3 Best Movies To Watch After Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)
The Out-Laws
Director Tyler Spindel's track record is scattered, composed of primarily-for-streaming movies including The Wrong Missy and Father of the Year. He has an affinity for the David Spade experience, in other words. His latest, The Out-Laws, doesn't feature Spade and doesn't do much to suggest that Spindel's body of work will ever grow more than scattered. Continue Reading →
艷屍還魂記
The vampire has been a symbol of many things throughout history: pestilence, addiction, and even physical desire. But one of their most enduring symbolic roles is the aristocratic vampire as an allegory for the predatory wealthy. Writer/director David Verbeek adds to this rich history of parasitic oligarchs with his latest film, Dead & Beautiful. Unfortunately, this entry into the undead oeuvre lacks the bite needed to become an immortal classic. Continue Reading →
Rachel Getting Married
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Good movies are no stranger to trauma, hurt, or hardship. These things give the images projected and stories a truth that allows the audience to forget they’re fiction, but even in the best films, that sort of trauma is usually manicured, packaged, and made digestible in two-hour chunks. Some of the greatest works of cinema still put our collective pain into little boxes that viewers can open and close when needed. Rachel Getting Married is rife with the same sort of pain, pathos, and unfathomable tragedy that has fueled many of those films. However, it presents an uglier, more unvarnished version of those elements and emotions. There’s an unsparing realness to the story it tells, of a family celebrating a beautiful occasion and reliving their worst losses at the same time. The results are, at times, hard to watch. But that just speaks to the raw nerve and level of authenticity that director Jonathan Demme manages to achieve here. Continue Reading →