8 Best Movies To Watch After Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)
Wish
Kids deserve better than yet another dull, going-through-the-motions misfire. The animation world was recently startled by Warner Bros.' announcement that they planned to shelve their recently completed feature Coyote vs Acme for a quick tax write-off, rather than spend money to release it. Not to be outdone, Disney Studios offers up Wish, an animated feature that is the kind of artistic misfire that deserves to be hidden away and never spoken about again. This is a creation so alternately bewildering and banal that it's implausible that at no point during the entire creative process did anyone point out the seemingly obvious fact that virtually none of it works on even the most basic levels. Wish takes place in the kingdom of Rosas, which was founded and is currently ruled by Magnifico (Chris Pine), a seemingly benevolent sorcerer who offers peace and protection for all those who live there. The catch is that they must surrender their deepest wish to Magnifico, who stores them in the lab in his castle in bubbles and once in a great while returns one to the person who made it. Inexplicably, the people of Rosas think this is a good deal, none more so than Asha (Ariana DeBose), a teenager who is all in on both Rosas and Magnifico and is hoping that the latter will present her beloved grandfather (Victor Argo) with his wish to commemorate his upcoming 100th birthday. Continue Reading →
Nebraska
Long overshadowed by Sideways, we’re giving this understated dramedy its due for depicting Midwest with the specificity Hollywood rarely gives it. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is as unassuming as the regular Midwestern folk it depicts. Even though this small, quiet, black-and-white comedy was flooded with nominations during the 2013 awards season it won almost none of them. Ten years on, it remains overshadowed by Payne’s more popular works like Sideways and Election. But this odd little dramedy is not only one of Payne’s finest films to date, it’s also his one true love letter to his home state of Nebraska and the Midwest itself. Elderly alcoholic Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) has fallen for a Publisher’s Clearinghouse–style scam and is convinced he’s won a million dollars. Determined to collect the cash in person, son David (Will Forte) ignores his mother and brother’s pleas and agrees to drive him all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. On the way, the pair get waylaid in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, giving David a glimpse of not just who his father is, but how a place and the people in it shaped him. Continue Reading →
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
An overview of the diverse features selected to screen at this year's Austin Film Festival. This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn't exist. A cycle rickshaw, adorned with a Texas flag billowing in the wind, whizzes by while blaring a Luke Combs tune. Massive murals of Willie Nelson and Post Malone gaze down on passersby like the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg. A man in a Blue Lives Matter shirt waltzes past a "PROTECT TRANS KIDS" sign planted on the lawn of a Catholic Church. Welcome to Austin, Texas, a Southern hotspot that, for the final weekend of October 2023, wasn't just home to these and other oddball sights, but also the backdrop for the 30th edition of the Austin Film Festival. Though not as world-famous as the Toronto International Film Festival or Cannes, Austin's annual ode to cinema is still a much-ballyhooed event attended by freelance journalists, aspiring screenwriters, iconic filmmakers, and everyone in between. Continue Reading →
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
The Hotel Transylvania series is a surprising juggernaut amongst contemporary family entertainment. Who would have guessed that a movie about a hotel for monsters would create a franchise where every sequel grows in both box office and critical success? With no signs of slowing down, it made sense for Sony to greenlight a fourth film. How could another sequel not be a hit at the box office? Well, I think we know how. Continue Reading →
The Matrix Resurrections
It's hard to overstate just how seismic The Matrix was when it was first released in 1999. Looking back on it now, in an age of focus-tested corporate franchises, extended universes, and an even more top-heavy IP landscape than we had back then, it feels positively revolutionary. Even in its imperfect but-radically-reappraised 2003 sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski manage to build a world that's at once evocative of so many of its influences (cyberpunk, bullet opera, kung fu film, Star Wars) but feels highly original. And what's more, is unafraid to tackle challenging, often heady psychological questions while still revolutionizing the way action movies were made. Continue Reading →
MacGruber
In the age of streaming, any movie, short of maybe Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, can become a TV show. It doesn’t matter if your original film was a box office turkey, these channels just want “content” and any previously established brand name will do. Through this phenomenon comes MacGruber, a continuation of a Saturday Night Live character and the star of a 2010 movie that crashed and burned financially. But when Peacock desperately needed something, anything, to release over the holidays, MacGruber rose from the aches like a conceited phoenix. Continue Reading →
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “May you live in interesting times,” understand this: we’re living in them right now. It’s a historically awful time of racial unrest, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a global pandemic that’s coldly highlighted how little many of us care about our fellow humans. Optimism is in very limited supply at the moment, and so we cling to the little things that give us joy, and a reason to keep going the next day. Things like Lil Nas X’s Twitter feed, or Ted Lasso, or Lady Gaga branded Oreo cookies. Things like Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar, which in better times might have made barely a blip on the pop culture radar, but right now feels like a cool drink of water on a very hot day, and is a cult hit in the making. Continue Reading →
Something Wild
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. Jonathan Demme's most acclaimed works are often his darkest: the grim serial killer nihilism of Silence of the Lambs, the tearjerking tragedies of Philadelphia and Beloved. But it's important to remember the late director for his moments of mirth, his celebration of music and Americana, and the little ways we allow ourselves to break out from the pack. 1986's Something Wild is more of a curio in Demme's back catalog, a manic pixie road romance that flits between goofy renditions of "Wild Thing" and blood-soaked confrontations in a suburban bathroom. It flirts with serious issues of late-capitalist malaise, but is first and foremost here to show you a good time. The opening minutes of Something Wild feel like something out of a Dear Penthouse letter: I never thought it'd happen to me, but.... It starts with gormless, straight-laced Manhattan finance guy Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels, paradoxically at his most Minnesotan) trying to skip out on a check at a diner, only to be intercepted by a mysterious, enticing woman named Lulu (an entrancing Melanie Griffith). In his transgression, she sees the glimmer of a fellow 'wild thing' trying to escape, someone flaunting social norms because he just needs to feel alive. Lulu, with her European bob (reminiscent of Louise Brooks' Lulu in Pabst's Pandora's Box, perhaps deliberately) and array of African jewelry, steals him away from his day job on a sojourn to a New Jersey motel, enticing him to skip work and come with her on a long weekend of sex and discovery. Continue Reading →