Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

We like to say that “the geeks have won.” It’s a victory that’s been called more often than Barbara Stanwyck’s bedside telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number, but each time it feels like geekdom has achieved the unthinkable – be it the smash debut of The Avengers or introducing comics-accurate oddballs like King Shark and Professor Pyg on primetime. In 2018, the geeks won by having a banner year, with three animated superhero films alongside major showings by their live-action counterparts. However you slice it, we can have a productive argument about whether the cartoon with a Spider-Pig was actually the best one – a true win for the geeks.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (finally) introduces Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to the big screen as Brooklyn’s new friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after a spider bite puts him in a league with his universe’s Peter Parker (Chris Pine). I say “his” universe, for Brooklyn becomes host to a coterie of spider-people after The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) tears a hole in the fabric of space-time with a particle accelerator experiment. Joining Miles are a shlubbier Spidey (Jake Johnson), Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham (John Mulaney) – all in search of a way home.

I’ve said in the past that Batman is the greatest fictional character because of his chameleonic ability to accommodate whatever his audience needs – he can be the paragon of camp, the apex gargoyle, a space-age dark knight, or a kid-friendly crusader. When I say that, however, I’m usually not thinking of Spider-Man, for whose comparable metamorphoses Spider-Verse makes a compelling argument. Spider-Verse posits a veritable spider-prism (kids next door, rocker chicks, tough-guy gangsters, wise-cracking pigs, and more), each of whom accesses the central truth of Spider-Man – that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. You can’t run away, you can’t turn your back; your family and your friendly neighborhood are counting on you. For all his myriad forms, it’s hard to imagine Batman in a film like this one, teamwork having never been his strong suit. (Singular dislocation suits Batman better than prismatic conjunction; cf. Batman Ninja, Batman Beyond, etc.)

It’s equally hard to imagine that Spider-Verse works as well as it does. Its irreverent approach to storytelling, layering origin stories in a gag that never loses its comedic punch, helps the viewer navigate fifty years of convoluted chronology with deft precision. (Its comics counterpart, 2014’s Spider-Verse crossover, is comparably impenetrable.) Make no mistake, though; for all its spider-people, Spider-Verse is well and truly Miles’s film, a full origin story for the newest Spider-Man (who debuted in 2011). Here Miles is quite a character, engaging and relatable because of his eminent humanity; he’s shy but gifted, funny and earnest. What’s more, there comes a moment in the film where you’d almost rather he not become Spider-Man because of how well we like Miles and the unique story being told with him; it almost seems a shame to put him in a costume and give him a fairly recognizable super-action narrative. But the exceedingly clever script finds a way to weave that hero’s journey into the story already in progress (including a few, ahem, touching callbacks).

Of course, so much of the film’s success owes to its lanky animation style, delicately exaggerated in the best Tex Avery tradition. The slightly jerky movements and modest design tweaks help divorce Spider-Verse from strict representation and move it into a realm where it feels like anything can happen, where any abstract incursion fits right in (cf. Spider-Ham). Animation naturally unfetters a filmmaker’s aspirations in the way that a comic book page renders all things possible beyond constraints of budget. That’s not to say that Spider-Verse is cheap (its budget has been reported at $90 million), but it’s hard to imagine a live-action film capturing all the peculiar quirks of this world, to say nothing of its technicolor climax or the characters that almost need to belong to an animated world (again, Spider-Ham, but also the monochromatic Spider-Man Noir). I knew I was in for a visual treat even from the trailers, but nothing can really prepare a moviegoer for the first appearance of the massive Kingpin – whose sheer mass cannot be understated. Even this, though, is essential character work; Kingpin’s colossal bulk distorts gravity around him, in the way that his particle accelerator tampers with the laws of physics in order to pull in the objects of his plot (no spoilers, but the script is smart to make Kingpin three-dimensional, giving him a full and possibly legitimate reason for risking the fate of the universe).

As dark as the film can be, wading into heavy subplots about betrayal, disappointment, and loss, Spider-Verse is exuberantly, boundlessly fun. I can’t, for example, point at someone or touch their shoulder without thinking of particular jokes in the film and guffawing my webs off. But the film also tickles my specific devotion to superheroes for its relentless optimism. Yes, the situation is dire, with cataclysmic consequences, but here’s a kid from Brooklyn who stands at the center of this massive web with the power to save everyone, and all he needs to do is figure himself out. What’s more, he has a loving family and a network of friends to help him through difficult times; no matter how isolated he feels, Miles Morales is never alone. Reducing him to “the black Spider-Man” doesn’t do justice to the depth of this character or the ways he advances and perpetuates the legend of Spider-Man without the guilt or baggage of Peter Parker.

I’m not ready to wade into the battlefields of “who did it better?” just yet. (As I get older, I’m losing patience with these pithy ‘hot takes’ that end more conversations than they start.) The geeks have well and truly won when we can have Black Panther and Spider-Verse, when we get a long-overdue Incredibles 2 alongside them and Avengers: Infinity War, to say nothing of Aquaman, Venom, Deadpool 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp. (Phew!) It’s an embarrassment of riches, not unlike the spider-cornucopia presented in Spider-Verse, with something for everyone and everything adding up to a romping good time. Best of all, Spider-Verse got me to dust off my Marvel Unlimited subscription and queue up a slate of spider-comics to read. That’s how the geeks win.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements, and mild language.” Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, and Dan Slott. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, John Mulaney, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, and Chris Pine.

Monday at the Movies - March 19, 2012

Welcome to Week Twelve of “Monday at the Movies.” On the docket this week, an Oscar winning movie, a movie as good as The Wicker Man (2006), and a trip between worlds: in other words, two hits and a miss this week – but oh, what a miss!

The Artist (2011) – This is the second silent film in as many weeks here on The Cinema King, although it might be unfair to label Michel Hazanavicius’s Best Picture winner as such, since the film does feature diegetic sound in several important scenes. While the revisiting of the silent film is a bit of a gimmick, the ways in which Hazanavicius and company subvert the expectations that come along with the genre redeem the film from being merely “that silent film.” I remain unconvinced that The Artist is better than fellow nominee Hugo, but it’s an equally compelling love letter to the cinema and its magic. The acting is, predictably, over-the-top, as all silent performances must be, and lead actor Jean Dujardin has no compunctions about chewing the scenery as necessary while portraying the actor George Valentin and his fall from fame. More restrained, mercifully, is his leading lady Bérénice Bejo, who plays talkies flapper Peppy Miller and can convey more with a wink than a lot of today’s crop of actresses. A few familiar faces round out the supporting cast – James Cromwell, John Goodman, and Malcolm McDowell among them – but all ears must necessarily be on Ludovic Bource’s score, which flounces through the highs and wallows in the lows of George Valentin’s descent. I enjoyed the film and was glad to finally start to catch up on last year’s Oscar frontrunners, although I must confess that there are parts where the film drags and most conventional filmgoers will lose interest. But stick with it; the ending is among the best I’ve seen in recent years.

Drive Angry (2011) – You can always count on Nicolas Cage for a really bad movie, but whether it’ll be an enjoyably bad movie or just a waste of film is always up for grabs. It’s been said that you can judge a Nic Cage flick by how far back his hairline goes, and in Drive Angry we’re getting a lot of forehead. And yes, it’s as bad as all that. In fact, the only thing that redeems Drive Angry from being completely unwatchable is that it seems to be in on its own joke, recognizing how absurd it is and reveling in its own ridiculousness. Nic overacts at level red as John Milton, late of hell, walking – nay, driving – the earth in search of his granddaughter, who’s about to be sacrificed by a satanic cult. Riding shotgun is Amber Heard as ex-waitress Piper, a pretty face who doesn’t do much aside from a fight scene near the middle of the film, and the villainous William Fichtner (recognizable as the bank manager in every film you’ve ever seen) plays The Accountant, who’s looking to return Milton to hell. I didn’t see the film in 3-D, and it’s apparently lost a bit of extravagance in the translation to two dimensions, but one thing the movie isn’t missing is explosions. A credible plot, realistic dialogue, meaningful character interactions, and narrative creativity – all of these are nowhere to be seen in Drive Angry, but at least (to borrow a line from Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok) it blowed up real good.

John Carter (2012) – It’s a major science fiction franchise, backed by arguably the biggest studio in town and a story by a major author of the twentieth century. Why, then, did it underperform? Taylor Kitsch stars as Civil War vet John Carter, who finds himself transported to Mars, where he’s quickly embroiled in a planetary conflict between the Tharks (led by Willem Dafoe’s voice in the body of a Green Martian), the Red Martians (with their king Ciarán Hinds), evil Sab Than (Dominic “McNulty” West), and the mystical Therns (headed by Mark Strong’s menacing Matai Shang) over the hand of Princess Dejah Thoris (Lynn Collins). Director Andrew Stanton has lent a hand on nearly every Pixar film, but for his first live-action solo outing John Carter is surprisingly good. Critical response has not been kind, and I’m not quite sure why. Granted, John Carter is not the best film you’ll see all year (wait until July for that), but it’s more than diverting; the effects are solid (although the Tharks recall the dismal Na’vi), the cast is strong, and the story is involving (if comprised of several infodumps). The best I can come up with is that John Carter’s biggest detriment is a weak marketing campaign; this ought to be a summer blockbuster, but it’s dumped ignominiously into the middle of March with not a single action figure on the shelves. I’d like to see a sequel, because it seems that the creative team is working very hard to introduce a lot of factions in an uncomplicated manner; I only hope they get a franchise out of it, because the last trilogy with which Andrew Stanton worked on made us all cry over a sheriff doll and a space ranger action figure.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Monday at the Movies - March 12, 2012

Welcome to Week Eleven of “Monday at the Movies.” We return to our unthemed format this week, with three movies with almost nothing in common.

The Italian (1915) – If memory serves, this is the first silent film reviewed on this blog, and perhaps it deserves more fanfare than inclusion as one of three “Monday at the Movies” review, and such likely would have been the case if The Italian had made a bigger impact on me. And it’s not that I don’t like silent films; I’m a big fan of Lon Cheney’s Phantom of the Opera, and Buster Keaton still makes me lose it every time. Here we have George Beban as the eponymous immigrant who finds little of the American Dream after crossing the Atlantic. The pacing in this one is a little slow, with the emphasis on set pieces rather than plot; when the plot kicks off, it’s a bit exciting, but usually the focus is on motion and crowd scenes. Beban’s performance is surprisingly good, if a little overwrought (like every silent film’s stars), and the close-ups innovated by director Reginald Barker help us understand the emotions each character feels. The Italian is more a film to be appreciated than enjoyed; it’s well-made but ought to be regarded more technically than aesthetically.

Kick-Ass (2010) – Here’s a film that’s a bit more my speed. Inspired by comics, high schooler Dave Liziewski (Aaron Johnson) gets the bright idea to become a superhero, but he finds that there are already professionals at work – the father-daughter duo Big Daddy (Nic Cage at his hammy best) and Hit Girl (the endearingly foul-mouthed Chloe Moretz), who are gunning for local mob boss Frank D’Amico (rising star Mark Strong). The movie diverges from the Mark Millar/John Romita Jr. comic source material by putting an optimistic sheen on the comic’s cynical outlook, but it’s not an unwelcome change; the film gets us so invested in the characters that anything less than an exuberantly happy ending would feel like a cheat. Chief among these is scene-stealer Moretz, whose turn as Hit Girl is unforgettable, simultaneously menacing and adorable. And even though I’m on record as holding Nic Cage as one of the worst actors ever, his turn as Big Daddy fits perfectly with the film’s self-consciously over-the-top mentality, as he gives Big Daddy a few moments where control’s lost and others where he channels Adam West circa Batman ’66. What’s great about this film is how it suspends disbelief and then reinvents the rules of its own reality, and the result is a highly enjoyable romp through satirizing superhero conventions by way of one of the best superhero movies in recent memory.

Safe House (2012) – One word guarantees my attendance: Denzel. He stars as rogue CIA agent Tobin Frost, who surrenders to safehouse agent Ryan Reynolds after an intelligence swap goes sour, and soon our two leads are dashing through Cape Town until a new safe house can be prepped. The reason I’m an easy mark for any Denzel Washington vehicle is because Denzel always brings his A-game and can usually save any movie from ignominy. It’s a combination of an engaging on-screen personality, off-screen ethos, and perfect timing as far as pauses or repeated words go. There’s such a scene in Safe House, when he tells Reynolds, “I like this, you and me figuring s--t out. Like the Hardy Boys.” But it’s one of the only scenes in which Denzel really gets to shine; don’t let the billing on the movie posters fool you, because this is a Ryan Reynolds vehicle top to bottom. In a nutshell, this is a good and entertaining movie, but it’s not one I’m rushing out to purchase on DVD, mostly due to the Denzel deficit. The action scenes are exciting – including a few great jump moments – and there’s nothing specifically flawed about the movie (save for a slightly predictable who’s-the-traitor subplot), but it’s what I’ve come to call “Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland syndrome” – good, but not as good as it ought to be.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week!

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is everything I love about Nicolas Cage movies - exuberantly over-the-top, bafflingly heavy on unsubtle characterization, and riddled with loud bursts of unnecessary shouting.

Werner Herzog insists that this Bad Lieutenant has nothing to do with Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel - it's not a remake, a prequel, a sequel, a midquel, an update, et cetera. Perhaps it's simply a variation on a theme: the bad cop. In any event, Cage is that bad cop, Terrence McDonagh, navigating his way through post-Katrina New Orleans. He's got a prostitute (Eva Mendes) for a lover, a nasty cocaine/Vicodin habit, gambling debts up the wazoo, and persistent hallucinations of iguanas. In the middle of a five-homicide case, McDonagh's life starts spiraling out of control as he crosses the line more times than one can count.

The main attraction at this carnival of movie magic is, of course, Nic Cage. Readers of this blog know that there's a very strange love-hate relationship between Cage and myself; that is, I've been burned on a lot of his movies (The Wicker Man, Next, and Ghost Rider chief among them), but his movies are irresistible. Most of the time they're terrible to the point of being infinitely rewatchable - The Wicker Man, with its shouted epithet of "HOW'D IT GET BURNED?!" and the delightfully campy "Nic Cage in a bear suit punching women" scene, for example - but every once in a while he turns in a star performance. And I'm just not sure which of these Bad Lieutenant is. On the one hand, Cage is McDonagh, unbreakably intense and (according to my father) nearly pitch-perfect in portraying a man suffering from back pain, at least as far as posture is concerned. On the other hand, he does some very strange things in this movie that I couldn't reconcile with really anything I'd seen before; sometimes his drug-addled stupor simply resembles confused myopia, and for twenty minutes his character slips for no apparent reason into a bizarre voice resembling Jimmy Stewart with lockjaw. The other performances are entirely negligible, then, in the wake of this wholly odd character Cage creates.

But win or lose, for better or for worse Cage is entertaining, perpetually on the brink of insanity. Where I've seen Cage phone in performances before (Next, the last third of Lord of War), here he's completely entrenched in the character's shoes, from his slumping shoulders to his unrelenting fearlessness when it comes to cutting loose. I can't count the number of times McDonagh snaps in the film, either hurling profanities at characters who are "in his way" or cackling hysterically after taking hit after hit from a crack pipe. This is Cage at his most unrestrained, but it's certainly not a fantastic film by any stretch of the imagination. It is, simply, fascinatingly bizarre.

Most of that strange quality is Herzog's fault, and I use the word "fault" with all its negative connotations because Herzog's interventions are deliberate, distracting, and detrimental. For starters, the narrative is tangled and fragmented, jumping in episodic format from vignette to vignette with only a loose thread tying it all together. For a fair amount of the second half, McDonagh is pursued by a group of hoodlums, though it's unclear until the last few minutes (at which point it's already too late) who these cats are working for. The most distracting and problematic shots in the film are ones in which Herzog's camera lingers fetishistically on lizards, with iguanas and alligators in particular getting their close-up. These scenes are almost impossible to fit into the narrative of the film - it's implied that the iguanas are hallucinations and therefore represent moments of unreality - and seem overly indulgent, calling attention themselves while grinding the narrative flow to a halt. (Herzog's greatest sin, though, might be his failure to pull Cage aside and ask, "Hey man, what the heck is up with this voice you're doing all of a sudden?"

For one of those "What the heck did I just watch?" movies, this Bad Lieutenant is all good. For high cinema (Ebert put it on his Top Ten of '09 list), I can't say it's a great film. You may, however, find it highly entertaining.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is rated a hard R "for drug use and language throughout, some violence and sexuality." McDonagh abuses pretty much every drug in the book, swears like a sailor (as do other characters), is lovers with a prostitute, and accepts sexual favors as bribes (rear nudity is seen once). Leave the kiddies at home; this ain't National Treasure.

Lord of War (2005)

I went into Lord of War expecting not to like it. Even as the FBI warning flashed across my screen, I settled into the couch and thought, "This is gonna be bad." I was expecting a cheesy accent, over-the-top emoting, and a film that generally deserved a better star.

Fortunately, I was mostly wrong. Lord of War is, in spite of my preconceived notions, enjoyable, and even Cage himself is pretty good here.

Narrated by its protagonist, Lord of War is a demi-biopic of arms dealer Yuri Orlov (Cage), who finds himself adapting to a new geopolitical climate after the fall of the Soviet Union. With his brother Vitaly (Jared "Paul Allen" Leto) as his partner, Orlov grapples with competing arms dealer Simeon Weisz (a smarmy Ian Holm), allies himself with Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste (Eammon Walker), and woos the girl of his dreams, model Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan) - all while doding Interpol and its persistent agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke). The film is a standard rise-and-fall story, with a moralistic twist at the end that turns it into a little something more.

I have a love-hate relationship with Nicolas Cage's films. Early Nic Cage - Raising Arizona, for example, and Honeymoon in Vegas - demonstrated a flair for comedic timing while playing offbeat characters with quirky and well-played mannerisms. A funny thing happened on the way to the modern day, and somewhere Nic's career fell to splinters, culminating in what I affectionately call the "Trilogy of Terrible" - Ghost Rider, Next, and The Wicker Man (my personal favorite "bad movie"). Recently, though, he seems to be on a bit of an upswing; the National Treasure franchise won't win any Oscars, but they're at least watchable, and I thought Cage was fantastic as Big Daddy in Kick-Ass. Lord of War brings Cage another step closer on the path to redemption, though he has a long way to go if I'm to forget the (in)famous line "How'd it get burned?!"

The rest of the cast is, for the most part, interchangeable. No actor or actress leaves a truly indelible mark on the film such that the roles couldn't be played by anyone else; as pursuing Interpol agent Jack Valentine, Hawke is fine, but any other actor could have done one step better (I'm thinking of Denzel Washington, but I don't know why). As Ava, Moynahan often bemoans her status as just another pretty face in this film, but I'm wondering if there's a bit of metafictional irony behind that, since any other "pretty" actress could have been just as good here. The only exception, as always, is Ian Holm, who does a fantastic job embodying arms dealer Simeon, once the top in his field and now struggling to retain his position - but I would have liked to see more of him in here, since his appearances are delightful but few and far between.

Though I'm labeling this as a "good" film and "to my liking," I should go on record as saying that the movie falls apart once it runs into the stereotypical "arms dealing is bad" moralism that ends the film. What began as an entertaining flick with a conscience turns into a conscience with moving pictures; suddenly the audience is preached at, with heavyhanded talk of "necessary evils" and closing title cards that indict members of the U.S. government and the UN Security Council for being worse arms dealers than Yuri Orlov. Huh? I don't know what it is about me, but I'm running into problems with films that start as one thing and end as another without successfully transitioning between the two.

Consequently, the film - and Cage - seems to run out of steam by the end. Cage seems tired, the plot careens into a highly politicized direction, and the film ends with none of the joy that it bore in the first 90 minutes. Perhaps that's the point; gunrunning is a joyless occupation. All right, but the film changes its focus to attempt to highlight the international gunrunning scene when we've previously focused only on Yuri; this switch is sudden and virtually ineffective, leaving only a jarring sense and the feeling that we're watching a different movie than the one we started with.

Lord of War bears an R rating "for strong violence, drug use, language, and sexuality." The violence is particularly graphic here, and the language is pretty strong. Drug use is limited to a few scenes surrounding cocaine, and sexuality includes fleeting moments of nudity as well as a pronounced presence of adultery and prostitution.

Next (2007)

It's almost blasphemous that this movie replaces The Dark Knight as the first article that my readers see when they log on, but here goes.

Next is the film that convinced me that Nicolas Cage has lost his edge. Granted, I had ample evidence - The Wicker Man and Ghost Rider among the most recent - but here I stand convinced that Cage is sadly incapable of making a good movie anymore.

On the surface, Next ought to be a reasonably intriguing movie. Cris "Frank Cadillac" Johnson (Cage) is a Vegas mentalist who actually possesses the ability to see two minutes into the future. Enter Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel), Cris's love interest and the woman who allows him to see farther (further, father?) into her future, and FBI Agent Ferris (the ever-intense - or is she just aggravated? - Julianne Moore), who's out to use Cris's ability to stop a terrorist cell from going nuclear.

If that plot thread seems out of left field, it is. Director Lee Tamahori (who brought us Die Another Day, arguably the least of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies) tries to make Next two very disparate things; at times a Nolan-esque examination of the fantastic in the real world and at other times a Jack Bauer-style counterterrorist actionfest, Next doesn't really succeed as either by fault of the other. If Tamahori had picked one or the other, the film might not have suffered as it does. Instead, the film waffles between genres without wholly committing.

I've beaten up on Cage for losing his edge, yet it's not as though the other actors aren't pulling their weight. Moore is serviceable as the stereotypical federal agent, making me a little nostalgic for her turn as Clarice Starling in Hannibal. And Biel seems determined to prove to me that she's an actress in her own right, because she seems to be doing more "acting" and less "eye-candying" the more I see her. And an almost-cameo from Peter Falk makes me lament that he's not given a bigger role as the comic relief sidekick. Still, Cage's performance led me to wonder (several times aloud), "Was that supposed to be funny?"

The villains are less than one-dimensional (they're evil, okay? that's all you need to know), but my most significant gripe comes with the ending of the fim. So if you wish to remain unspoiled, best to stop reading here and take away the nugget that I can't in good conscience recommend Next. Essentially, the ending of the film is the largest cop-out since Superman reversed the rotation of the earth back in 1978. Just as the film builds to some really cool stuff and instills a sense of hope that maybe - just maybe - Next is about to redeem itself, SURPRISE! None of it really happened! The last time I felt this cheated by a movie, I chucked a bowl of quinoa at Inland Empire. Thanks, David Lynch - and thanks to Lee Tamahori for completely invalidating ninety minutes of my life.