Tag: Into the Spider-verse

Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds

Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds

Now Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign your children have waited to see. The morning will come when the world is mine; tomorrow belongs to me. “Tomorrow Belongs To Me,” written by John Kander for the play “Cabaret.”

I loathe going to movies alone. If the flick is great, I wanna talk about it. If the flick sucks, I wanna commiserate with a friend. Most movies are somewhere in between, and if I picked the right companion the after-movie discussion can be better than the viewing experience itself. In seeing Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, I was joined by my dear friend Martha Thomases, of DC and Marvel fame. We’ve enjoyed some great movies together, although some would be defined by critics as shitty.

Is a movie shitty even if you had a good time? Well, perhaps by consensus, but that should not humble your experience retroactively. Portal-to-portal, going out to the movies these days is an expensive proposition: the old phrase “coming soon to a theater near you” is obsolete because the vast majority of humanity no longer lives near a movie theater (Martha is a lucky exception). So when you add up all of your expenses, assuming you are willing to pay the going theater rate for a quarter’s worth of pop corn, seeing any movie in the theater is likely to cost the better part of a mortgage payment. Of course, those few surviving movie palaces of yesteryear are now showing live theater and kinda-live concerts, so we’ve got to shoehorn ourselves into little boxes made of ticky-tacky and endure twenty minutes of commercials before we get to the trailers.

But it’s a choice we, as the paying audience, choose to make. Not so much the movie critics. They have to see damn near everything, and I sympathize. They’ve been subjected to so many flickering images it’s a wonder they’re not all epileptics. Continue reading “Brainiac On Banjo: Tiny Heroes Vs Tiny Minds”

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #019: Into the Fishmanverse

So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #019: Into the Fishmanverse

Note: This is a SPOILER-FREE column that celebrates Spider-Man: Intro the Spider-Verse

This past weekend I took my son (in conjunction with my brother-from-another-mother taking his son who is my son’s bff… you dig?) to see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It was, to sum up succinctly, all the things. It was a visual spectacle. It was deeply diverse in the on-screen cast. It was kinetic in its action sequences. It was heavy on emotional growth. It was a nearly perfect example of what a comic book film could truly be.

As comic book films have grown from niche to the mainstream, my fear has been a dulling of the medium in the macro. Look only to the house of Mouse and Marvel’s 4 phase plan that started with plucky films like Iron Man and period-pieces like Captain America: The First Avenger, all leading to the beautifully bloated Avengers: Infinity War — which itself relies on the eighteen feeder films before it. And with Spider-Man specifically… the Spider-Verse would be (to a degree) the fourth version of the brand in less than 16 years.

But my fears scattered like Thanos-born ashes mere seconds after the glitchy-twitchy introduction of Spider-Verse’s mix-n-match animated style. Brilliantly bright colors build a stylized version of New York that took 180 animators to build. And it absolutely shows. Each of the varied Spider-People that eventually populate the film are rendered hilariously in homage to the worlds that they hail from. Be it the Manga-inspired Peni Parker being animated within the confines of an anime-palette, or Nic Cage’s turn as the monochromatic Spider-Man Noir… there’s a serendipitous presentation here that boasts to the millennial set that style is only surface-deep. And that plays heavily into the story.  Continue reading “So Long and Thanks for the Fish, Man #019: Into the Fishmanverse”