My son is currently watching a movie for pleasure

One of the first indicators I might become a cinephile was all the movies I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid- to late-1980s. I won't go through those titles again, because I've done that before, and it is not particularly relevant to the current post anyway. But let's just say that I burned a hole in those VHS tapes, watching some of them upwards of ten times. And given that there were at least ten of those titles in heavy rotation, that's a lot of viewings.

We live in different times now. Children do not, to the same extent, satisfy their twin appetites for screen time and storytelling by watching movies. I should say, some children might do that. Mine do not.

Oh, they'll watch a movie with us if we put it on the schedule. The younger one enthusiastically, the older one less so. But these events are also becoming less common, in part because my wife is also less interested in them.

Except maybe there is still hope for my 11-year-old.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed he was starting to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming. When he saw me notice him starting to watch it, he kind of gave me a look like "See? I'm doing something you like doing." Though the fact that it was a newsworthy event does indicate how uncommon it is otherwise.

When I asked him if he had seen the movie before, this is when I got more encouraged. (I should be able to remember myself, but I've got two kids and sometimes I can't remember who has seen what.) "Oh yeah," he responded. "Two or three times."

Which means that yesterday, my son just felt the urge to watch Spider-Man: Homecoming, so he started to watch it. 

Hooray.

It was a similar urge that prompted me to press play on all those VHS tapes back in the 1980s. I don't know why on certain days I felt like watching, I don't know, WarGames, and on other days it was The Pirate Movie. But the point is I got those urges, and responded accordingly.

Now, things still aren't what they once were. Attention spans are much different now. I say my son is "currently" watching Spider-Man: Homecoming, even though I also said he started it yesterday. Both of these things are true. While watching, he's likely to take breaks and game for a while, or watch a YouTube video.

However, the fact that he started it yesterday and returned to it today means he sees something sacred about completing a viewing, and not just sampling a small part of a movie and moving on. There are cinephiles who do the second thing, of course, and God bless them for whatever form they want their engagement to take. But my son is taking my form of engagement, completing what he started, and that further tickles me.

What's more, this additional engagement -- even if it is in its nascent stages -- is deepening his overall engagement with the cinematic landscape. Another thing I have wondered is if today's children -- or more specifically, my children -- would ever become conversant about movie stars, knowing their names and what other films they had been in. They do know some names, such as Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black, but even some very famous names, like Tom Cruise, may cause them hesitation. 

Well, one person my younger son knows is Tom Holland, star of Spider-Man: Homecoming. He mentioned him by name earlier this month when we were at Universal Studios. So it may be that my son is choosing personal favorites among actors and intentionally choosing films starring those actors, which is another way further in to cinephilia. I just don't need him to watch Holland movies like The Devil All the Time -- not at this stage, anyway. (Given that I think that movie is shit, possibly not ever.) 

Look, I'm not going to blow this out of proportion, all evidence to the contrary in the fact that I'm writing this post. But for a guy who constantly longs for "the way things used to be," this is an encouraging development, both for me personally and for my hope about the younger generation. 

I have also been worrying lately about the way the kids are spending their summer, essentially devoting most of their time to screens except for the break we force them to take for a couple hours in the early afternoon. If my 11-year-old starts choosing to wile away his summers on movies -- the way I once did -- then that removes that stress for me as well.

Now, I just need him to start obsessively ranking his movies and watching more than 150 of them per year ... 

NOTE: Less than an hour after I published this, my son began watching Spider-Man: Far From Home. Yay. 

"Children, what do you know about Avengers: Endgame?"

My plan to watch the first two Marvel Spider-Man movies with my kids before taking them to No Way Home on Saturday -- thereby fitting in a crucial end-of-year screening while also getting credit for a family activity -- hit an unanticipated snag. 

All was going fine until mid-way through our first viewing, 2017's Spider-Man: Homecoming, on Sunday afternoon. The kids were enjoying it, laughing in the right spots, providing the sort of commentary about the action that indicates full engagement.

Then I realized that our viewing of the Marvel movies out of sequence would finally have its first negative repercussions when we got to the next movie.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was the first movie released after Avengers: Endgame in 2019, the official beginning of the MCU's Phase Four. Where spoilers had never been a problem previously, they would immediately become so at this juncture. 

And though I'm sure you've seen Avengers: Endgame, now would be the correct time to issue a SPOILER ALERT.

Until now, the only things that could be "spoiled" from earlier Marvel movies were various plot-based twists and turns in the serpentine narrative, which is now 27 movies in length, and was already 21 at the time Endgame was released. Because these are superhero movies, the hero generally survives, leaving only weird references to Sokovia and the like as unexperienced events that could throw my kids for a loop, but only momentarily as they would just forget them and move on.

The death of Tony Stark, however, changed all that.

And while I heard my kids laughing and providing commentary, my mind raced ahead to how I was going to deal with the fact that they didn't know this had happened. It was like my worries of The Empire Strikes Back being prematurely spoiled all over again.

Watching the Avengers movies before Saturday was out of the question, even if I were inclined to do so. Even just watching Endgame was out of the question, as I would never dream of depriving someone of at least Infinity War as part one of the two-part story. I would also never dream of watching a three-hour movie with my kids, especially not this week. Then there's the fact that Infinity War contains what I consider the most shocking and potentially traumatizing moment in the entire MCU, the strangulation death of _____ by Thanos at the beginning. (I didn't give a spoiler warning for Infinity War, so I'll just leave out the name of that character.) It's that exact moment that caused me to wade into MCU viewings with my kids only very gingerly. It might be even more traumatizing considering that we only recently watched and quite enjoyed a show devoted entirely to this character. (Oops, so much for being vague.)

But I didn't want to abandon these viewings either. I need to get in Spider-Man: No Way Home on before I close off my 2021 rankings. With the hype it has received, not seeing it in time to rank it is just not an option. 

I thought of just skipping Spider-Man: Far From Home, which is like a non-stop Tony Stark memorial from start to finish. (Or from Stark to finish, you could say.) At least the kids would have one Tom Holland Spider-Man movie before seeing the newest one. But as I had already promised them both movies, I couldn't really renege now. Nor, as a proud film enthusiast and curator, did I consider it responsible to show them the third in a trilogy without showing them the second.

So I decided to put the issue to them and see what they wanted to do about it.

Tuesday afternoon I asked the older one, who is 11, the question you see in the title of this post. He was helping me put a shade cover on our new trampoline at the time.

"Something about Thanos gathering infinity stones to wipe out half the population."

"That's Avengers: Infinity War," I explained. "What do you know about Endgame?"

"Then nothing I guess," was the response.

The playground chatter that had given him the details of Thanos' master plan had not produced the end result from the second movie. I guess a bejeweled glove is more fascinating to the playground crowd than the death of Iron Man.

So I asked him what he thought of the fact that there would be spoilers from Endgame in the next Spider-Man movie. When he asked what kind of spoiler, I said it had to do with characters dying.

"No, I want to avoid that," he said.

Damn.

I punted for now and returned my focus to attaching the trampoline roof.

Because I had deemed Tuesday the best time to watch Far From Home before Saturday, and around 5:30 the best time to schedule the watch, I had to return to the topic later on, this time involving his brother.

I said we could either watch it and have the spoiler occur, or we could skip this movie and just go straight to third -- which a friend had told me did not include very much, if any, talk of Stark's death, if he remembered correctly.

The older one wanted to skip, the younger seemed horrified by that idea.

We settled on the compromise that I and my eight-year-old would watch Far From Home, and my 11-year-old would skip it. But almost immediately, he decided that if we were going to watch the movie he would just watch it as well.

As it turned out, I almost didn't need to worry.

One of the very first things that happens in the movie -- after the cold open featuring Michael Keaton's Vulture -- is a tribute on Peter Parker's high school news program to the fallen Avengers. Not just Stark, but also Captain America, Black Widow and Vision. I sat there their cringing at the enormity of the information being dumped on them. (After all, we'd watched Vision in Wandavision as well.)

You know what? Went right over their heads. 

Huh? 

Kids are funny sometimes.

I have to wonder if they didn't process it because they thought they knew how movies worked, and there was no way any of these characters could be dead. (Is Steve Rogers dead or is he just really, really old?) 

When I was able to exhale, I ventured a pause to make sure they understood what The Blip was and how it worked, how some characters were gone for five years and then came back.

"Don't spoil it!" the 11-year-old said. "Wait is that the spoiler?"

I hit play again without confirming or denying.

It went on this way, becoming more comical with each oblique reference to Tony's death. And by "oblique" I don't mean the references were indirect to any normal adult. My children apparently needed someone to say "Tony Stark is dead" for them to actually get that this happened.

Phrasing very close to that, which could not be mistaken for anything else, finally occurred during the "nightmare" that Mysterio creates for Spider-Man, one of several illusions Mysterio creates whose logistics are basically impossible to understand. At this point it took the eight-year-old to finally ask the question:

"Wait, did Tony Stark die?"

By way of confirmation, I put my hand on his back.

The revelation didn't derail anything. The laughter and the commentary continued. The kids loved the movie -- one or both of them called it their favorite of all time, which is something they say after basically every movie they see. (Most recently: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.) I myself liked the movie a lot better than I had the first time. I still find the Mysterio stuff kind of weak, but anything related to the high school students is gold, and I like Zendaya a lot more these days than I ever used to.

Some concern for Tony did finally arrive during the closing credits, at which point, the 11-year-old asked if Tony had come back to life yet in the ensuing Marvel movies. Maybe they get how these movies work after all.

"Not so far," I said, helpfully leaving the door open for his eventual resuscitation, if any emotional comfort was needed in that moment, if there had been any tainting of another recent first-time viewing -- the original Iron Man.

It doesn't seem that there was. They were screaming and bouncing on the trampoline a few minutes later.

"Not so far," my response to the prospect of Tony returning, was not a lie. I get how these movies work too. You telling me we're never going to see Iron Man in a movie again? Of course we are. He just won't be played by Robert Downey Jr. (Or maybe he even will be. Never rule anything out. The aforementioned Michael Keaton is playing Batman again, isn't he?)

So a tricky scenario tackled in the best way it could have been tackled: head on.

And at least now they'll have the context for all the ways I imagine their noodle is going to be fried in Spider-Man: No Way Home. I won't be able to pause this one to explain anything that's happening, including the Easter Eggs for the five live action Spider-Man movies that they haven't seen. 

My wife, who was expecting to be busy during that block of time, may actually join us for the viewing. She probably hasn't seen a Spider-Man movie since the Tobey Maguire original. Let's hope her adult brain can just go with it in the moment. 

A return to Spider-Man

Of all the major superhero movies, I've seen the smallest percentage of ones featuring Spider-Man. Until last night, it was just half of the movies that fit that description, and only that many because the character makes an appearance in Captain America: Civil War. If you include only movies with Spider-Man's name in the title, it was only two of the existing five. The number of years since I'd seen a movie devoted to Spider-Man is an even more astonishing figure: 13. That's right, 2004's Spider-Man 2 was the last I'd deigned to see.

To give you some idea how unusual this is, I'm missing no more than one of any other movie featuring any other superhero of any note. In fact, the only significant examples I can really think of are the second Thor movie and the third Iron Man movie, and ten years ago neither of these guys had even one movie to their respective names.

What's more, of the superheroes I have designated as "the big five," I've not missed a single of their movies -- no, not even the Incredible Hulk. The other four being Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman (only very recently a cinematic entity) and, yes, Spider-Man.

So why the Spider-Man drought?

It didn't feel intentional. I'd always expected to see Spider-Man 3, despite liking the first two movies only about 75% as much as most people did. But I heard it was bad and, well, perhaps that was a particularly busy summer for me. Then when The Amazing Spider-Man came around, I'm sure I intended to see that as well. But I passively participated in an unspoken boycott of it, probably because I thought it was too soon to reboot the character (and, well, I heard that one wasn't great either, and maybe I had a busy summer that summer too.) The Amazing Spider-Man 2? Well, if I hadn't seen the first one, why start now?

What finally brought me back was when Spider-Man was brought back home to Marvel -- and not until I was sitting in the theater did it occur to me the secondary meaning of the word "Homecoming" in the title.

Even the generally good taste of Marvel might not have been enough if I hadn't seen him in Civil War, where he combined with another character that I'd come to consider sort of a dubious property (Ant-Man) to comprise possibly the two most fun things about that movie. Civil War showed me Spider-Man could be done right -- even if I hadn't personally witnessed any of the examples of him being done wrong.

And it was a pretty happy homecoming for me, as it turns out. I didn't love Homecoming, but it's got some funny moments and some exciting moments, and it rests comfortably in the upper half of Marvel movies I've seen.

Interestingly, though, the reasons it worked for me were more or less the reasons Ant-Man didn't totally work for me, and that has everything to do with timing.

If you remember this Ant-Man rant, my biggest gripe about that movie was the awkward way it introduced the MCU. If memory serves, little to no mention is made of any other superheroes until about halfway through the movie, when Scott Lang says something along the lines of "The first thing we should do is contact the Avengers."

The who? Suddenly the spell of being in a world where Ant-Man was the center of the superhero universe had been shattered. I wanted that universe to last a bit longer before he was just another face in the MCU crowd. It left a sour taste in my mouth and started spoiling a movie that was only really all that interesting in the parts that Edgar Wright obviously contributed before he left the movie.

Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn't suffer from the same problem. The Avengers are in this movie from the very first moments on screen, when a child's drawing of Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap et al is rescued from the debris of the battle that mostly leveled New York at the end of The Avengers. Not only do we get a visual reminder of those characters (only some of whom we will actually see in the ensuing movie), but we're immediately reminded of a major plot point from their first movie. This is an Avenger world, and Spider-Man is only part of it.

And that's okay, if you do it right. In fact, it's probably inevitable, and again it's a function of that timing. Timing not only in terms of getting to other parts of the MCU straight away, but timing also because we've already seen Spider-Man in the context of the Avengers. We hadn't seen Ant-Man that way until after his solo movie, and that seems to have made all the difference.

I also dug Michael Keaton as the villain, who gives a fairly direct shout-out to his character in Birdman in terms of wearing a winged creature suit. (In fact, at first I wondered if he was supposed to be Anthony Mackie's Falcon ... until I saw him doing, you know, bad things. Especially since Falcon was the main link to the Avengers in Ant-Man.)

I don't know if I'll need a lot more solo Spider-Man movies, though if they're making a third Thor movie, I'm sure we'll get at least a couple more. I also don't know if I'll be inclined to circle back and catch up with the Spider-Man movies I missed the first time around.

But I'm glad to have Spider-Man back in my life -- back as a presence I'll be making excuses to see, rather than not to see.