Spider-Man and his many verses, and other No Way Home thoughts

We finally contributed to the massive -- and still growing in leaps and bounds -- box office of Spider-Man: No Way Home over the weekend. 

The viewing prompted many different thoughts -- you know, the type I'd write about in separate posts if I wanted to have a week's worth of Spider-Man posts. Since I don't, I'll fit them all here, making use of subheadings. 

And of course, there will be SPOILERS. 

The first was one that had occurred to me previously, but one I've never written about:

Why is Spider-Man the hero who is always trifling with the multiverse?

It's a shame Spider-Man: No Way Home is so many times more successful than the already successful Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which is getting a sequel in 2022. I wouldn't say it's a remake of that movie, though it does deal with multiple versions of Spider-Man from different universes coming together to fight a threat to the very space-time continuum. At the very least, it owes something to it.

Into the Spider-Verse is an adaptation of a 2014-2015 comic book series conceived and written by Dan Slott. So he was the one who may have taken Spidey down this path to begin with. 

As an MCU movie, I think No Way Home does its best not to be directly indebted to any particular source, since these plot turns are supposed to take even comic book nerds by surprise. However, I'm reading that the basic story arc comes from a 2007 comic story arc called "One More Day," and Wikipedia credits Slott's Spider-Verse story with inspiration for the film.

Because I don't have a huge breadth to my comic book knowledge, I cannot say this for certain, but I have to figure that other superheroes have had multiverse type storylines, if only because they have been around so long that the writers need to get creative (or ridiculous, take your pick). But Spider-Man is the only one whose multiverse dalliances have received the cinematic treatment -- twice now.

Why is that? I'll leave that one dangling as we get to our other topics for today ...

Covering our eyes for different reasons

I noticed while buying tickets that Spider-Man was rated M, meaning it is appropriate for children over 15. My younger son is eight, and only just turned eight last week. That's not even close.

But we were already at the cinema, and if I mentioned it to my wife, it could only derail a day I had carefully planned through two viewings of the previous two MCU Spider-Man movies -- presumably also rated M. So I just bought the tickets and moved on.

So it was with some surprise that my wife groaned over the intensity of the trailers before the movie, which included The Batman and Morbius. (She was less shocked by The 355, maybe just because it stars women?)

And so while I was closing my eyes to avoid seeing footage I didn't want to see, part of my ongoing prevention of having all the images from a movie spoiled by familiarity, my eight-year-old was closing his eyes to avoid traumatizing images -- and my wife was providing an additional layer of protection by using her hand as a second shield.

I can't tell you how traumatizing those images actually were, since I didn't watch them. I suspect it was just the tone, since the 15-year-olds who were officially approved to watch these movies wouldn't want something that my eight-year-old would be perfectly comfortable with. I'm sure my 11-year-old was plenty awed and excited in an aspirational way. I suspect more than anything, the eight-year-old had that sense you get when you've shown up in the wrong place and are suddenly subjected to something that wasn't intended for you.

Then again, superhero movies are sort of intended for everybody, and it was clear from the trailers that we are not winding down on them anytime soon. Speaking of which ...

A reminder of when I didn't see every superhero movie

You'd figure someone like me would be perfectly prepared for the fan service in No Way Home, perhaps even its ideal target. You'd be wrong.

As I was watching the film and piecing together who was who by process of elimination, I was reminded that I did not go to the theater to see three consecutive Spider-Man movies ... and still to this day have not seen them.

It's a weird sequence of events considering that I really liked Spider-Man 2, the second Sam Raimi movie, the one with Doc Oc as the villain. I guess I heard bad things about Spider-Man 3, though, because I never bothered with it.

Then I recall finding it absurd that they were rebooting the character so quickly, which means I didn't see either of the films starring Andrew Garfield. 

By the first Tom Holland movie, every superhero was being rebooted constantly, and I'd also adjusted my perspective such that I felt like I had to see every significant film released in a given year before I closed my rankings each January. Perhaps especially superhero movies, even if they didn't have a realistic shot at my #1 for the year. (Though Wonder Woman was actually my #2 in 2017, the year of the first Holland movie.)

In hindsight, it seems really weird that I just blew these movies off, especially given the character's prominence within the pantheon of superheroes. (I once had a theory that Spider-Man was one of the most famous five superheroes of all time, joining Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk.)

But it wasn't totally uncommon either. I didn't see either of the Iron Man sequels in the year of their release, and that character is, nowadays, the most prominent challenger for that top five. 

I suppose it's not completely unprecedented even today. I'll be wrapping up my rankings next week without seeing the latest Venom movie. There was one Friday night when I was going to see it, but I couldn't find a parking space at the mall (it was Black Friday) so I just bailed and never got back to it.

Having missed three of the existing seven Spider-Man movies -- or eight if you count Into the Spider-Verse -- was not ultimately a problem. I knew Jamie Foxx was the villain in the second Garfield movie. I didn't remember who was the villain in the first Garfield movie -- a lizard? -- but by then it was obvious because I knew Thomas Haden Church's Sandman was the villain in the final Tobey Maguire movie. When the lizard finally transforms back into Rhys Ifans at the end, I remembered Ifans' announced casting in that movie.

I do think it would now be worth going back and seeing what I missed, and I can watch it in a manner that gives appropriate nods to the multiverse. Having watched the two Holland movies with my kids leading up to the viewing, maybe I will boomerang back outward and watch the Garfrield movies in reverse order before getting to Spider-Man 3. Hey, why not. 

Which leads me to ...

The surprise ongoing effectiveness of Tobey Maguire

Tobey Maguire has become an absolute pariah in Hollywood. Everyone thinks he's an asshole -- we all know the stories of his behavior as a poker player, as documented in that Aaron Sorkin movie -- and he really hasn't been working at all.

Since Garfield was the first one to appear here, I wondered if maybe Maguire wouldn't even be in the movie. After all, they could have but didn't include James Franco in the cast.

When he did show up, I was surprised at a) how youthful he still seems at age 46, and b) how he's still able, more or less, to do the thing that ingratiated us to him in the first place.

Most actors who see a dimming of their fame -- say, Orlando Bloom -- seem awkward when we see them again. Like all the sudden they just can't do what they used to do anymore. Whereas once they were charming, now they aren't. Now their awareness of their own downfall actually diminishes their craft, and they just can't pull it off anymore. 

That wasn't the case for Maguire. He's actually sort of the heart and soul of this movie in a weird way. He factors into a key moment in the climax when he gets Holland's Peter Parker to control his rage and resist doing something he would have regretted. 

I'll be curious to see where he goes from here. Is this the comeback role Maguire needed?

Or will he fritter it away and still act like an asshole to everybody?

Dr. Strange's carelessness with magic

After all he'd been through with Thanos, I never really believed Dr. Strange would conjure a spell to "brainwash the entire world" -- to use his own words -- on a whim.

So while we might blame Peter Parker for the space-time endangering events of this movie, that's like saying you blame the child for asking to play with a gun, rather than the adult who gave him the gun to play with.

I guess Strange didn't see any of the other Spider-Man movies, because he's unfamiliar with the phrase "With great power comes great responsibility."

Sure, one of the film's funniest scenes is the one where Strange has to keep changing his spell in progress due to last-minute edits by Peter. But again, do we blame Peter for remembering one more person he doesn't want to forget him, or do we blame Strange for not reviewing all the parameters of the spell with Peter before he even started?

It's not like Strange is the genie here. It's not like he's trying to use the exact semantics of Peter's request against him in order to deny him a wish on a technicality. Since he's on Peter's side, you'd think they'd want to sit down and hash out the spell over a couple of hours. 

Not so much.

Mysterio's unbelievable credibility

Another thing I didn't believe was that the world would believe Mysterio -- a "superhero" who had been famous for like a week -- over Spider-Man, an Avenger who had demonstrably saved the world, or at least his small part of it, on multiple occasions.

I tried to consider whether Mysterio had been known to the world longer than his three or four fights with the elementals, but I decided he had not been. Peter wasn't even aware of him until his school trip to Europe. In fact, Peter names him. Mysterio dies at the end of that school trip.

In this case, I think you can view it as a criticism of our sociopolitical landscape, not something that's supposed to be realistic. The conspiracy theorist talk show host played by J.K. Simmons is supposed to be a riff on Alex Jones. The things he says are not supposed to make sense, which makes it all the more of a sharp satire that so many millions of people believe him.

Still, as the core conflict for an entire movie, I didn't totally buy it.

Plus, aren't there schools other than M.I.T.?

Cool but not clever

Although I liked this movie quite a bit, it doesn't approach the rarefied air of the Marvel movies I have really loved in the past five years, such as the final two Avengers movies, the most recent Thor movie and the most recent Ant-Man movie.

My ultimate assessment is that all the multiverse stuff was cool, but not particularly clever.

When you look at any individual detail of this movie, it doesn't care much about explaining itself. Villains just appear, Spider-Men just appear. There's no rhyme or reason to where they appear or when they appear. They appear at the time the plot needs them to, and only because the plot needs them to appear.

I think the key to a head-trippy film involving paradoxes is that the paradoxes themselves should be clever. The guiding principle behind the making of Back to the Future was the unanticipated repercussions of traveling through time. Everything that happens is an offshoot of a paradox or an attempt to avoid one.

No Way Home doesn't care about paradoxes. All it really wants to do is assemble a bunch of different characters from three different cinematic threads and figure out a way for them to coexist. 

And it does that in a cool way. Just not a clever one.

                                                             ******************

Okay, I think that's enough subheadings for today.

The day my kids sat still

The reason we're in the U.S. is to celebrate my dad's 80th birthday, which will not actually be until September 10th, but this was the best time for my sister to take off from work. She and my mom flew out to Fresno from Boston on Monday, and my dad and his wife flew out from Maine to LA mid-week last week. We got in on Saturday morning, saw them for a swim in our hotel pool on Sunday, and caravaned up here on Monday, where my sister and mom actually beat us here. "Here" is Yosemite National Park, or just outside of it anyway. (And yes, my family has gatherings such as this even though my dad and mom split up in 1997. They've had almost every Christmas together since then.)

Yesterday was the day we celebrated Dad's birthday with a french toast breakfast and presents. I had a surprise for a movie night that night: The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not the abominable Scott Derrickson-Keanu Reeves remake from a couple years ago, but Robert Wise's 1951 original, which was my dad's favorite movie when he was growing up (from age 12 onward, anyway. His favorite "adult movie" is The Seventh Seal).

Dad was indeed "chuffed" (to use the Australian term) at the idea, and told us the reason it had become his favorite, which I never knew previously. He had a friend who was in some way associated with the local movie house (he told us this story yesterday and I've already forgotten the nature of that association), and when The Day the Earth Stood Still left town, my dad came into possession of a number of the still images from the movie they had used to promote it, which he proceeded to festoon around his room.

The impetus for this viewing was not just to fete my dad on his "birthday," but to create a bonding experience with him and his grandkids. The other half of that bonding experience is meant to be a viewing of their favorite movie, or at least the older one's favorite movie -- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse -- which should occur at some point later in the weekend (we're here until Monday).

The bonding experience, though, was a fairly high-risk, high-reward proposal. It was both the reason for the Earth Stood Still viewing, as well as one of the greatest reasons not to view it.

See, The Day the Earth Stood Still is boring. Or so I thought when I watched it, which was likely in my late teens or early 20s.

It's a movie about aliens, alien spacecrafts and alien robots that doesn't have all that much of any of them. The main alien looks exactly human, and doesn't even do any non-human things other than speak an alien language (when he's not speaking English) and easily solve complicated mathematical proofs that even the best human minds of the day struggle with. The robot looks cool but is actually not in it all that much. Most of the movie involves the alien being on the run, disguised as a human as he looks after the son of another woman sharing his lodgings, and tries to find a brilliant professor.

So, boring.

My kids don't do well with boring. They have short attention spans, or can have them, anyway. This is the type of movie that might trigger those short attention spans.

As a reminder, they are 8 and 5, though the older one turns 9 this Sunday (and the viewing of Spider-Man may be on his birthday). That's at least ten to 15 years younger than I was when I saw it, and found it boring. And I'd venture that my attention span back then was far better than theirs would be now, obviously at the age I was, but especially at the age they are now. I just didn't have the distractions they have today.

Having them start watching The Day the Earth Stood Still, and quit watching it 15 or 20 minutes into the movie, could be a worse outcome than if I'd never borrowed it from the library and brought it along with us at all. It could have had the effect of curdling my dad's birthday celebration rather than leaving him chuffed.

But you know what? They were awesome.

The older one was, I believe, genuinely engaged the whole time. The younger one may have lost some of his attention at one point or another, but the only way he demonstrated that was to move from where he was sitting next to his grandmother, to sitting next to my wife. She explained some of the things that were happening quietly in his ear, which seemed to get him back on track.

The fact that the movie was only 92 minutes long undoubtedly helped get them through, but I never got the sense they were in any hurry for it to be over. Fortunately, the movie front-loads the thrills it does have. The spacecraft lands within the first ten minutes, and it's not long after that that the robot Gort is shooting the lasers out of his eyes that you see above. He only uses them to disintegrate weapons -- and two men later on, but we won't go into that -- so I knew the content of the movie would be suitable for them. But I never could have guessed how patiently they would sit through all the walking around Washington D.C. and the vague romantic intrigue between Michael Rennie's alien and Patricia Neal's mother of the young boy. I had a wince at the ready any time that stuff seemed to be going on too long, but none of it ever lost my boys.

The best part is that we watched it interactively, laughing at certain things that seemed outdated, but not in a derisive way, and giving all the right oos and ahhs every time the story took a turn. I worried that my dad would be offended by some of the extraneous commentary, but he actually participated himself willingly, as anything that was made as long ago as 1951 is going to seem slightly silly through a modern lens. His affection for the movie is nothing so solemn that it can't be punctured by a few well-timed, MST3K-style observations from an audience that was obviously enjoying ourselves.

And I was surprised at how much I enjoyed myself. I recognized it as a good movie when I first saw it, but I think I had to allow it a lot of latitude for its age and its comparatively slow pace. These things didn't bother me this time. I've had a lot of my own maturation since then.

Now the onus is on my dad for doing his part to appreciate Spider-Man, though the way he responded to the visual effects in Peter Rabbit last year (see here) suggests there's a good chance he'll just be genuinely blown away.

His grandkids have set a standard of appreciation it'll be difficult for him to match.

The single vulgar moment of "Sunflower"

My older son’s favorite movie is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but it took him a while to discover one great thing about it, which I cottoned on to the first time we saw it. As we were watching the movie back in December, I made an immediate mental note to look up the song that Miles grooves to in his room when we first meet him, which instantly struck me as a keeper.

The song ended up being “Sunflower” by Post Malone featuring Swae Lee. I acquired it, and I included it in the annual mix I make every February in time for the March 1^st birthday of the one guy I know who still makes mixes. (He also sends me one for my birthday.) I’d say the mix is for him, but to be honest, I only somewhat try to include songs that I think will be wins for him. It’s really more for me, as I am the one who is sure to listen to it multiple times (he’ll give it a polite initial listen, but after that who knows). So this annual mix has come to represent a snapshot of which songs I’m liking at that juncture, and “Sunflower” was given a place of prominence on this last one.

We watched Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse a second time earlier this month, with my son’s brother and mother joining us this time, and I’m guessing the second viewing gave “Sunflower” a chance to sink in with my son, as he’s also grown considerably in his musical appreciations in the eight months since our first viewing. Now the song is in regular rotation among those he looks up on YouTube, and so I’ve become familiar with its video.

The video is a really wonderful incorporation of footage from the movie with lyrics from the song, which are typed out on the screen creatively, in available negative spaces and elsewhere.

But not ALL of the lyrics.

The only hesitation I have ever had about fully embracing “Sunflower” is its one truly anomalous lyric. This is mostly what sounds like a sweet love song, but there’s one point where Malone (or is it Lee?) sings the following:

“She wanna ride me like a cooz.”

Huh?

Why is this song talking about a “cooz”?

And what is a “cooz,” you may ask?

Well, allow me to quote Reservoir Dogs, regarding Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”:

“It’s about this cooz who’s a regular fuck machine. Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick.”

Why is this vulgar lyric plopping itself in the middle of a sweet song that sweet Miles really likes?

Seeking confirmation that, indeed, the song is talking about a regular fuck machine, I looked up the “Sunflower” lyrics online.

In fact, it is not “cooz.” It is “cruise.” “She wanna ride me like a cruise.”

That’s a bit better, but really, not that much.

It’s still a lyric about a woman riding a man, which can only be interpreted sexually. Whether she’s a “cooz” or not, she still wants to ride the singer like a cowboy atop a bucking stallion. She’s in it for the sexual gratification.

Which is, you know, not really what “Sunflower” is about.

I don’t know if Post Malone was commissioned to make this song for Spider-Man or not, but if so, it certainly seems like an odd choice. And the makers of the video have recognized that tonal failure by leaving those particular lyrics off screen.

Good song though. Even better movie.

A list-making dad's dream come true

I didn't start making my list of all the movies I've ever seen -- which is just five away from reaching 5,300 -- until I was about to graduate high school.

I got my hands on a video guide released by the local video chain, which seemed exhaustive at the time, and which helped me build the bones of my list. Today, I feel the list is probably accurate to within ten titles, and those that aren't on there are likely ones I saw so young that I don't remember their titles, or even seeing them.

I've considered, over the years, that the only way to get a truly accurate list would have been to start when I was a kid, something that was never likely to happen. Neither of my parents are into lists or movies, particularly -- actually, my mom has gotten into movies in a big way, but it's been more of a later life obsession. In any case, they wouldn't have made up a list of movies their child had seen because that just wasn't something someone was likely to do in the late 1970s or early 1980s, at least not without their child asking them to do so. (Not that it's particularly common in the 2010s.) And at that point I didn't yet know I was going to be this obsessed with lists.

But now that I'm a parent with my own child ...

I'm not going to lie, I have thought about this a number of times. I figured the 45-year-old version of my older son -- either son, but he was the one I thought of first -- would thank me for it. He wasn't going to have the tools nor the wherewithal to create this list, but I could. After all, I'd know about most of the movies he saw because I'd see them with him, and been keeping track of them for my own purposes.

Every time I considered it, though, I ultimately waved it off. There are many things you may want your children to inherit from you, but obsessive list-keeping skills is not necessarily one of them. I don't think it's a bad thing to pass on, per se, but I'd feel weird being proactive about it. It's something they have to come by on their own, or not at all.

And sometimes, they do just that.

A propos of nothing except the fact that he's got my genes, my son has started asking me recently about my favorite movies. He knows I'm a critic, and he also knows I have my films ranked on Flickchart. This has all become more relevant for him in the wake of seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which he considers his favorite movie of all the time. More often than I would think reasonable, he asks me where this movie ranks on my list, expecting me to say it's in my top ten or something. When I'm honest and say that it's probably in my top 400 (out of that aforementioned 5,300) he's always disappointed.

It had never been more than your typical kid-questioning until this past weekend, when he said he wanted to rank his top 100 movies. And I said I had the means at my disposal to help him compile a list of all the movies he'd ever seen.

He not only jumped on board, he wanted to do it right then.

Instead we did it over the next few days, adding films as we came across them by going in reverse chronological order through my list of first-time watches and repeat viewings on Letterboxd. We added some films I knew he'd watched without me, such as in his after-school program or at his aunt's house. And though this doesn't really feel definitive either, and we expect to add movies over time as we remember them, we currently have a list of 106 films he's seen.

It's funny how at age eight, he's already grappling with some of the same things I am grappling with in my series Audient Audit -- movies I think I've seen, but can't be sure. I told him he'd watched Bambi and Dumbo, neither of which he actually remembered seeing, and likely would never have included himself on a future such list. Then there were two movies he started but didn't finish at his aunt's house -- that's a pretty common thing there, apparently, since normal people don't lose sleep over partial watches. He wasn't willing to include them. That's a standard I apply to my own lists as well.

Ranking them? Next weekend, probably, if he hasn't already moved on to something else, which is a distinct possibility.

But now that I have this list, I may try to maintain it for him. We watched E.T. on Easter night, after compiling the list, and I've added that. With the one other I just remembered, now it's 108.

A long way from 5,300, but you have to start somewhere.