'Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse' Is The Best Movie Of The Year, And Maybe More
#228: "Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse," "Jury Duty," "Everyone Says I Love You," "Enemy"
Edition 228:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
This week: The overwhelming awesomeness of the Spider-Verse…you surprised to hear me say that? Plus a reality-bending show on FreeVee, a streaming comedy and the perfect movie to pair with crazy smoke-filled skies in New York City. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a raunchy high school comedy trying to capture that Gen Z magic.
Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse
Plenty of ink has been spilled, in this newsletter and elsewhere, decrying the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its recent obsession with multiversal storytelling as a some sort of weed that has taken over the garden of modern blockbuster entertainment and choked out any semblance of creativity and risk-taking.
My problem has never been with the idea of superheroes, or the multiverse, but rather how they’ve been deployed as a commercial tool for consequence erasure. Of course, no one believed me, and most of the MCU fans in my life assume I have a personal vendetta.
Case and point! Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse — a movie that’s a multiverse-centric superhero SEQUEL — is in my opinion not only the best movie of 2023, it could make a compelling case to be among the best movies in the past five years.
This second entry in the Miles Morales story is far more ambitious than the first, expanding not only the scale but also its point of view. As with most superhero fare, if I were to describe the plot to you it would sound like gibberish, but the difference here is how grounded it is in relationships and experiences we can recognize. Miles is about to enter college and/or an elite squad of universe-jumping Spider-people, in both cases trying to prove himself as worthy of respect. He wants independence from his parents, who in turn only want the best for him. He’s in love with Gwen Stacy (a first movie love interest who is given a hero’s arc here), who’s big-timing him. These are things we can connect with.
I love that the movie doesn’t patronize the audience or hold its hand through complicated emotional territory. It allows the difficult scenes to be difficult. And you don’t need to follow the minutia of cosmic blah blah blah because character motivations are clear and you’re fully on board with why people are doing what they’re doing. Just as often as it goes big, the movie returns to small character moments.
Essentially, Spider-Verse does everything I wished the live action MCU movies would do — a multiverse with stakes! universes which all feel different and look different! developing real characters with flaws who can’t always get what they want! — leaving me wondering why this model of movie can’t entirely replace the bloated live action productions with celebrities in a latex suits dancing in front of a green screen.
Unlike those movies, which are all digitally painted in drab tones, this movie is two and a half hours of vibrant colors, loud music and crazy action. It’s another entry in the growing trend of Gen Z- and TikTok-influenced chaos pacing on screen, where more is more is more (think Everything Everywhere All At Once or Beau Is Afraid). The creativity and imagination overwhelms the senses.
Seriously, the visuals in this movie are nothing short of breath-taking. Each scene is like a work of art, and each world we jump to feels like a masterpiece created by a different artist with different style and sensibilities. For the first time, I feel like I understand the appeal of comic books, having rendered the experience of reading one on screen through multiple “panels” of action, text boxes, and sequences that simply can’t exist in the real world (even with the help of CGI).
Having the movie be animated also allows you to assemble a voice cast that would cost roughly four bazillion dollars in real life: Oscar Isaac, Daniel Kaluuya, Mahershala Ali, Issa Rae, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Andy Samberg, Jake Johnson, and literally a dozen others whose names or voices you’re familiar with. That luxury gives basically every tiny character the gravitas of a star, and fulfills the illusion that within each universe, that Spider-Man is quite literally the greatest being in existence.
One of my personal measures of a great movie is how quickly I want to go out and see it again, and I’ll be back to see Spider-Verse again this week (preferably this time not at 9:30 a.m. like before).
My enthusiasm got so high that about halfway through I even thought to myself, “is this a perfect movie?” For reference, on my Letterboxd account, I’ve logged 762 films and exactly 14 of them have five out of five stars. The only reason this movie got 4.5 is because after 2hr20min runtime the filmmakers decided to entirely punt on an ending to the story and instead slap “to be continued…” on as a capper, the only brazenly commercial decision in the entire project. If it’s not a standalone story, it by definition cannot be a perfect movie. But that should tell you just how impressed I was.
See, I don’t have to hate Marvel!
Something New
Past Lives (Theaters): I went to see writer/director Celine Song’s autobiographical debut feature this week expecting to plug it into this spot in the newsletter, only to find a bottomless well of thoughts and feelings I could not stop turning over in my mind in the days since the screening. It is, I believe, the second best movie of the year so far and as such deserves its own featured review spot. So next Friday it’ll be up top.
It’s an A24 superindie with Oscar buzz, so my hope is that it will expand out to more theaters over the next several weeks. Despite the obvious lack of explosions and spectacle, I highly recommend finding this movie on a silver screen if you can…for reasons I’ll explain next week!
Jury Duty (FreeVee): I won’t leave you empty handed this week though! There’s a new show on Amazon’s free-with-ads platform that is (and I don’t say this lightly) the first of its kind. A young man signs up for what he believes is a documentary about what it’s like to be on a jury. What he doesn’t know is that every single aspect of the trial, including the judge, the lawyers, the plaintiff, the defendant, and all his other jurors are all actors.
So it’s like The Truman Show, but instead of being mean spirited or driving the guy insane, it ends up being closer to a celebration of his kind heart (and yes, his naivety). Through each stage of the trial, and the sequestration, crazy events keep happening meant to push his buttons, leading to the kind of humor that can really only exist in real life moments. It’s a fascinating show to watch, and I burned through it in just a couple of days. I highly recommend!
Something Old
Everyone Says I Love You (1997, FreeVee): New York Magazine just did a cover story on Drew Barrymore, which got me looking back through your early movie catalogue, which is how I discovered this Woody Allen movie from the late 90s. It’s kind of incredible this movie exists, and exists in part as an old school, soft shoe musical with big dance numbers. But even more impressive is the young cast.
Barrymore plays a New York City socialite who’s enagaged to Ed Norton, before running off with ex-con Tim Roth. Her sisters are Natalie Portman, Gaby Hoffmann and Natasha Lyonne, the movie’s narrator. Lyonne has a brief relationship with Billy Crudup. And keep in mind, these are all teenagers before any of them became famous! The parents are Alan Alda and Goldie Hawn. Allen himself is Hawn’s ex-husband, who goes on to begin a relationship with Julia Roberts (continuing the long tradition of Allen wishcasting beautiful romantic partners for himself). It’s a cast that defies belief, and makes what is otherwise a fairly predictable Woody Allen romp into a really fun streamer.
Something to Stream
Enemy (Max): The photos of the New York City skyline this week are apocalyptic, drawing comparison to everything from Dune: Part 2 to “Breaking Bad Mexico.” My mind immediately went to the final, haunting shot of this 2013 Denis Villeneuve thriller, in which a massive spider looms above the city. That shot, and the movie as a whole, is quite trippy, beginning with the dilemma of what to do if you were watching a movie one day and saw an actor who looked exactly like you, and only getting more discomforting from there.
Jake Gyllenhaal is the double-sided face of a dark story that never allows its viewers to catch their breath or find their balance, and rather than relieve the tension of the mystery, each reveal only cranks the intensity up further. The ending spins it into an almost philosophical or mystical direction, thus the spider, which can’t even be considered a spoiler because I still don’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Still, the movie is gorgeous and tantalizing, and the ultimate endorsement I can give it is the two-plus hours I spent googling theories and explanations after the first time I watched it.
Trailer Watch: Bottoms
Last week I lamented the theatrical family comedy going the way of the dodo (About My Father up to a WHOPPING $10 million now), but the truth is that raunchy comedies aren’t faring much better. Rachel Sennott (breakout star of Bodies Bodies Bodies) and Ayo Edebiri (star of “The Bear”) lead an ensemble high school comedy that’s basically what if the girls from Booksmart f—’d. They start a female fight club at school (because why not), and get Marshawn Lynch to be their faculty advisor (not sure from the trailer whether his character is actually Marshawn Lynch or whether the fact that he’s exactly like Marshawn Lynch is actually the joke).
If this movie is able to capture some of the Gen Z authenticity that made Bodies Bodies Bodies special, and hilarious, then I’m all for it. Otherwise it’s a run of the mill horny high school comedy, which historically I pretty much tend to always go see too. I suppose it’s a win-win.