12 Comments

On Spidermens. Beautiful movie but Sonny you are not alone in feeling like this was half a movie. The amount of people in my theater who gasped and groaned when we got the to be continued was high.

Also doesn’t Spider Gwen deviate enough from the standard spider canon established in this movie that she would also qualify as a anomaly?

Unrelated but flash movie looks so ugly. The trailer before spider verse made some of the action look like it came from the CW Arrow verse.

Expand full comment
founding

Re movies in theaters: I remind us of an earlier conversation about theaters and how badly they and their technologies are maintained. There is nothing more annoying than going to see a movie with a great score and having to listen to a wire rattling in the speaker for 2+ hours - or watching spectacle not matched to the screen. I’ll take a well maintained setup any day, even if it’s smaller and not as totally immersive.

Expand full comment

Umm Spoilers......

I thought Sonny's point about trauma was really interesting, but isn't the primary conflict of the movie kind of resolving it? That's the point no. Miles fights the idea that he has to be repressed by "an algorithm and the ghost of Stan Lee." Miguel isn't like level headed and trying to make altruistic rational decisions. Miles drives him into a rage and his wanting to preserve the canon looks like a personal obsession from a vampire and in the end the heroes see that Miles is a truer incarnation of the spirit of Spider-man than Miguel and Miles is who he is because he's raised with love and doesn't experience multiple spiderman tragic deaths.

Expand full comment

I enjoyed the discussion about the theater itself. But as someone who once went to a movie on most weekends - and for a few years even went to NYC, well now as I am older, it is no longer worth the effort. Few theaters are really all the fun. and for all the great sound in a real theater, in fact it is more fun to sit at home, have a beer etc and just enjoy. I think the point about who watches Succession is spot on.

Yes, we watch movies and premium television - and we never have a concern about missing a scene if we go to the bathroom.

Also re being the first to see something.... this is one view of how folks look at art. But try this. And I preface this by saying that for all arts there is New Art and Good Art (this idea was taken from painter Alex Katz). So we want both. In music we have our Beethoven concertos, but we also want to hear new music. In painting, we want to see the art in the museums but also the art in the galleries.

So it is not just the thrill of being in the know, but the thrill of seeing the new - that gets us to see new..... movies or TV. But you miss that TV and movies are really the same art. Both consumed in the same manner.

I used to see lots of new stuff but I began to stop after Broke Back Mountain.. I gradually realized that the new were really not what I was looking for. Tastes of those attempting to push taste were no longer mine.

Expand full comment

Re: Spiderman

The look of the various scenes, especially those in the first portion of the film involving Gwen Stacy (Ghost Spider) was stunning.

However, I will say that ending on a cliffhanger after putting the viewer through 2 hours and 20 minutes is brutal.

Expand full comment