Sinners (4/5 Stars)

We have been waiting for this movie for ten years. In 2013, Writer/Director Ryan Coogler entered the scene with the impressive Fruitvale Station. We were all happy to see him hired by the biggest of studios (and definitely get paid) to make some wide release blockbusters like Creed (2015) and then Black Panther (2018). But unlike other auteurs that get scooped up into the money-making apparatus of reboots, remakes, and superhero franchises (Chistopher Nolan comes to mind), he either did not have the opportunity or chose not to take a step back and make some smaller movies in between his large ones. Ryan Coogler has not made a truly personal movie since 2013 until now. Sinners is undeniably Ryan Coogler’s movie. He built up a lot of good will (and box office) over the past decade, and here he is spending it.

Not that Sinners is a small movie. Yes, it takes place over the course of one day and one night in 1930s Clarkson, Mississippi, but it comes with all the technology and scope of a Marvel movie. Besides the obvious example of Oppenheimer, there has not been a more appropriate movie for an IMAX screen in the past several years than Sinners. I saw this movie in a regular movie theater and was consistently reminded by Coogler’s framing that I was seeing only a part of what he wanted to show me. My time to see it in IMAX has passed, but if it ever was released again in an IMAX theater, I would try to see it again.

The story as it is involves two identical twins, Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who have been gone from town for a while. First then fought in World War I and then they ran booze in Chicago for Al Capone. Despite the segregated reality of Mississippi, they have decided to open a bar/nightclub in their home town and spend the first half of the movie impressing the natives with their big city style and money and recruiting the best band they can for opening night. This involves rounding up an old bluesman like Delta Slim (played by Delroy Lindo) but more importantly an up-and-comer Sammie Moore (played by Miles Caton) whose voice is reminiscent of James Earl Jones.

The auditory aspects of Sinners are as impressive as its visual aspects.. Sinners has enough music in it to be classed as a musical, and Ryan Coogler shows his knowledge and very good taste in old school blues and old tyme folk music, which fill up the movie wall to wall. Sometimes it is hard to tell what makes good sound mixing or sound editing, but I would be very surprised if this movie was not going to show up next awards season nominated and perhaps winning those awards. (I do not believe there will be a nomination for Best Song because I think all of these songs are pre-existing, however, my category for Best Use of a Song will very likely include at least two entries from this movie).

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of Sinners, but I sit here and wonder whether I really understood the overall theme and plot of this movie. The main storyline I have already described is clear enough. But halfway through the movie, vampires show up and they surround the nightclub with the aim (I think) of turning the talented Sammie Moore into one of them. Clarkson, Mississippi is known as the place where blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for musical success. That might be relevant. I’m not sure. Sammie Moore seems to be plenty talented already. Honestly, I’m not exactly sure what the sins are that the film title Sinners appears to be referring to. Is it just basic drinking, carrying on, and fornicating? Because I don’t think the characters were doing anything heavier than that besides killing vampires.

Nor does the vampires’ desire to obtain Sammie Moore seem to be a not-so-veiled metaphor for the white man’s mission to steal the essence of their (supposedly) more artistic/creative black brethren (see Jordan Peele’s Get Out). After all, the vampires have their own music, and Ryan Coogler made sure to incorporate some very good samples of it. The vampire’s cover of Rocky Road to Dublin is awesome. Indeed, when attempting to be invited into the nightclub (basic vampire rules do apply here), the vampire's claim that they are not prejudiced and that to join them would be an opportunity to join an equal fraternity of undead. Whether it is better to be an undying and powerful vampire or to be a black person in the segregated South is an argument that gives the characters (and us) pause.

The movie devolves into bloody fist fights before the last remaining characters make it to the morning. Overall, the mission to open this nightclub is a dramatic failure even if the Klan get dealt a major blow near the end of the film, almost as an afterthought.

One more thing can be said about the performance of Michael B. Jordan. I’ve seen actors playing against themselves as identical twins, and this is not the best version of that. But more distracting is the fact that Michael B. Jordan is still built like Apollo Creed and Killmonger. Is it appropriate for a normal human in 1930s Mississippi to look like they’ve been into competitive body-building? It is even more distracting given that Michael B. Jordan was a respected actor (see The Wire, Fruitvale Station) before he became a human action figure, as opposed to, say, Arnold Schwarzenneger who doesn't really have the range to be anything but Arnold Schwarzenneger. Nicholas Cage did this for a few years (1996-1998) but then became normal again. If Ryan Coogler can escape the constraints of franchise movies, then I think it is time to release Michael B. Jordan as well.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2/5 Stars)

 

Take any 10-15 minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have part of an impressive movie. But taken as a whole it is both too long and incomplete. It suffers from a bad case of evil producer strategy, whereupon the failures of the movie have less to do with the creators themselves but from certain dictates from on high that force bad decisions in terms of length and content.

A very prominent version of this can be seen in the adaptation of The Hobbit. The evil producers had it in their mind to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and so they set out to make the new movies exactly the same in length and release strategy. The problem of course was that the source material was a novella, not three books of hundreds of pages each. And the content of the novella didn’t have the action set pieces that the trilogy of tomes had. So, in the end, The Hobbit trilogy was way too long and stuffed with a bunch of blockbuster action sequences that were boring as all hell because they weren’t in the book at all. Why this was done is obvious, the evil producers wanted to market the movies as big events, so they needed to be epic (see long) and there needed to be at least three of them so they could have three big opening weekends. I hope they liked how much money they made immediately because no one in their right mind would ever see those movies again, or for the first time, now. I didn’t bother to watch the third. (In that one, they take a single chapter and draw it out for three hours).

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has this same sort of problem. It is a sequel to the well thought out and executed 2019 standalone feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but unlike that movie, it starts with a marketing strategy and then tries to fit a story to it, not the other way around. At 2 hours twenty minutes it is way too long and then it ends on a cliffhanger because apparently it wasn't long enough.

Again, take any ten or fifteen minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have what could be part of a good movie. The animation in particular is striking and impressive in its attention to detail and multitude of forms. Like the original (and now live-action Spider-Man too), the spider-people live in a concurrent multi-verse. These multi-verse each have their own art style. The main version, wherein Miles Morales (aka Black Spider-Man) is our hero, is curated in Brooklyn neo-realism. Another version, with Gwen Stacy (aka Spider Woman) is curated in impressionistic pastels. A villain named the Vulture seems to pop out of a universe styled in the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Spider-Punk is made out of british paper-mache.

All of these are good artistic ideas that are well done. It’s just that there is too much of it and not enough actual plot. Action sequences go on too long. Even when the movie is out of an action sequence and it's just normal exposition, there is still a lot of action. In one scene with plenty of background exposition, the characters are actually webbing their way through the city at great speed. The thing is, this occurs right after an overlong action sequence, so we are going from action sequence to action sequence to action sequence. Even word-play jokes are set against a scene of blockbuster action. Did you know that Chai is Indian for Tea? And that when you say Chai Tea you are actually saying Tea Tea? You are not laughing, is it because you are distracted by that skyscraper falling/crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge. The action sequences would have felt more exciting if the movie wasn’t wall to wall with them. And certain dramatic moments would have worked better without all this sound and fury. A big reveal involving the emotions of several main characters takes place during a chase and fight on a bullet train racing up a space elevator. Why? Why do it like that?

When the movie does slow down, it slows down a lot, and in repetitive fashion. How many scenes do we really need of a teenager trying to talk to their parents and getting frustrated. I would be happy with one scene per teenager and set of parents. In this movie, there must be at least 5-10 scenes of that kind of thing.

The thing is, these overlong action sequences and all these frustrating scenes where teenagers are not able to communicate with their parents are the same thing: the movie stalling for time, trying to get to an EPIC length and the cliffhanger to set up the next movie. I for one will not be seeing the next movie. I don’t need to see it to know that they could have combined its story into this one resulting in one good movie instead of two way too long bad ones. (I do not understand why evil producers have this strategy. You can always make more movies. Just look at the James Bond franchise.)

This movie doesn’t even have Spider-Ham in it. What a disappointment.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (4/5 Stars)

Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse war written in part by Phil Lord. This man has been instrumental in bringing to prominence a very 2010s subgenre of movies. Previous examples of his work are 21 Jump Street and the Lego Movie. What these movies have in common is a consciousness of previous source material that goes beyond being meta and continues into a weird quirking of the "suspension of disbelief". These movies are insisting that a fake universe is real to its characters and that the fake reality rules should apply instead of real reality rules. A good example is Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, whereby the characters are sucked into a video game and realize the world they inhabit is not governed by physics or biology but video game rules.

You wouldn't think that should work in a dramatic sense because when anything is possible, there should be no stakes or suspense. But the rules have kind of changed in the last twenty years, in part by gamer culture (which I will speak of later) and in part by a TV show named Community. (Obviously there are a million different threads that produce culture, but I do feel this show must have been instrumental). Community introduced a character named Abed who was so ingrained in the workings of genre storytelling that he could seemingly predict what would happen in the very TV episode he was in. Other characters would chide Abed that reality wasn't like a TV show, but they would generally be proven wrong becuase they were characters in a TV show. Over-time, Community became less a TV show about what characters did in certain situations, and more about how already established characters would react if they found themselves in a completely different TV genre. That is the situations didn't change in Community. The TV show's genre, and thus the cliche genre rules, changed.

This type of storytelling probably wouldn't be possible without something like gamer culture. By that I mean, the ability for an entire audience of people to have spent more time studying the rules of a fake universes to the point where it might make sense for a story to be using different rules of realty. I guess you could trace this back to J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, the enormity and details of which were so developed that the place became real in the imagination. Nowadays, vast landscapes of fantasy come out every couple of months. Much of this can be crowd-sourced, with different people contributing their own stories. Think of the expansiveness of the Star-Wars Universe. These are not simply movies. There are dozens of novels and several 30-50 hour video games. Wookieepedia, the StarWars encyclopedia has granular descriptions of various races, planets, languages, specifications of different weapons and vehicles. There are historians of these fake universes who curate online encyclopedias and obsess over what is canon, a mind-boggling absurd notion that tries to differentiate the fake-actual events from the fake-fake events of a completely fictional storyline.

But amazingly, if the universe becomes detailed enough, its reality can become something approaching real and drama/pathos/humor can be derived from it. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is such an example. Now you know this story as this movie will explain to you at least six separate times. Peter Parker was an unassuming teenager from Queens, New York. He was bitten by a radioactive spider and became Spider-Man, a friendly neighborhood crime-fighter who works as a photographer for the Daily Bugle and falls in love with his highschool sweethear Mary Jane. He has a particularly good origin story that involves a beloved uncle that counsels him the "with great power comes great responsibility" and whose death occurs because of Peter's inaction. The original Spider-Man story has been told three times already in the last twenty years, first with Tobey Maguire, than with Andrew Garfield, and currently with Tom Holland in the main role. (As a NY Times critic pointed out, Spider-Man's defining characteristic is his youth, thus he must remain forever young, and thus the many reboots). Over the last sixty years, there have apparently been many spinoffs and satires of this story. In this movie, all of those universes merge.

The science is hazy but goes something like this: Every version of Spider-Man that has been created in any comic book or movie lives concurrently but in different universes. A bad guy named KingPin is creating a big machine underneath Brooklyn that will meld this multiverse. Spider-Man (the original Peter Parker) tries to stop him but gets sucked into the machine. This sucks the other versions of him into the original universe. Now instead of one Spider-Man, there are at least six.

I had no idea how out-of-hand this universe had become. Apparently, none of these characters are original to this movie. But we've got Miles Morales, teenager from Brooklyn. Gwen Stacey, best friend of Spider-Man who becomes Spider-Girl after Spider-Man's death, Peter B. Parker the middle-aged version of Spider-Man recently divorced and out of shape (voiced by Jake Johnson), Spider-Man Noir a black-and-white private detective Spider-Man from the 1930s (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Penni Parker, an anime japanese school-girl from the year 3100 who utilizes a Spider-Man robot, and finally, the one and only Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, a cartoon spider who was bitten by a radioactive pig, works for the Daily Beagle, and can float through the air while smelling a delicious pie (voiced by John Mulaney).

Visually, the movie is very impressive as it utlizes all of the different animation styles from the various Spidermen in the same movie. Animation, especially computer animation, makes for great action sequences, and this movie is very impressive in that capacity too. The heart of the story belongs to Miles Morales who we see gaining his powers, going through the tribulations of high school, and losing his beloved uncle. Certain stories are special to us. "If it was never new, and it never gets old, it's a folk song" says Llewyn Davis in Inside Llewyn Davis. This too applies to Spider-Man.