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.

Jurassic World (2/5 Stars)

Nerd Pandering

If I had made a spoof of the Jurassic Park franchise, it might have been remarkably similar to “Jurassic World.” This movie is not too far away from being a total joke. Take two main plot points. First, the theme park “Jurassic World” is not growing in attendance because people are bored with the same old dinosaurs and the investors are getting anxious. Say what? A theme park with dinosaurs is losing its appeal after only ten years in existence? Surely that is one of the most absurd scenarios in the history of movies. But whatever, in reaction to this scenario the theme park is training velociprators like bloodhounds and creating a newer, bigger, more dangerous dinosaur. You see their focus groups suggest that giant carnivourous dinosaurs tend to draw larger crowds. These new attractions have gotten the attention of the U.S. Military which brings us to the second plot point. A contractor named Hoskins (Vincent D’Onofrio) exclaims “Imagine what we could have done with these guys in Tora Bora!?!” I can actually answer that question. An Al Queada soldier with a sniper rifle would take down the raptor from about 500 yards away. And that’s if the beast could actually be transported to Afghanistan in the first place. And these absurdities are what drive the main plot conflicts of the story. Really. This movie just made a record 200 million dollars in one weekend. The silver lining to that I guess is that this movie would not have made nearly enough without the enormous goodwill garnered by the first two very good Spielberg films. So, at least in this instance, critics can be assured that bad movies don’t come out of nowhere and make tons of money. They stand on the shoulders of actually good movies and also in this case a pretty good book.

Let’s talk about the dinosaurs. They are relatively deficient from past movies in their capacity to provoke wonderment or thrills. The lack of wonder has much to do with the movie’s insistence via the characters that the dinosaurs are not so special. In the first movie you followed the reactions of paleontologists whose every dream came true when they saw their first living dinosaur. Contrast that with the two kids who visit the park in this movie. One of them, a child, is sufficiently excited. The other, a teenager, is more interested in girls. I felt like smacking him upside the head for most of the movie. It matters less what is on the screen than what the characters think about it. The experience of movie going is a vicarious one. If the characters don’t care than the wonder is not extended to the viewer. The fact that “Jurassic World” had one of its main characters not be all that impressed with dinosaurs really undercut the whole reason to see this movie: i.e. that it had fucking dinosaurs in it.

These dinosaurs are less thrilling than the ones in the original movie. Now I’m going to make a distinction in the technology but keep in mind that there is actually no particular reason why computer images could not do both. Think back to the original movie and pick out some of the more visceral moments, perhaps the Velociraptor in the kitchen tapping its big claw, or the water vibrating, or Wayne Knight’s death, or the girl being sneezed upon. None of these little things employed computer effects. It would be absurd to use computer effects for them, as they were not needed. However in the new movie, as far as I can tell, the dinosaurs are completely computer generated even for the moments when it isn’t needed, i.e. closeups on faces. And those dino faces look unnecessarily weird to me compared with the first movies. But as before it is not really the problem that the dinos are almost entirely computer generated. The real problem is that there are not really any moments that do not call for computer generation. There are no little moments. All the moments are big. And this is a problem because you need little moments to create suspense (i.e. water vibrating) and also to explain things.

Filmmakers studying Spielbergian masterpieces such as Jaws and Jurassic Park (as no doubt the director of “Jurassic World” Colin Trevorrow has) continually draw the wrong lessons from them. They assume that if you do not see a monster for a significant length of time that it suddenly becomes scarier. This is not true. The reason why the shark and the dinos are scary in those movies is because they are thoroughly explained. That is to say in “Jaws” Richard Dreyfuss explains in length the nature of Great White Sharks and in “Jurassic Park” a paleontologist explains how velociraptors attack in herds.  It amazes me how these scenes are sometimes the first ones dropped in inferior movies. What you get instead is movie cheats wherein the creature, not being defined, is allowed to arbitrarily gain and lose supernatural powers at the movies whim. Here the new dinosaur is allowed to camoflauge himself amongst the trees. This somehow makes it impervious to bullets, lots and lots of bullets. Or take the raptors, which can be trained to follow orders from Chris Pratt until they don’t want to until they want to again. It also does not help when the ambitions of the movie are so great in scope that a wild animal as a villain just cannot work without it having absurd levels of competence in fighting modern technological war machines. Sometimes for the purposes of thrills that do not insult the intelligence of the audience it is better to have a boat that is not big enough.

Now lets talk about the secondary attractions, the people. There is not much to say here other than how well they play out stock imitations of other Spielbergian characters and tropes, most explicitly the one where an adult needs to stop working so much and spend more time with the kids. Then there is Chris Pratt doing his best ‘Indiana Jones’ impression. Not bad although I think he really should be drinking a beer in his first scene and not a coke (and who drinks coke from bottles anymore?). BD Wong, the scientist from the first movie, is back as a scientist here. His presence is nerd pandering which I will get to next. The same can be said about the characters of Jake Johnson and Lauren Lapkus the computer nerds in the control room. Again, more on that later. Bryce Dallas Howard plays a vapid corporate dummy who disrepects nature and is too high strung and organized for a relationship with Pratt to work. She has these high heels. Pratt at one point when they are in the midst of nature with danger all around them ridicules her decision to wear them. He is right of course. She shouldn’t be wearing them in this context and high heels in general are rather vain and unbecoming for someone already in charge with nobody to impress. So that’s a good criticism. But then the movie does something else: It insists that Bryce continue to wear the high heels the rest of the movie past many scenes when either a sane person would have ditched them or they would have broken past repair many times. Now given that the character is only wearing the heels because the movie itself (written, directed, and produced by guys) has been intent on making her wear them beyond all suspension of disbelief, is it really okay to make fun of the woman’s character for wearing them in the first place. I would suggest that it is not but this is the sort of thing one generally gets when a movie deems as its mission to above all else pander to nerds. In this particular case nerds like to think of themselves as Han Solo and that every girl is Princess Leia who would fall head over heels for them if only they weren’t so stuck up. Chris Pratt and Bryce Howard Dallas are just another reiteration of that classic type of nerd pandering.

I don’t like nerds. I don’t think there is another group of people who would sit through all sorts of stupid drivel as long as it patted them on the back and made them feel special. But boy do studios love nerds. Make a movie about their favorite comic book and the nerds will feel compelled to show up as a matter of honor perhaps if only for the opportunity to complain loudly about how terrible it was done. So the incentive to make decent movies is lessened right there. What is more is that the nerds routinely react with glee when sequels or reboots incorporate the best jokes and lines of the original movie. “Jurassic World” is no exception. There are a ton of inside jokes and callbacks to “Jurassic Park” (Hell, look at Jake Johnson’s “Jurassic Park” shirt) and “Jaws” that make the plot more predictable and all the action tinted with a sense of déjà vu. There is the ‘objects look closer than they appear in the mirror’ gag, there is ‘the loosening of a giant tooth from a vehicle’ trope, there is the ‘flare baiting of the T-Rex’ scene. The best example of all is the musical score. It isn’t John Williams great score from ‘Jurassic Park.’ It is a similar but inferior version whose best quality is to remind you of how great the original was. The most frustrating thing about “Jurassic World” is not that it isn’t a great movie, it’s that it cynically did not even allow itself the space to be a great movie. It deliberately set out to be a nostalgia piece. And the ones to blame are the nerds because they do not insist that their movies challenge them. (One could perhaps argue that the whole idea of having superpowers is an immature way of escaping real world problem solving). As long as they go and see the next Spiderman reboot every five years why would the studios ever give them something different.  

Safety Not Guaranteed (4/5 Stars)

The source material for this movie is a real classified advertisement from 1997 that received thousands of responses. It went like this:

Wanted: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED. I have only done this once before.

In the early 2000s, it became an Internet sensation when a photo of a man with the most serious 80s mullet in the world was added to classified advertisement. Now it is 2012 and there is a movie. Given the source material you would probably expect a dumb action/comedy with plenty of low budget action and at least one great mullet. And you would be completely wrong. The movie, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” written by Derek Connolly, directed by Colin Trevorrow, and starring Mark Duplass and Aubrey Plaza, has action and comedy but also comes with several fully developed characters, a totally unpredictable plotline, and a really sweet romance. It is a far better movie than the source material commands or requires.

The story starts with the classified advertisement. A magazine writer finds it and pitches writing a story about it to his boss. He gets permission to take two intern, a nerdy Indian and the sarcastically depressed Darius, played by Aubrey Plaza, with him on the road trip to hunt down the weirdo.

A movie like this has two storytelling traps in it that would doom the ordinary independent movie. The first trap has to do with time travel and the fact that it ought to be impossible. At some point in the story the writer is going to have to give us a decent explanation as to what is going on there. The second is the presence of a sarcastically depressed character. These people overpopulate indie movies. They usually are underemployed artists/actors/writers/dancers who are depressed, most of the time because they aren’t famous and successful artists/actors/writers/dancers. The problem with this sort of character is that they tend to be pretentious and annoying (because seriously only a pretentious and annoying person would be depressed that they can’t be famous and successful for doing something profoundly useless like, for instance, art.) An intern for a small magazine seems to fit that mold pretty well.  

It is a credit to this movie that both of these traps are deftly averted. The main reason for this I believe is the movie’s treatment of the advertiser, a middle-aged supermarket employee named Kenneth, played by Mark Duplass. The character is one of the most weirdly endearing characters in movies. He truly believes in his mission and is sincerely looking for a partner to go back in time with him. In fact, it is revealed that he has been seeking out theoretical physicists over the Internet and engaging them in discussions about time travel. And yes, he is actually building some sort of big mechanical thing in his garden shed.

But more importantly he also happens to be shy and protective. When the magazine writer shows up at his door and asks to help, he flatly rejects him because he rightly senses that the writer doesn’t really want to go back in time. This guy may be delusional enough to believe in time travel but he can also tell when somebody is making fun of him. Darius is more sympathetic in her introduction and succeeds in gaining enough trust to start Kenneth’s brand of time travel training, but it is still a long time before he feels he can trust her enough to actually tell her the reason he is going back in time. It is a really nice reason that I am not about to spoil it here.

How the movie portrays Kenneth avoids the traps because at some point I started to not really care whether the time machine worked. And I did not care because Darius starts enjoying the sincerity and enthusiasm of the strange guy in the woods to the point where she loses much of her sarcastically depressed persona and stops caring whether the time machine works too. The story becomes more about a romance then about time travel. As far as plots go, that’s ridiculously original. What’s more ridiculous is that it really works. 

Now I can probably guess what you are thinking, and that might be that what I just described is a great cliché in romantic comedies: the oft-seen and inexplicable romance between an outlandish out-of-shape comedian and a ridiculously tolerant supermodel. Believe me this is not the case. This romance is not inexplicable. This is brought out by a superior performance with some very tricky material by Aubrey Plaza. It should be mentioned that it is never suggested that her attraction to Kenneth is a normal thing. This is even highlighted in one of the best scenes where Plaza interviews for the article a sort of ex-girlfriend of Kenneth, played by Kristen Bell, (who you may fondly remember as the ex-girlfriend in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”). She gives a totally understandable explanation of why she did not get too involved with the guy and does so without coming off as a total bitch. Instead, the attraction Darius has to Kenneth isn’t just a foretold conclusion because the screenplay necessitates that the guy has to get the girl in the end, but something that develops between two fully realized imperfect personalities that just happen to be perfect for each other. Darius has actual reasons for wanting Kenneth that make sense. It’s a pleasure to watch a comedy go through the trouble to do that every now and then.

I have yet to not be impressed by an Aubrey Plaza performance. Of course, I have only seen her in this and in her small part in “Funny People,” but I’m already at the point where I’m looking forward to seeing her in plenty of other movies. I have finally added “Parks and Recreation” to my Netflix queue.