![]() ![]() There’s a clunkiness to the rant montage, and yet it is also so heartfelt, so loving. So far every Spike Lee movie I’ve seen has been aggressively willing to have flaws, to do things that shouldn’t work and don’t quite, and this is no exception. ![]() And the second one is a dream, an alternate ending, another life. It pulls some punches, but imho that makes sense given that it’s a rant by someone who is still a Catholic schoolboy underneath it all. One is an intensely Spike Lee montage of ethnic etc stereotypes which is not-particularly-covertly a love letter to all the rotten people of the Big Apple. A terrific opening, not sentimental even though it touches things people get really sentimental about. Stellar acting from Edward Norton as the shlimazl and Rosario Dawson as his possibly-snitchin’ girlfriend extremely 2002 acting from Anna Paquin as a high school girl who’s hot for teacher. The 25th Hour: Spike Lee’s post-9/11 movie, about a low-level NYC crook trying to navigate everybody else’s emotional needs during his going-away party, the night before he goes upstate to prison. A Michelangelo sketch crashing into a modern-day cartoon! A melting teen watercolor world of lilting poignancy! Tilting angles, crazy action, nice punctuation of the overwhelming scenes with calm, character-driven scenes… a wild ride through a hundred different ways to see the world. There’s a side order of, “Don’t trust people who tell you to sacrifice another person for the greater good,” which was allowed to emerge through the storytelling rather than in exposition, and I’ll admit that the film is a fairly insightful portrayal of how desperate many spunky teens are to give away their hearts to some plausible non-parent authority figure.īut mostly I was just in awe of how I never knew what I’d see next. I was bored by all the lecturing about the nature of the *~*multiverse*~* and I suspect they tried too hard to wring metaphor from something that is ultimately just about the decisions of a corporation in pursuit of pelf. Like a zine that’s a person.Īs contemporary kids’ movie messages go (why do they have to tell us messages? why do the messages have to be moral in nature?), “Nobody else can write your story for you” is fine, I guess. ![]() Hobie, the Spider-Punk, struck an especially delicate balance as a corporate franchise character whose actions and motivations all made sense coming from an anarchist punk. ![]() …No, thinking back, I’ll say that the writers did work to make Miles and Gwen a bit more individual and lived-in than that analogy suggests and the plethora of Spiderpeople (and Spider-Cat!) was full of both fun visual gags and delightful characters. Main characters are appealing, I mean it’s Spider-Man, when you buy a Snickers bar you expect it to taste how a Snickers bar does and you like it. Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse: Thrillingly inventive visuals, an absolute can’t-miss movie in spite of having imho (imho!!!) not much to say and insisting on saying it anyway. In a better world, a very different political movement would have adopted the slogan, Deplorable Lives Matter. There’s a kind of disrespectability politics here, or “participatory democracy is for jackasses too!”, and I loved that, as a jackass. (Spoilers for that thing where Yo-Yo tried to tip off the Washington Post, I guess.) Their only allies are sketchy people: sometimes brave people, in one case a very smart person, but people who have never “beaten the odds” or even risen to the occasion. But Tyrone‘s world seemed so much bigger–and it’s important that our heroes don’t use elite institutional power at any point. That show has some striking similarities with Tyrone in everything from specific cultural references to broad themes: is success different from liberation, if you join ’em does that mean you’ve beaten ’em, etc. Is it saying something, not just mouthing Twitter-revolutionary platitudes but trying to say something raw and real? Yes.Īnd it’s interesting, too… I watched some screeners for an upcoming series, which I can’t review yet. Like okay, is it fully thought-through? It is not. This movie isn’t as surreal and individual as, say, Sorry to Bother You–it’s a commercial product–but it doesn’t feel sanded-down. There are a couple hard-hitting plot twists for me, the most powerful one is the one about personal guilt, when they figure out how the cloners are picking who to clone. ![]()
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