The Writer's Poke

I try to write a review immediately after watching a film, but for this one, I wanted to wait a few days. We got to the theater the second week of its release, and I had managed to stay ignorant of how everything in the movie would play out. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by who showed up in this film. I certainly wouldn't have predicted it.  Okay, so there's a 5-year window between this and the last movie, but Aunt May's (Marisa Tormei) gravestone listed 2024 as her year of death. That means Peter (Tom Holland) has been keeping the secret of his identity from MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) for less than 2 years -- which still feels like a crazy amount of time.  Going back to the last movie: Why does Peter not tell Zendaya who he is when he entered the coffeeshop? Is he trying to protect her, which is probably what he would say he's doing, or is he afraid that he will be rejected -- that she will tell him that the MJ he loved is not the MJ she is now? W...

If Far From Home missed a step, then No Way Home tried to overwhelm us with three franchises and a glimpse into the multiverse.  No, this movie isn't perfect. It would be easy to pick on this or that different plot point. But I'm not going to do that here. Topping all that is just how cool it was to see old friends from the earlier Spider-Mans. I wasn't expecting it, and I'm not sure if anything quite like that's ever been done before. Just imagine a bunch of James Bonds standing around together. Wouldn't that be cool? I noticed that a lot of reviewers in my friend group have watched this film multiple times. It always interests me to see that, because not every film gets that wide-ranging repeat viewing treatment. Star Wars, sure, but even the reviewers offering criticism on this one found some reason to keep re-watching it again and again.  This is one of those films that I don't remember watching when it was originally released in theaters. It's possi...

Into the Spider-Verse (2018) introduced us to four Spiders from other Earths, but Across the Spider-Verse opens it up and introduces us to, or at least shows us, dozens more. Spider-Gwen, who we met in the first movie, is the main Spider focused on from a different Earth. It seems like she and Miles, our Earth's Spider-Man, are more than friends, or they would like to be. There's only one problem, and it's not that they're from two different Earths. It's that a relationship between Spider-Man and Gwen never works out in the long run.  Even though there are all those different Spiders out there, we find out that the "canon" stories each of them follows generally have events that cannot be changed. Spider-Man and Gwen not working out is one of the canon events. Another is: Spider-Man cannot save the people closest to him -- be it, Aunt May, Uncle Ben, their father, etc.  Does freewill not exist anywhere in the multiverse? Miles cannot accept that. He wants t...

This movie had people crying in the theater at one point. I heard multiple people trying to control their sobs.  * When I was looking to buy tickets last weekend, I knew I wanted to see this film in IMAX, but the closest IMAX theaters were already almost fully booked. So, I thought, surely there will be less demand midweek. But it turns out that even the Tuesday 10 p.m. screening, the one I went to, was packed. Who are all these people? I wondered. And why are they so interested in The Odyssey? I still remember being a Graduate Student at the University of Mississippi 25 years ago. One of my jobs then was to assist a Professor with his World Literature class. This is when I first really studied The Odyssey, and while I loved it, I don't remember the undergrads in the class being overly thrilled about it. The story was there on the page, but it doesn't as easily "come to life" as Nolan's vision of it does.  And so, my thoughts about the audience I was watching the ...

"The day I die will be like any other. Only shorter." -- Samuel Beckett Iris (Naomi Watts) is a writer. She was a student of Walter's (Bill Murray), who was also a writer.  The bare outline of Walter's life is provided in the movie, but not much more. He had three wives, multiple girlfriends, and retired from teaching, perhaps in disgrace. What his misconduct might have been isn't explained, but he did, we know, have a relationship with Iris when she was his student a number of years -- maybe 20? -- in the past.   Early in the film, Iris mentions that most student stories start at the beginning of a day, but few start at the day's end. Perhaps that's a clue for how this film starts, which is essentially with the ending of Walter's life.  I have to admit that the film pulled one over on me. I only watched this film because Bill Murray was in it, but his actual screen time in the film might be 5 minutes. This film is a vehicle solely for Naomi Watts and ...

Flow looks unlike any other animated film I've ever seen. That's what ultimately pushes the rating up to 5/5 for me. I think it is subtle storytelling, and for a while, I was holding back a bit in my praise. The ending itself it pretty quiet, too, but I appreciated how it ended... This might be odd to say, but I felt like the animation of the background and everything OTHER THAN the animals was amazing. I'm not sure what I think about the animals themselves. They looked "weird" and somehow a little off. Not the Cat itself, but maybe just the dogs. I don't know. I don't want to make a big deal about it. What's maybe surprising is that this is a world where people obviously existed, but I thought for sure the animals would need to run across some people eventually... maybe by the end, say. But nope. No people. They are all gone. Just some cat statues, a drawing, some boats, and whatever nick-nacks lemurs collect. But what happened to all of the people? W...