Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse: Thwip it up and start again

If there's one thing I bloody love, it's a good hard kick up the bum. Not literally you understand, and also not aimed in the direction of my own bum, but rather the kind that someone gives to a flagging movie franchise every now and again. I've wanged on about it a thousand million times but see Dynamite Comics' James Bond stories for a classic example of cracking the mould while remaining respectful to the source, or The LEGO Batman Movie for a triumphant and hilarious cape caper that never forgot what made its hero unique.

Superheroes, of course, are massively ripe for this kind of bum-kicking, and while Spider-Man got a decent enough reboot last year when the MCU finally got its hands on him, there was still a sense of the same beats being followed that have been the Spidey road map for five preceding films. So thank the lord (or, more accurately, Phil Lord) for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a film as unconventional as its embarrassing-to-say-out-loud title.

"Two for Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse
In Theaters Christmas In 3D And Real D 3D please"

Jerking us sideways into the universe of the Spidey comics, Into The Spider-Verse is set in an alternate dimension not entirely dissimilar to - but significantly different from - the one that the Spidey we know and love occupies, thereby immediately sidestepping tedious "BUT IS IT CANON?" questions. They've got their own webslinger, but they've also got Miles Morales, an ordinary schoolkid facing similar bother to that which Peter Parker experienced before his encounter with a nuclear arachnid. When Miles gets bitten by a similar bug, becoming New York's second Spider-Man, he finds himself up against exaggerated villains and aided by - for reasons way too bonkers to explain here - a handful of Spider-guys from other dimensions, including two Spider-women, one Spider-pig and one Spider-Nicolas-Cage.

As you have no doubt deduced, all of this turns out to be absolutely batshit crazy. It's the kind of plot and execution that live-action super-films are usually terrified to go near, and when you walk out of the Spider-Verse, anything Sony or Marvel ever did with the character on screen before suddenly seems about as cutting edge as the Nicholas Hammond-starring late '70s TV series in comparison. There are so many unfeasibly ginormous monsters, truly mental set-pieces and white-hot meta references to previous incarnations of the character that every cinemagoer should be issued with a coffee-table book of every frame of the film to get the most out of it.

But all that would be pointless if it weren't carried off with the love, humour and storytelling skills on display here. With Phil Lord writing and Chris Miller also tinkering in a producing capacity, the frothing excess of ideas that characterised The LEGO Movie spill out of the frame and into your incredulous, gaping facehole. Despite detailing about half a dozen origin stories (usually the curse of the modern superhero flick), Into The Spider-Verse is almost comically efficient, setting up its own cinematic universe of characters in the time it takes most franchises to stretch out one character's backstory. The assorted Spider-people are like the Avengers, if the Avengers were all slightly different versions of the same character, and each gets their own USP and moment in the sun without losing sight of the core plot.

"Is anyone else's NikNak sense tingling?"

That plot, of course, is Miles' journey from paint-spraying delinquent to web-shooting legend, and Lord peppers that story with a perfect balance of knowing nods to the Spidey mythology (uncles play as crucial a role here as ever, and familiar scenes from the past are given hilarious twists) while entirely surprising tangents come so thick and fast they give you thwiplash. And while Miles Morales isn't Lord's creation, the decision to use a half Puerto Rican, half African-American kid as the lead in a superhero movie (a youth- and diversity-celebrating choice reflected in the hip-hop soundtrack that left me scratching my old, white head) is only to be applauded.

The one thing I haven't mentioned yet is the thing that gives Into The Spider-Verse its licence to flip out and take all these liberties: it's animated. But this is nothing like any animation I've seen before; what's being fired into your eyeballs at a thousand miles an hour here can only be described as Spectacular Spider-Manimation. It's a mash up of comic-book dots and lines and bleeding-edge CGI that takes some getting used to (for at least half an hour I was convinced the cinema had forgotten to dish out the 3D goggles), but it's innovative, retina-popping and staggeringly beautiful at times. In all honesty it's also occasionally too much, especially in busy action scenes that overloaded my optic nerves a few times and, for me, could have been dialled just a notch below supermassively megafrantic. But I'm an old man who doesn't get hip hop, so what do I know.

Hold me

Bravo, then, to this mad, anarchic bastard of a film and the hurricane force blast of fresh air it aims at its overstuffed genre. What looked like it might have once been a straight-to-Netflix, kid-oriented time-passer for restless toddlers is in fact as game-changing a cinematic experience as any cape film we've seen since Superman: The Movie. It also makes a strong case for all superhero films from now on to be made like this, and with Nicolas Cage playing a monochrome, 1930s detective version of Spider-Man in each of them. If you ask me that's exactly the kick up the bum they all need.

Labor Day [sic]: suspiciously familiar

Now that Labor Day [sic] is out in cinemas and we can all enjoy Josh Brolin sticking his fingers in Kate Winslet's moist, warm peach pie, I think it may well be time to lift the lid on its source material. Jason Reitman might claim that he based his screenplay on Joyce Maynard's book of the same name, but from where did Joyce get the idea? The answer to this question, as the answer to most questions should be, is Roger Moore.

Nice raised eyebrow, Kate. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT IDEA?

Specifically, Sir Rodge's 1992 non-hit Bed & Breakfast, which was only recently covered so thoroughly and painfully on the pages of this very blog. Now I suspect I may be the only person in the world to have seen both Labor Day [sic] and Bed & Breakfast, so naturally it falls to me to uncover this act of plagiarism. So without further ado, let's examine the evidence:

Labor Day [sic] and Bed & Breakfast spoilers ahoy!

LABOR DAY [sic]	BED & BREAKFAST
A sexy crook on the run (Josh Brolin) goes into hiding in a sexy single woman's home	A crook on the run (Roger Moore) goes into hiding in a single woman's home
The sexy single woman (Kate Winslet) has a young, naive son who fancies a local girl	The single woman (Talia Shire) has a young, naive daughter who fancies a local boy
The sexy crook turns out to be quite the handyman, doing odd jobs around the house	The crook turns out to be quite the handyman, doing odd jobs around the house
The sexy crook is a whizz in the kitchen, whipping up a peach pie while talking in sex metaphors	The crook is a whizz in the kitchen, whipping up a curry while talking in a racist Indian accent
The sexy crook becomes a father-figure to the sexy single woman's son	The crook becomes a father-figure to the single woman's daughter
The sexy crook gives the sexy single woman the hot, steamy sex she's been missing for years	The crook gives the single woman the rusty pensioner sex she never knew she wanted
The citizens of the small town begin to wonder just who this mysterious, sexy man could be	The citizens of the small town begin to wonder just who this mysterious, old man could be
The sexy crook's past eventually catches up with him and he's forced to leave his surrogate family	The crook's past eventually catches up with him and he's forced to leave his surrogate family
Eventually the sexy crook is reunited with the sexy single woman and they live happily ever after	Eventually the crook is reunited with the single woman and they live happily ever after
The naive young son grows up to be Tobey Maguire	The naive young daughter grows up to be Tobey Maguire

I haven't been able to clarify that last point but I'm pretty sure it's the case.

The floor is hereby left open to Jason Reitman and Joyce Maynard to defend themselves. We're waiting, guys!

*waits*

The Labor Day [sic] peach pie chart

Lymelife

Lymelife is an indie drama comedy (would I get away with 'indramedy'?) (No.) about some people who do some stuff and say some things in America some time around 1980. I'm not about to go into any more detail because a) it's not very interesting and b) that's what the IMDb is for. Use it or lose it.

It was made about two years ago and, like The Brothers Bloom, it's been hanging around since then like a group of kids outside Spar, waiting for someone to come along and release it into the wild.

Lymelife is notable for starring two sixths of the Culkin acting dynasty, one of whom looks like Tobey Maguire, the other of whom doesn't. I can only assume Macaulay is still nursing his bee stings from My Girl, otherwise they would have found a pointless role in this film for him too like they did for Tobey Maguire Culkin.

It's not an appalling film by any standards but if you can't predict what's going to happen several scenes in advance then you need to lock yourself in a room with the entire IMDb Top 250 movies of all time and don't come out until you've watched them all. Even Sleuth.

Lymelife offers nothing new or surprising to make it stand out from the morass of identidramas about dysfunctional families and, with the exception of Timothy Hutton, it wastes a good cast who look like it's too much effort to do any hard acting. In fact to waste Alec Baldwin like this should be punishable by being made to watch a rest-of-the-Baldwins marathon.

It also suffers from a truly awful title, which refers to the tick-borne Lyme disease suffered by one of the characters, and which I assume is some kind of clever metaphor for things that get under your skin and eat away at you from the inside, but in fact just makes you think of disease-ridden ticks.

Watchable, then, but ultimately forgettable. That's even if you get chance to watch it: Lymelife opens in about nine cinemas around the country this weekend then disappears from the face of the Earth, never to be heard of again.

Oh and one more thing: Don't try to sell me your movie by sticking this on one of the posters:

Because a) there's nothing remotely Scorsesish about Lymelife, 2) at least make the effort to spell his name right, and iv) the whole world knows that 'Executive Producer' is a pointless title used when someone agrees to stick their name on the poster in the hope of suckering in a few idiots. Shame on you Marty. I may have to rethink my offer of an interview.

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Up In The Air

If you're looking for reviews of Up In The Air and have several months in which to read them, you're in luck because every bugger out there has used up petabytes of text writing about this whimsical bit of flim flam. Empire cracked off no less than 1,255 words about it, festooning it with red stars like it was some kind of Communist headquarters, while even the usually blissfully concise Ultra Culture managed to stretch its review out to nearly 500 words.

Up In The Air isn't bad as such, quite enjoyable in fact, but in no way is it exceptional, extraordinary or otherwise notable. The acting is good but that's to be expected rather than applauded. George Clooney's character is interesting but ultimately watered down by the film's cheesy message. It's a solid 6 out of 10 film.

Here are the two most interesting things I could find to say about Up In The Air:

• It features the least sexy phone-text-sex scene ever. I get more erotic text messages from Orange telling me how many free minutes I've got this month than George Clooney does from Vera Farmiga. She should have just texted him anagrams of her name, there must be something saucy there.

• The aforementioned Ms Farmiga has been subjected to the most obvious replacement-by-naked-body-double since Tobey Maguire:

So there you have it. Go and see it by all means, but Jesus, no need to go on about it.

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The Spider-Man Reboot: The Incredible Suit Exclusive

Like Quantum, The Incredible Suit has people everywhere. News reaches me today from my Hollywood spies of this conversation, which took place at the headquarters of Sony Pictures yesterday between Sam Raimi, director of two great Spider-Man movies (and Spider-Man 3) and the head of Sony, a retarded monkey:

Sam Raimi: "Well, I’ve confirmed Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst for Spider-Man 4, and I’ve secured John Malkovich to play The Vulture, so it looks like I might be able to atone for the last one and make another great movie!"

Retarded Monkey: "OO! OO! OO!"

Sam Raimi: "Quite. The only thing is, I won’t have it ready for next summer like you wanted. It’ll take another year to do it properly because these things take time."

Retarded Monkey: "AA! AA!"

Sam Raimi: "Indeed. Well we rushed Spider-Man 3, and you made me cram too many villains in, and look what happened there."

Retarded Monkey squeezes out a huge poo on the desk.

Sam Raimi: "I’m sorry you feel that way, but what with my excellent track record as an innovative director capable of handling massive action sequences and nuanced emotional drama who’s made 2.5 billion dollars for this studio, I think you’ll agree I know what I’m doing."

Retarded Monkey flings some of the poo at the wall.

Retarded Monkey: "EEK! EEK! OO! OO! AA!"

Sam Raimi: "What? You want to get rid of me and all the actors and start the franchise again with a completely different bunch of people and call it a reboot and put it out only five years after the last film and the script’s already written and it’s 'gritty' even though the comic was all about fun and bright colours and people don’t want a 'gritty' Spider-Man when they’ve got Batman, Bond and Potter all mooching about in huge piles of grit and could I close the door on the way out? Are you some kind of retarded monkey?"

Retarded Monkey eats the rest of the poo.

Sam Raimi: "Right you are. Good luck with that. I’m sure the audience can’t wait to see Zac Efron as Peter Parker and sit through another origin story."

Retarded Monkey: "OO! OO! Do you have McG’s phone number?"

Sam Raimi leaves to make billions of dollars for another studio.



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