Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Bob Persichetti. 2018.

Wowzers. I did not expect this movie to be this good. It’s an animated movie, but aren’t all super-hero movies, really?

It’s fascinating how they were able to dial up the “cartoon” level on the animation here and make it possible to do all kinds of comic-book effects without things turning cheesy. (Viz. the Batman TV series from the 60s.) But these cartoons are real expressive, so you get the best of both worlds, and I’ve never seen that before. It’s a triumph of animation.

And it’s pretty funny and moves along at an insane pace. Is this how all super-hero movies should have been done?

There’s a lot to like here. I love how they’ve used Bill Sienkiewicz’ design for Kingpin, for instance. It’s not something that could work in a live-action movie, but it makes perfect sense here.

It’s just about a perfect super-hero movie. Like all of them, it’s a bit too long, but less than most.

Venom. Ruben Fleischer. 2018.

This movie is kinda famous for being critically panned but well-liked by the audience, so I was curies as to what this was going to be like.

This is, of course, a spin-off of Spider-Man, so it’s a Marvel super-hero movie not done by Disney, which is a rare thing these days.

I’m at the 15 minute mark as I’m typing this, and I’m bored silly. The actors are basically a bunch of Hawkeyes, and the cinematography is… there…, the editing makes every take slightly too long, and the plot is super-tedious. The protagonist works as a journalist who is, of course, fired by his boss for being too good at his job, and it’s all OH WHY.

Perhaps it’ll get better once the symbiote shows up.

OK, half hour in, and still nothing entertaining has happened. It’s just like bad, on a scene-by-scene and a line-by-line basis.

Hardy is trying his best at making this funnier, by being over-the top and all nervous and stuff, but the rest of the cast gives him nothing to work with.

It does pick up once the symbiote symbiotes with Hardy. There’s some fun action scenes and they’ve got a Not Very Odd Couple schtick going between the symbiote and Our Hero. The storyline seems oddly abrupt once it gets going: Perhaps it had been better if they’d cut the first 45 minutes and then expanded the fight scene part of the movie with 15 minutes.

It’s disappointing that they’ve gone for the cheap CGI solution of doing the action scenes in the dark so you can’t see whether the CGI Venom is any good or not. Yes, we all understand why fight scenes take place in the dark: It’s because it’s cheaper.

Just a Question of Love. Christian Faure. 2000.

Oh, I thought this was a movie by that Hong Kong guy… Wong Kar-wai? Yes.

It’s not.

Oh! It’s an old-style French movie about young gay romance. Yay? It feels like it comes from a different century. Which it does, if you’re one of those weirdos that start counting at year one instead of year zero.

The DVD transfer is odd: The bit rate is 50% lower than on normal DVDs and whenever the camera pans, everything goes all choppy.

Incisive:

Anyway, aside from the fact that the main guy was fugly, it was pretty good

It’s a sweet movie, but it’s difficult not to be impatient with this type of narrative now.