Ranking: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

I went with my son and daughter earlier this week to see the new animated Marvel movie: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. After seeing it, I realized it was the first comic book movie I'd ever seen. You see, all the movies I've seen up until now have been taking the characters and idea from the comics and making movies out of them, but were not actually comic book movies. Spider-Verse does something more difficult than those other movies--it translates the actual comic book experience onto the big screen. It's one of the best comic movies I've ever seen.

Okay, so about five years ago, Marvel realized they had a number of different Spider-Men floating around in different media. There was the original comic book Peter Parker, of course, but they also had Miles Morales, the teen-aged African-American Spider-Man from their Ultimate universe line of comics. They had the Spider-Ham (bitten by a radioactive pig and given the proportional powers of swine) from the kids-oriented Star Line of comics in the 1980s. And they had various cartoon versions of the characters from over the decades. So Marvel decided to an event where all these Spider-Men came together in one story, along with a bunch of new ones they invented for the occasion-- the female Spider-Gwen, the 1930s Spider-Man Noir, the anime Sp//dr robot, Spider Punk, and so on. This story was called Edge of Spider-Verse and was very popular with readers.

It's that idea of a Spider-Verse that the movie runs with, although the plot is original. When the established Spider-Man Peter Parker dies in inter-dimensional vortex in an early scene, novice Spider-Man Miles Morales has to take his place. Only, he keeps running into strange other Spider-Folks around his hometown of Brooklyn. I won't say too much about what happens, although the main villains are the Kingpin, Tombstone, Prowler (who hasn't been a villain in the comics for a long time, but never mind), and a secret villain I won't reveal as it's a crucial plot point. The main thing is just seeing the interaction of all these Spider-Men.

The animation of the movie is highly urban, as befits Morale's home in Brooklyn, and extremely well-done, with the agility of the various Spider-Folks especially emphasized. The visuals are high quality to the point of awe-inspiring, the Spider-interactions are hilarious, and the plot if fast-paced and intelligent. I rate this movie as Excellent and would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of comics.

I have previously ranked Avengers: Infinity War, the Avengers movies, the Batman movies, Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, Logan, Man of Steel, the Man-Thing, the non-Marvel and non-DC comic movies, the other DC movies, the Spider-Man movies, the summer 2015 comic movies, the Superman movies, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men movies.


As ever, my ranking system is
Green=excellent  Blue=pretty good  Black=Okay  Red=avoid


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Here's the master list of all comics movies I've rated so far, in order from best to worst:

Crumb
American Splendor
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Iron Man
Heavy Metal (1981)
Spider-Man 2 (2004)
Avengers
Superman (1978)
Captain America
Wonder Woman (2017)
Batman Begins (2005)
Captain America: Civil War
Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier
Spider-Man (2002)
X-Men 2: X-Men United
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Superman II
Batman (1989)
Ant-Man
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Dr. Strange
The Dark Knight (2008)
Logan (2017)
Iron Man 3
The Wolverine (2013)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
Sin City (2005)
X-Men: First Class
X-Men (2000)
Black Panther
Man of Steel (2013)
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers 2: Age of Ultron
Swamp Thing (1982)
Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Iron Man 2
Watchmen (2009)
Batman Forever (1995)
Superman Returns (2006)
Thor 2: The Dark World
Incredible Hulk (2008)
Mystery Men (1999)
Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Man-Thing (2005)
Superman III
Supergirl (1984)
Thor
X-Men 3: Last Stand
Hulk (2003)
Fritz the Cat (1972)
Batman and Robin (1997)
Batman Returns (1992)
Superman IV

Amazing Spider-Man (2012) (Haven't seen)
Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) (Haven't seen)
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) (Haven't seen)
Batman (1966) (Haven't seen)
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Haven't seen)
Catwoman (Haven't seen)
Constantine (Haven't seen)
Deadpool (Haven't seen)
Green Lantern (Haven't seen)
Hellboy (Haven't seen)
Judge Dredd (Haven't seen)
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (2014) (Haven't seen)
V for Vendetta (Haven't seen)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Haven't seen)

What I'm Reading: Re-Start

Re-Start, by Gordon Korman, is the second book by this author I've reviewed on this site. The first, Ungifted, I gave a fairly positive review to here. I like the author fine, but I'm not trying to follow him or anything--this is one of the books my son is reading for his Battle of the Books at school, and he, my daughter, and my wife have all read it and said I would enjoy it. And they're right!

In both books, a troublemaking middle schooler finds himself with an unexpected second chance to do things differently, and tries to take advantage of it. Seems to be a Korman theme! In this case the troublemaker is Chase Ambrose, who has just awoken from a coma a few days before his eighth-grade year starts. Chase fell off the roof of his house and conked his head, and now has complete amnesia concerning everything that occurred before the fall. He doesn't even remember his own mother.

As the days go on, Chase learns that he was pretty much a jerk before. He and his best buddies, Bear and Aaron, were the stars on the middle school football team, which they led to its first state championship in 25 years. They had the run of the school, and took advantage of that to bully nerds and dweebs as much as they liked, and they liked to do it a lot. They even bullied Joel Weber so mercilessly that Joel had to enroll at a private school in another state.

Chase is horrified at the person he used to be, and at the barbaric behavior of Bear and Aaron. Because the doctor said he couldn't play football the rest of the year, he joins the video club and really enjoys it. The geeky members are terrified of him at first, but soon realize he's genuinely changed. What's more, he's really good at camerawork, and within a few weeks has become a valued member of the club. He also joins Shoshanna Weber, Joel's twin sister, on her visits to a local senior citizens' center so they can interview a Korean War vet for a video project she's putting together. (But what would Joel think if he knew the kid who'd bullied him out of school was now hanging out with his sister?)

The football team, however, is really struggling without their star player. Bear and Aaron hatch an evil plan to spoil Chase's newfound friendship with the nerds and remind him of who he really is. Soon Chase will have to make a decision about who his real friends are--only he doesn't remember enough about his previous life to be fully informed about the possible ramifications if he chooses the nerds over the jocks.

This was a great book--tons of humor and a meaningful story. The characters are really well-drawn. Even Bear and Aaron, the villains, are well-rounded, and bad as they are, you can see the attractive qualities in them that led Chase to be their buddy. I did find the ending a little pat--in particular, Chase's dad, who had seemed to tie his love to his son to Chase's performance on the football team, has a real change of heart at the end that comes out of nowhere..

Another strange thing I noticed in the book is that I think it was originally aimed at an older, high school-aged audience. For instance, Chase's dad is proud of his son, the star football player, because he himself was on the last middle school team to go the state championship decades before, and he looks back on that period as the best time of his life. Plus, all the townspeople know who Chase and his friends are because of the football team, which is why they're able to get away with so much. But this doesn't seem right--it's high school football that is the most important thing in so many small towns, and it seems silly for Chase's dad to look back on middle school as the best time of his life. Moreover, Shoshanna wants her video project to win the National Video Journalism Award. This sounds a lot more like something a college application-building high schooler would be interested in than a middle schooler.

That doesn't make anything wrong with the book. I suspect Gordon Korman originally wrote it as a YA, not a middle grade book, and decided to change it. Or maybe the publisher asked him to, since he's known as a middle grade author. Regardless, it's more of an oddity than anything else. The book is still well-written, hilarious, and sometimes touching, and despite it's slightly overly sentimental ending, I would recommend it to any middle schooler, and any adults that might be interested, too.

What I'm Reading: In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made, by the late NYU Professor Norman F. Cantor, is billed on the cover as the best and most thorough book of the Black Death ever written. I don't know. It may be the most thorough popular history on the subject ever written, but at not quite 250 pages, there must be thicker scholarly histories. Moreover, the book has a decidedly England-centric perspective on the subject, and I bet there are French or German or Italian histories that cover the Black Death in those countries more thoroughly. Still, I'm sure this is quite enough for your average reader.

The Black Death arrived in Italian ports in December 1347 and had reached the entire continent by early 1350. At least partly an epidemic of bubonic plague--but as Dr. Cantor argues, almost certainly fortified in some areas by simultaneous anthrax outbreaks--the Black Death killed one-third of Europe's population in three years, and in some towns and cities more than half. Europe's population did not recover for 150 years. It was one of the greatest calamities to occur in human history. Along with the Hundred Years War between England and France, it ended the prosperous High Middle Ages in Europe, while in some ways clearing the way for the Renaissance to come.

The chapters in the book are of highly variable quality. The chapters covering the actual history bit are quite good--and the chapter on how the Black Death affected Europe's Jewish population is a special highlight. (I mean, the pogroms against the Jews by a gentile population looking for a scapegoat for the disaster is a lowlight of history, but the event is related with an especially informative and impassioned authorial voice.)

The chapters covering the epidemiology of the disease are far weaker, however, not delivered as confidently and little more than re-wording of others' research, and with very little interpretive force. The chapter on the origins of the Black Plague, which gives a number of pages over to astrophysicist Fred Hoyle's theory that the disease arrived on a meteorite, was a particular eyebrow-raiser.

Still, the whole book is easy and fun to read, full of interesting facts and tidbits and theories, and certainly gives your typical reader all the information you'd want on the subject. Not without its weaknesses, but I would definitely recommend this book to anyone with a curiosity about the Black Death.

Scary Movies: Alien Resurrection

Okay, last horror movie from my family's annual October horror moviethon. At my son's strong request, we watched the fourth movie in the Alien franchise, Alien Resurrection. Previously on this site, the first Alien movie was the only horror movie I've reviewed to receive a perfect score, Aliens got a rating of Pretty Good, and Alien 3 scored only a 3 on my 10 point scale. I did note that Alien 3 actually had an interesting premise that it didn't really follow through on--I've since learned that the movie that director David Fincher turned in was rejected by the studio as "not commercial enough" and radically re-edited. Apparently there is a director's cut that's 20 minutes longer and I bet it's a much better movie. Maybe I'll get to it someday!

But for now, on to Alien Resurrection. Unlike Alien 3, a movie with an original and creative premise poorly executed, this one basically returns to the same story well as Aliens, but is quite well-executed. Acting and script are top-notch, with Sigourney Weaver returning as Ridley, Ron Perlman and Winona Rider (!) also having roles, and a script by Joss Whedon (!!).

The movie is set 200 years after Alien 3, and Ridley has been cloned using her human DNA mixed with that of an alien queen, for some reason. She is held on a remote outpost in space where a team of military scientists is using her to breed embryos for new aliens to experiment on. A small spaceship manned by outlaw traders comes in with a delivery of human bodies for the head of the scientific mission. During an incident while the traders are on board, the aliens escape their confinement and start hunting the humans down. Ridley and a select group of the outlaws must battle their way back to the outlaw ship to escape.

So, not a huge leap from Aliens. But what it lacks in originality, it makes up for in tight pacing, Whedon's trademark witty repartee--this is the first Alien movie with a sense of humor--and at least a couple fun innovations on the alien chase scene. (A setpiece where the characters have to swim through a flooded galley while chased by water-breathing aliens is something to behold.) Final ranking? It has some high points but as a whole is only Okay.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Story/Plot/Characters--Top-notch acting and script outweigh the by-now tired premise. (2.5 points)
Special Effects--Technically accomplished, and a couple scenes are truly marvels, but overall somewhat perfunctorily presented. (1.5 points)
Scariness--Very few frights to be gotten out of the franchise at this point. You know what's coming. (0 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness--What was atmospheric in previous movies is by now predictable and stale. (.5 points)
Total=4.5 points (Okay)

______________________________________________________________________________
Here's the master list of horror movies I've rated so far. (Click the title for a link to a review of the movie.)

Excellent
Alien (1979)=10 points
Dawn of the Dead (1978)=9.5 points
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)=8.5 points
A Quiet Place (2018)=8.5 points
Frankenstein (1931)=8 points
King Kong (1933)=8 points
Village of the Damned (1960)=8 points
Night of the Living Dead (1968)=7.5 points
Carrie (1976)=7.5 points
The Haunting (1963)=7.5 points
Jaws (1975)=7 points
Pretty Good
Witch: A New England Folktale (2015)=6.5 points
Aliens (1986)=6.5 points
The Birds (1963)=6.5 points
Carnival of Souls (1962)=6.5 points
Night Creatures (1962)=6.5 points
Phantom of the Opera (1962)=6.5 points
The Thing (1982)=6 points
Tales of Terror (1962)=6 points
Day of the Dead (1985)=6 points
Okay
The Raven (1963)=5.5 points
The House on Haunted Hill (1959)=5 points
Gremlins (1984)=5 points
Alien Resurrection (1997)=4.5 points
Lady Frankenstein (1971)=4.5 points
Man-Thing (2005)=4 points
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)=3.5 points
Avoid
Alien 3 (1992)=3 points
The House of Wax (1953)=3 points
The Wolf Man (1941)=3 points
The Last Man on Earth (1964)=2 points

Scary Movies: Day of the Dead

Still wrapping up the horror movie reviews from October... Now we come to the third in director/writer/producer George Romero's zombie trilogy, Day of the Dead. The first two (Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, which I reviewed here) are among my favorite scary movies of all time, but I'd never seen this one before. Did it hold up compared to the first two?

Not quite, although it's by no means a terrible movie. Where Night takes place the first evening of the zombie infestation, and Dawn a few weeks into it, as society is crumbling, Day takes place several months later, when society is long gone and most of humanity is dead. This one is set in Florida--an odd choice, since the first two take place around Romero's hometown of Pittsburgh. And except for a few scenes at the beginning in a nearby town, we don't even see much of Florida, because nearly the entire running length of the film is set in a miles-long underground cavern where various government records are stored.

The heroine is Dr. Sarah Bowman, one of a team of about half a dozen scientists working on a cure for the zombie infestation. There's also another a similar number of soldiers in the cavern, there ostensibly to protect the scientists but actually at odds with them under their petty-tyrannical leader, Captain Rhodes.

The head scientist, Dr. Logan, thinks he's close to a breakthrough. He's figured out the zombies can learn, and has even trained one zombie, Bub, to respond to voice commands and listen to music through headphones (!). He keeps his experimental zombie subjects in a fenced-off portion of the cavern, and also runs a disgusting lab where he's generally elbow-deep in blood and innards, trying to figure out how those zombies work.

However, Captain Rhodes thinks it's all a waste of time, and the scientists and their dumb experiments a waste of resources. It's not long before the camps led by Captain Rhodes and Dr. Logan are in open conflict, with that zombie pen just waiting to be opened....

Unfortunately, the monotony of the cavern setting and the reliance on melodramatic yelling matches between the members of the two groups to advance the plot mean this one drags at parts. On the other hand, it has by far the best gore and special effects--make-up artist Tom Savini won a Saturn Award for his work on Day of the Dead, and the awesomely disgusting zombies are still among the best work ever done in horror. This one's not for everyone, but if you like zombies and have a strong stomach (the gore dial here is really turned to the maximum), it's not a bad way to pass an evening.

Day of the Dead (1985)

Story/Plot/Characters--I don't think you'd say it was Shakespearean or anything, but the Dead movies prior to this one at least had better acting than your typical horror flick. Not here. Decent premise but plot's a little thin. Characters not totally stereotypical but not real well-rounded either. Better than most low-budget horrors but feels perfunctory after the horror magnificence of the first two movies. (1.5 points)
Special Effects--Superb. Best zombie make-up and prosthetics ever, awesome gore. (2 points)
Scariness--Relies too much on gore and melodrama to be really scary, but definitely has its moments. (1 point)
Atmosphere/Freakiness--Dr. Logan's zombie lab and the zombie pen definitely give this a freaky vibe. A half point off for the endless samey-ness of the caverns, though. (1.5 points)
Total=6 points (Pretty Good)

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Here's the master list of horror movies I've rated so far. (Click the title for a link to a review of the movie.)

Excellent
Alien (1979)=10 points
Dawn of the Dead (1978)=9.5 points
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)=8.5 points
A Quiet Place (2018)=8.5 points
Frankenstein (1931)=8 points
King Kong (1933)=8 points
Village of the Damned (1960)=8 points
Night of the Living Dead (1968)=7.5 points
Carrie (1976)=7.5 points
The Haunting (1963)=7.5 points
Jaws (1975)=7 points
Pretty Good
Witch: A New England Folktale (2015)=6.5 points
Aliens (1986)=6.5 points
The Birds (1963)=6.5 points
Carnival of Souls (1962)=6.5 points
Night Creatures (1962)=6.5 points
Phantom of the Opera (1962)=6.5 points
The Thing (1982)=6 points
Tales of Terror (1962)=6 points
Day of the Dead (1985)=6 points
Okay
The Raven (1963)=5.5 points
The House on Haunted Hill (1959)=5 points
Gremlins (1984)=5 points
Lady Frankenstein (1971)=4.5 points
Man-Thing (2005)=4 points
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)=3.5 points
Avoid
Alien 3 (1992)=3 points
The House of Wax (1953)=3 points
The Wolf Man (1941)=3 points
The Last Man on Earth (1964)=2 points

What I'm Reading: Stories of Daily Life From the Roman World

Stories of Daily Life From the Roman World: Extracts From the Ancient Colloquia, translated and with commentary by Eleanor Dickey, is not precisely what I was expecting, although it was close enough.

What I was expecting was stories from different sources of everyday life in Rome presented in something of a comprehensive manner. The problem was I didn't understand the term colloquia in this context. It turns out the Colloquia are a collection of texts from antiquity that Romans, especially children, used to learn Greek. They're essentially dual-reading texts, presenting common everyday situations (attending school, going to the baths, eating dinner) with one side written in Latin and the other in Greek. The Roman could read the Latin side that he understood and compare to the Greek side to learn the vocabulary used in different situations. It's maybe a little different than a modern-day foreign language textbook, but the same idea.

The reason they're valuable to scholars today is because they describe situations that don't usually come up in ancient literature. How exactly did Romans behave in court, or go to bed, or conduct a transaction at the bank or the market? Because these things were so common and mundane, Plutarch or Cicero, say, never bothered to address them.

Two parts really stood out as interesting to me. The first is the chapter on going to the baths. Because public bathing is foreign to Americans today (but not to Scandinavians or Russians, with their saunas in winter), it was fun to find out about the different rooms for exercising or rinsing, or the way the way they would cover themselves in olive oil and then take the oil off with a scraping instrument called a strigil. Of course I'd heard about the Roman public baths before, but I didn't realize that everybody in Rome bathed nearly every day--even slaves. The rich might have had their fancy bathhouses and the poor cheaper ones, but there was a place for everyone to keep clean.

The other part is slaves. Many scenes in the book describe vocabulary or phrases for ordering slaves to cook your meal, or help you dress, or carry your items while you shop. I suppose those who were rich enough to study a foreign language were also rich enough to own slaves, so slave-owning was perhaps not as widespread as the scenes in the book would lead one to believe. Nevertheless, for a significant portion of the population, dealing with slaves was an everyday matter.  (Parts of Xenophon's Conversations of Socrates, which I read last year, also dealt with this topic.)

Dickey has supplemented her translations of the colloquia with her own explanations of the text to fill in the blanks, and has added some well-selected pictures to give us an idea. However, due to the fragmented nature of the colloquia, there are lots of aspects of Roman daily life I might have liked to read about but that didn't come up--religion in daily life, for instance, or the interaction between parents and children. Still, there was a lot of good information here and I would recommend this book to anyone interested in how ancient people really lived.

Scary Movies: The Haunting

Ach! Behind by three scary movies! Okay, last time I promised I would review a bad one and a good one, and I did the bad one. This time, we'll do a good one, The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise in 1963. This was remade just this year, and the reviews are terrible. I think I'll stick with the older version.

You see so many b-movies when you're a horror fan, it's refreshing every once in a while to see a movie that actually had a budget, A-list actors, and a real director (the film Wise directed just before this was West Side Story, and the one right afterwards was The Sound of Music--although he also directed The Day the Earth Stood Still and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so this may not have been as big a departure for him as it appears at first).

The plot, based on a short story by Shirley Jackson, is pretty simple. Dr. John Markway is a paranormal researcher, and Hill House in rural Massachusetts has the reputation of being the most haunted house in New England. He decides to spend a week investigating the house, and invites several guests who have past experiences with supernatural phenomena, although only two arrive--including Theodora, a psychic who can sometimes read minds, and Eleanor, who had a run-in with a poltergeist as a child-- as well as Luke Sanderson, the nephew of the house's owner, who stands to inherit the place and is completely skeptical.

I don't suppose it's a surprise to learn that bizarre things start happening almost immediately. Does Luke Sanderson become a true believer in ghosts? Does Dr. Markway get material for his research? Do any of the characters have secrets that come out in the course of the film? I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying the answer is yes to all three of those.

I will say, unlike many other movies of this era, the movie doesn't cheat by trying to explain away the various ghostly events at the end. It is also genuinely scary, or at least creepy. My daughter (age 9) watched it with me and though there's no gore, or really anything inappropriate for a kid, she said she might have trouble going to sleep that night. I can't blame her--the scares in this movie are really effective.

The Haunting (1963)

Story/Plot/Characters--Great script, great acting, great pacing. I might have wanted a little more development of the characters. Theodora seems really fascinating but we hardly learn anything about her, and Luke Sanderson is two-dimensional. But that's quibbling--Eleanor is well-rounded, and Dr. Markway turns out to have some surprises. (3 points)
Special Effects--Not really a special effects movie, but what's used is done well. (1 point)
Scariness--It's a little hard to pinpoint what's so effective here, because not a whole lot actually happens--strange noises, things moved around when people aren't looking, but it's all done so well that the suspense builds throughout the film. Very scary for a movie from 1963. (1.5 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness--This is almost the definition of atmospheric-- a haunted house in a rural New England setting. (2 points)
Total=7.5 points (Excellent)

______________________________________________________________________________
Here's the master list of horror movies I've rated so far. (Click the title for a link to a review of the movie.)

Excellent
Alien (1979)=10 points
Dawn of the Dead (1978)=9.5 points
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)=8.5 points
A Quiet Place (2018)=8.5 points
Frankenstein (1931)=8 points
King Kong (1933)=8 points
Village of the Damned (1960)=8 points
Night of the Living Dead (1968)=7.5 points
Carrie (1976)=7.5 points
The Haunting (1963)=7.5 points
Jaws (1975)=7 points
Pretty Good
Witch: A New England Folktale (2015)=6.5 points
Aliens (1986)=6.5 points
The Birds (1963)=6.5 points
Carnival of Souls (1962)=6.5 points
Night Creatures (1962)=6.5 points
Phantom of the Opera (1962)=6.5 points
The Thing (1982)=6 points
Tales of Terror (1962)=6 points
Okay
The Raven (1963)=5.5 points
The House on Haunted Hill (1959)=5 points
Gremlins (1984)=5 points
Lady Frankenstein (1971)=4.5 points
Man-Thing (2005)=4 points
Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954)=3.5 points
Avoid
Alien 3 (1992)=3 points
The House of Wax (1953)=3 points
The Wolf Man (1941)=3 points
The Last Man on Earth (1964)=2 points