Movie Review: The Giddy Splendor of ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ 

This image released by Sony Pictures Animation shows Miles Morales as Spider-Man, voiced by Shameik Moore, in a scene from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation's "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." (Sony Pictures Animation via AP)
This image released by Sony Pictures Animation shows Miles Morales as Spider-Man, voiced by Shameik Moore, in a scene from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation's "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." (Sony Pictures Animation via AP)
TT
20

Movie Review: The Giddy Splendor of ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ 

This image released by Sony Pictures Animation shows Miles Morales as Spider-Man, voiced by Shameik Moore, in a scene from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation's "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." (Sony Pictures Animation via AP)
This image released by Sony Pictures Animation shows Miles Morales as Spider-Man, voiced by Shameik Moore, in a scene from Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation's "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." (Sony Pictures Animation via AP)

Let’s get this upfront: “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” was the best comic-book film of the last decade.

With an animation blizzard blown straight in from the pages of comics, “Into the Spider-Verse” took a supercollider to all the conventions of the superhero movie. Solemnity was out. Gone, too, was the idea of a chosen one. Spider-Man could be anyone, including a graffiti-tagging kid from Brooklyn, including a pig named Spider-Ham. The possibilities of the comic book movie were suddenly limitless. With Post Malone and Swae Lee’s “Sunflower” thumping, the vibes were, as they say, immaculate.

So a lot to live up to. Yet five years later, the Spider-verse is still expanding in thrilling ways. “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is the rare sequel that dazzles as much as the original did. It’s something to behold. Colors drip, invert and splatter in a shimmering pop-art swirl.

If “Into the Spider-Verse” reveled in the head-spinning collision of universes, “Across the Spider-Verse” turns the multiverse blender up a notch, or 10. Worlds bump into each other like shoppers in a crowded bodega. Spider-Men and Spider-Women tumble forth like unloaded clown cars. In this frenetic, freewheeling thing that dares you keep up with its web-slinging pace, the sheer muchness of what’s in the frame can be almost overwhelming.

But despite all that’s going on, “Across the Spider-Verse” is remarkably grounded as a coming-of-age tale. The masterful flair of writers-producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who penned the script with David Callaham, lies in how they detonate convention and then assemble the leftover, splintered shards to build something deceptively sweet and simple.

The directing team has been entirely swapped out. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson take the reins in this second chapter, which finds Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore) now a 15-year-old with a better handle on his crime-fighting powers. He’s less adept, though, at communicating with his parents, Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) and Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez), who still don’t know their son’s secret identity and are growing increasingly concerned about his strange behavior.

Similar issues bedevil Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), who by revealing to her police captain father (Shea Whigham) that she’s Spider-Woman has caused a huge rift in their relationship. (He blames her for Peter Parker’s death.)

When Miles and Gwen, stuck in worlds apart, meet again and swing in tandem through New York, they’re less a romantically linked Spidey pair than they are a couple of teenagers whose parents just don’t understand. When they sit together, on the underside of a ledge on the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower, gazing at an upside down Manhattan, hazy and blue in the distance, the lingering image perfectly encapsulates an electrifyingly downside-up movie franchise.

In its chaotic and jumbled way, “Across the Spider-Verse” keeps playing with these notions. Miles and Gwen, rightly, feel exceptional — that their problems are unique to being enormously gifted kids. But the movie again and again reinforced that, yes, they’re supremely talented, but, no, they’re far from alone. “I’m Spider-Woman,” Gwen says when a pregnant superhero (Issa Rae) peels in on a motorbike. “Me, too,” she replies.

This being a “Spider-Verse” movie, though, there more than just a few Spider-Men lurking about. There are actually gobs of them, each from some parallel world. (Among those here are a Mumbai-like New York, a Lego land and a nightmarish alternate reality.) The portals start opening thanks to The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a supervillain-in-training who looks like a splotchy blank page with ink drops on him.

But Spot’s powers grow, bringing the attention of the Spider-Society, a gaggle of Spider-People who guard over order in the multiverse. Some of them are pretty cool — most notably Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk, a British rocker who looks like he dropped out of The Clash. Others, like the leader Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), are more serious and haunted.

When worlds start colliding, prescribed storylines get upset. Seemingly anything goes in these multiverse realms, but, Miguel informs us, there is Canon that needs to be obeyed. Certain foundational narrative beats must occur, in some form, for every Spider-Man, including the sacrifice of a loved one.

When Miles tests these tenets, he brings about a cataclysmic battle across the Spider-Verse, and a movie series hellbent on deconstruction faces-off against formula. For Lord and Miller, the post-modern makers of “The Lego Movie” and “The Mitchells vs. The Machines,” it’s a battle they’ve been girding for their whole lives.

The danger in all these crisscrossing dimensions is that no reality seems to mean all that much. By exponentially multiplying worlds and Spider-Men, “Across the Spider-Verse” risks making itself dizzy. Yet it surprisingly, even movingly, stays true to the teenage emotions at its core and the parent-kid relationships driving all these multiverse convulsions.

It’s the first Marvel movie that I felt in the theater a palpable disappointment that it was over. (“Across the Spider-Verse” is a sequel in two parts, and ends here in full-on cliffhanger fashion.) That “Across the Spider-Verse” earned that response is surely partly due to its giddy design just as it is to its conviction that we all contain multitudes. As Rachel Dratch’s principal says in the film: “Every person is a universe.”



Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito Revisit ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ for Its 50th Anniversary

Michael Douglas, left, and Danny DeVito appear at the 5th Annual Reel Stories, Real Lives Benefit on April 7, 2016, in Los Angeles. (AP)
Michael Douglas, left, and Danny DeVito appear at the 5th Annual Reel Stories, Real Lives Benefit on April 7, 2016, in Los Angeles. (AP)
TT
20

Michael Douglas and Danny DeVito Revisit ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ for Its 50th Anniversary

Michael Douglas, left, and Danny DeVito appear at the 5th Annual Reel Stories, Real Lives Benefit on April 7, 2016, in Los Angeles. (AP)
Michael Douglas, left, and Danny DeVito appear at the 5th Annual Reel Stories, Real Lives Benefit on April 7, 2016, in Los Angeles. (AP)

Jack Nicholson did not want to go to the Oscars. It was 1976 and he was nominated for best actor in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The Miloš Forman film, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a nationwide theatrical re-release on July 13 and July 16, had become a bit of a sensation — the second highest grossing picture of 1975, behind “Jaws,” and had received nine Oscar nominations.

But Nicholson wasn’t feeling optimistic. In five years, he’d already been nominated five times. He’d also lost five times. And he told his producer, Michael Douglas, that he couldn’t go through it again.

“I remember how hard I had to persuade Jack to come to the ceremony. He was so reluctant, but we got him there,” Douglas said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “And then of course we lost the first four awards. Jack was sitting right in front of me and sort of leaned back and said ’Oh, Mikey D, Mikey D, I told you, man.’ I just said, ‘Hang in there.’”

Douglas, of course, was right. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” would go on to sweep the “big five” — screenplay, director, actor, actress and picture — the first film to do so in 41 years, (“It Happened One Night,” in 1934) which only “The Silence of the Lambs” has done since. That night was one of many vindicating moments for a film that no one wanted to make or distribute that has quite literally stood the test of time.

“This is my first 50th anniversary,” Douglas said. “It’s the first movie I ever produced. To have a movie that’s so lasting, that people get a lot out of, it’s a wonderful feeling. It’s bringing back a lot of great memories.”

The film adaption of Ken Kesey’s countercultural novel was a defining moment for Douglas, a son of Hollywood who was stuck in television and got a lifeline to film when his father, Kirk Douglas, gave him the rights to the book, and many of the then-unknown cast like Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd.

DeVito was actually the first person officially cast. Douglas, who’d known him for nearly 10 years, brought Forman to see him play Martini on stage.

“Miloš said, ‘Yes! Danny! Perfect! Cast!’” Douglas said in his best Czech accent. “It was a big moment for Danny. But I always knew how talented he was.”

A Joyful Shoot

Though the film's themes are challenging, unlike many of its New Hollywood contemporaries it wasn’t a tortured shoot by any stretch. They had their annoyances (like Forman refusing to show the cast dailies) and more serious trials (they found out halfway through production that William Redfield was dying of leukemia), but for the most part it was fun.

“We were very serious about the work, because Miloš was very serious. And we had the material, Kesey’s work, and the reverence for that. We were not frivolous about it. But we did have a ball doing it,” DeVito said, laughing.

Part of that is because they filmed on location at a real state hospital in Salem, Oregon. Everyone stayed in the same motel and would board the same bus in the morning to get to set. It would have been hard not to bond and even harder if they hadn’t.

“There was full commitment,” Douglas said. “That comes when you don’t go home at night to your own lives. We stopped for lunch on the first day and I saw Jack kind of push his tray away and go outside to get some air. I said, ‘Jack, you OK?’ He said, ’Who are these guys? Nobody breaks character! It’s lunch time and they’re all acting the same way!'”

Not disproving Nicholson’s point, DeVito remembers he and the cast even asked if they could just sleep in the hospital.

“They wouldn’t let us,” DeVito said. “The floor above us had some seriously disturbed people who had committed murder.”

A lasting legacy

The film will be in theaters again on July 13 and July 16 from Fathom Entertainment. It’s a new 4K restoration from the Academy Film Archive and Teatro Della Pace Films with an introduction by Leonard Maltin.

“It’s a gorgeous print and reminds me how good the sound was,” Douglas said.

DeVito thinks it, “holds up in a really big way, because Miloš really was paying attention to all great things in the screenplay and the story originally.”

Besides the shock of “holy Toledo, am I that old?” DeVito said that it was a treasure to be part of — and he continues to see his old friends, including Douglas, Lloyd and, of course, Nicholson, who played the protagonist, R.P. McMurphy.

One person Douglas thinks hasn’t gotten the proper attention for his contributions to “Cuckoo’s Nest” is producer Saul Zaentz, who died in 2014. His music company, Fantasy Records who had Creedence Clearwater Revival, funded the endeavor which started at a $1.6 million budget and ballooned to $4 million by the end. He was a gambler, Douglas said, and it paid off.

And whatever sour grapes might have existed between Douglas and his father, who played R.P. McMurphy on Broadway and dreamt of doing so on film, were perhaps over-exaggerated. It was ultimately important for their relationship.

“McMurphy is as good a part as any actor is going to get, and I’m now far enough in my career to understand maybe you have four, maybe five good parts, really great parts. I’m sure for dad that was one of them,” Douglas said.

“To not be able to see it through was probably disappointing on one side. On the other, the fact that his son did it and the picture turned out so good? Thank God the picture turned out. It would have been a disaster if it hadn’t.”

Douglas added: “It was a fairy tale from beginning to end. I doubt anything else really came close to it. Even my Oscar for best actor years later didn’t really surpass that moment very early in my career.”