ISLE OF DOGS is an adult's idea of what a film for children might be like, but just comes off as less adventurous or inventive than actual animation for children like World of Gumball or Stephen Universe, resulting in something that really just comes off as Wes Anderson self-consciously working Wes Anderson The Brand. It's not without charm, but Anderson has been here before, and done it better.
INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE is a reminder that Spider-Man never used to be this big. I mean, sure I knew who he was because I'm a big nerd, and he was certainly there in the background of popular culture in movies or US tv shows or whatever when kids would be wearing Spidey pajamas or reading a Spidey comic, but that was a constant reminder that he was never going to be Superman big, or Batman big no matter how many crappy but eventful cartoons or crappy and slow live-action tv shows and tv movies got churned out - in fact, these were more sort of barometers of his level. Spidey was never destined to be a big thing in popular culture because Superman was a simple and iconic concept, the very definition of a superhero, while Spidey was... well, he had the primary-coloured costume and the colourful villains, but Spidey was kind of complex, especially compared to DC heroes. Spidey's whole origin is basically an explanation of how he isn't a selfless person by inclination, and had to be taught social responsibility, and when he discarded that lesson he paid for it dreadfully and would be driven by guilt for the rest of his days - by contrast, Superman's origin is that he just does the right thing.
But then the Raimi movies happened, and DC fumbled the ball with Superman and Batman for a few years and now Spidey is so huge he is probably what most kids think of when they think of superheroes as a concept, and just to really rub it in how DC fumbled the ball, Into The Spider-Verse even takes those many years Spidey was just so much pop-cultural landfill and makes them a part of the mythos. Where Batman had to wait six decades to get to a point where the character could sustain multiple reinventions within the same generation and the Nolan Bat-movies could coexist alongside the Brave and the Bold cartoon show comfortably, Spidey did it in half that time, and without the head start of a big pop-cultural splash in decades past that both Batman and Superman enjoyed.
Spidey is a meta-franchise, and that is what Into the Spider-Verse is about: "I'm Spider-Man, and I'm not the only one." "Anyone can wear the mask." and so on, and so on... I'm sure purists will point out the flaw in this take is that Peter Parker's moral complexity is what makes Spider-Man a compelling character, though this would miss that the point isn't that Parker is a replaceable element in the Spider-Man franchise but that social responsibility is not a lesson only Peter Parker can learn. Miles Morales' mother is a nurse, his father is a police officer - this is a character that doesn't need to learn the same lesson Peter Parker did (although after a fashion, he does), and instead he simply needs to find the direction to implement the lessons he's already learning from his family.
Anyway, I liked this. It was very entertaining.
NANCY DREW AND THE HIDDEN STAIRCASE is not much of a Nancy Drew movie, the lead character not having anything to do with Nancy Drew, but I do like the lead character of the movie all the same as she's got sass, so I'm not sure what my point is. Maybe something to do with reinventions like what Spider-Verse does? Mmmm, I am certainly enough of a hipster wanker to try that one, but Nancy Drew has never done particularly well in her periodic reinventions for a variety of reasons, and this one seems to be an inversion of the fish-out-of-water comedy movie starring Emma Roberts from the early 2000s in which Nancy Drew was a teen sleuth in a perpetually 1950s setting who suddenly found herself in the big modern city and yeah if you didn't see it you missed absolutely nothing of note, as quite why a character who was invented in the 1930s would live in a town that looks like the 1950s is never explained, nor does it even have any bearing on the character or her interactions with a modern American city. The Hidden Staircase inverts this premise, however, having Nancy be a big city teen sleuth who comes to a small town, and it also has little bearing on the way she interacts with her new environment. There's this bizarre bit where Nancy says "maybe I'll do some Instagram and talk about boys" and then she laughs because it's a psych-out about what a clumsy reinvention/update would do and yet she does these exact things in the course of the movie anyway - there's a 17 minute sequence right at the start about cyber-bullying that has zero bearing on the rest of the movie, and then she meets a boy.
Nancy Drew reinvented in the novels as she went along - and I don't just mean the constant rewrites of earlier novels to remove outdated (racist) content or risque (bondage) scenes, I mean she's been in publication for 80 years, the books just kept catching up with the periods in which new writers were dropping them, so updating or reinventing the character doesn't require anything drastic, it just needs the usual tweaks for adaptation, and anything beyond that just seems desperate or wrong-headed - like the tv pilot where Nancy was a middle-aged Muslim homocide detective in New York City and you're just like "whoa who asked for this?" (SPOILER literally nobody asked for this, the pilot has never seen the light of day and even the actor who played Nancy has expressed relief that it never went to series)
Anyway, I am grumping on this an awful lot when it isn't really that bad, just lacking in a solid central theme to tie all the disparate stuff together into a coherent whole, as it's just a jumble of cliches shot and performed capably but unexceptionally, as one might expect of a children's television movie, I guess, but I can't help but think if someone came along with a clear idea of what made Nancy Drew appeal to audiences and then transferred that to the screen, it would probably be good. And yes, I realise I am describing Veronica Mars there.
THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING is also a movie about reinventions and cheese and crackers there is a lot of it going about it's almost like there is not a lot of demand for original things these days. That's maybe unfair, as Joe Cornish's kiddie adventure romp about the reborn King Arthur does try and do things differently here and there, but there is a really confusing through line about the role of women in the Christianity-appropriated post-pagan mythology of Britain that I'm not sure what to make of. A common trope I noticed in superhero comics when I started going up my own arse a bit was male characters taking on the role of their absent fathers while never acknowledging strength or resolve as being things that they learned from their mothers, almost as if women could not be acknowledged within male power fantasies as a source of strength or wisdom, only compassion or love, and I think The Kid Who Would Be King falls into this trap, too. Like I say - right up my own arse.
I liked it and it was entertaining, if slightly overlong.
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