One of those "I really want to like this movie" movies, which takes a fascinating figure from history and turns it into the movie equivalent of eating your vitamins - "learn about this unappreciated Black person because it's good for you, not because the movie is engaging or interesting".
Because this movie is not those things! A plot so predictable you know what's gonna happen twenty minutes ahead for basically the entire movie, and because the dialogue is so wooden…
as of this writing, the most favorited review on this website about this movie is a one-star rant about how the movie is about Henk Rogers, the business guy who managed to get the international rights to Tetris, rather than about Alexey Pajitnov, who actually created Tetris, and here is the thing:
the creation of sublime works of art is ALWAYS A BORING STORY, it is never like in Shakespeare In Love where amusing people say clever things which the…
I know some people will be leery of this because there's a lot of white-saviourish stuff hanging around the film (which is inevitable because it's based on a true story, and that true story is about a white teacher from southern Canada introducing afterschool lacrosse to an Inuit community and the success of that program). But what's remarkable about the movie is how hard it constantly pushes back against the white saviour narrative. The script allows Ben Schnetzer's prepbro teacher…
A triumph from pillar to post, Into the Spider-Verse is so improbable a success - an animated Spider-Man movie from a studio that has consistently fucked up both animated movies and Spider-Man movies based on a comic-nerdily dense idea that should be impenetrable to ninety-nine percent of the viewing audience - that it is hard to call it anything other than "remarkable," but that feels unfair simply because it is so good that just going with "remarkable" feels like giving…
