Endnotes and digressions from the latest show:
* So that’s it over there to the left. That’s Sonny’s bookshelf favela. It is . . . something? I think if a product designer from Ikea saw this set up, it would give his precise Scandinavian brain an aneurysm.
* Vic’s piece in the Free Beacon on Amelia Earhart is fantastic. Go read it.
* On the subject of In Search Of, you can find the entire series on YouTube here. (Thank you internet!) But if you only have time for one episode, treat yourself to Bigfoot. It has the best theories and conjectures ever!
* I mentioned during the show that I found it strange that Spider-Man: Homecoming is a large-scale re-imagining of the character, but that very few people seem to have noticed this fact.
Which is weird. You can count on the fanboys to go nuclear over the tiniest, most superficial changes to a character—when Michael Bay put flame decals on Optimus Prime, for instance, and the nerds went insane. But in Spider-Man: Homecoming Marvel makes Aunt May into a MILF, disappears Uncle Ben, eliminates Spider Sense, and makes Peter more of a well-adjust nerd, rather than a sad-sack loser. And no one seems to have even realized it, let alone objected.
Which is fine—I like many of these changes and I really like the big one whereby Marvel changed Peter’s place in the high school world. It’s a great choice.
* However I missed an even bigger change to the character. As Max Landis notes, forget Aunt May-I. The real change is that Homecoming does away with the animating principle of the Spider-Man character: The idea that with great power comes great responsibility.
Without Uncle Ben, that moral charge evaporates and Spider-Man’s mission becomes much more of a coming-of-age story about trying to join a grown-up club (the Avengers) and less a movie about a boy learning morality, responsibility, and sacrifice.
Now, again, I’m not sure this is a bad thing. As I said, I really liked the movie. But as Landis says, Homecoming “quietly ignores the most iconic emotional element of the character, and once you notice it, you can’t unnotice it.”
I agree with that, completely.
* For anyone not old enough to appreciate the genius of Vic’s Gene Shalit impression, here’s a supercut of the hackiest movie critic, ever. It’s Vic’s finest moment.
* I don’t want to scare you, but Richard Rushfield has been reporting that Dunkirk is tracking toward a $30 million opening. If that happens, then batten down the hatches, because there’s going to be a gigantic fight in Hollywood over art, grownup movie making, and the economics of the tentpole.
