Worth Mentioning - What's Up, Danger?

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Spider-Men, Joe Goldberg, and real estate.

SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE (2018)

For generations, the character known and loved as the web-slinging superhero Spider-Man was Peter Parker. He was the original Spidey, introduced by Marvel Comics in 1962; a New York high schooler who gains enhanced abilities after being bitten by a radioactive spider. Fans have been following Peter Parker’s adventures through comic books, movies, cartoons, and more media for decades. In 2000, Marvel launched a book called Ultimate Spider-Man, which imagined the life and adventures of a Peter Parker that lived in a separate universe from the version of the character fans had already known for many years. And in 2011, the Ultimate version of Peter Parker was killed off... but then, another Spider-Man followed in his footsteps. It was revealed that another teenager, named Miles Morales, had been bitten by a radioactive spider, and had gained abilities similar to Spider-Man’s. For years, comic readers have been following the adventures of Miles Morales. For some, he is their Spider-Man, just as known and loved as Peter Parker ever was – and for some, the fact that he is of Afro-Puerto Rican heritage makes the character even more special and close to their hearts.

Ultimate Spider-Man was just one of several Ultimate titles, and I never ventured into Ultimate territory. I would hear about some of the books here and there and they didn’t seem very appealing to me; I preferred the versions of the characters that I was familiar with. (And, in some cases, it sounded like there was some serious “edgelord” stuff going on in Ultimate comics, making me even less interested.) I did read some Ultimate Fantastic Four when I was digging into the Marvel Zombies stuff – but that’s about it. As far as I can recall, I haven’t read any comics with Miles Morales in them (yet). So when it was announced that he was going to be the lead character in the animated Spider-Man movie Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, it didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t know him. Peter Parker is my Spider-Man. Plus, I have to be in a very specific mood to be able to sit through an animated movie.

So it took me a while to get around to watching Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And it took me a couple of tries to get through the movie – because I wasn’t in that “watching an animated movie” mood during my first attempt. But once I was able to settle into that mood and take in the full movie, I was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying it.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman from a screenplay Rothman crafted with producer Phil Lord, the movie is (as the title gives away) a multiverse story. It begins by introducing a version of Peter Parker Spider-Man who has been doing the hero job for ten years, is voiced by Chris Pine, and seems to have lived out moments similar to scenes from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, but the details are slightly off. Which, considering what happens to this Spider-Man, is a good thing, because I wouldn’t want to see this as the fate of the Raimi Spider-Man. 

Following the Spidey intro, we meet up with teenager Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), who attends Brooklyn Visions Academy and has a hobby of spray-painting graffiti art. Miles is the son of nurse Rio Morales (Lauren Vélez) and police officer Jefferson Davis (Brian Tyree Henry) – but the family member he can really relax and be himself around is his uncle, Jefferson’s black sheep brother Aaron (Mahershala Ali). When Aaron takes Miles down into an abandoned subway tunnel to do some of his art, the kid happens to get bitten by a radioactive spider... and just when he’s discovering that he has developed Spider-Man-like abilities, he stumbles across a confrontation between Spider-Man and the villains The Prowler (spoiler withheld), Green Goblin (voiced by Jorma Taccone) and Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber). 

With the help of Doctor Olivia "Liv" Octavius (Kathryn Hahn), a female version of Doctor Octopus, the Kingpin has built a super-collider as a way to access parallel universes. He has a relatable, sympathetic reason for wanting to access these universes: his wife and child were killed in an accident, and he’s trying to reach living versions of them from other dimensions... but he’s a violent scumbag, so he doesn’t hold your sympathy for long. Especially not once he beats Peter Parker to death.

With Parker dead, Miles feels he has to take on the mantle of Spider-Man. And while he struggles with this idea, other spider-people enter his life. Kingpin running that super-collider have brought them in from other dimensions: there’s Jake Johnson as an overweight, down-on-his-luck version of Spider-Man named Peter B. Parker; John Mulaney as Peter Porker, also known as Spider-Ham because he is a talking pig; Kimiko Glenn as the anime-style Peni Parker, whose alter ego is SP//dr (she has a telepathic connection to a radioactive spider that lives inside a biomechanical suit); and Nicolas Cage as Spider-Man Noir, whose dimension is black & white and permanently stuck in the 1930s. Mile’s classmate crush Gwen Stacy is even one of the spider-people; she’s from a dimension where she’s Spider-Woman. (Or Spider-Gwen, if you know her real name.)

All of these spider-people from other dimensions are experiencing cellular decay, so they will have to run the super-collider again to get back to their own worlds. As they work together toward this goal, they encounter Kingpin, The Prowler, Doc Ock, plus the henchmen Scorpion (Joaquín Cosío) and Tombstone (Marvin "Krondon" Jones III). Along the way, Miles gets some Spider-Man mentorship... and experiences the sort of tragedy that everyone who becomes Spider-Man seems to have to endure.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has a unique animation style that I really liked, combining computer animation with hand-drawn comic techniques – and what finally allowed to me to really take in the movie is the fact that many of the people are drawn in a fairly close-to-life way. The further away from reality that an animated movie or show looks, the more difficult it is for me to connect with it. Since there were times here where I could almost feel like I was just watching a live-action movie, I could get into it. (And when things did get over-the-top in the way only something animated can, I was able to go along with it easier.) The fact that this wild and crazy story takes place in a dimension that isn’t exactly the same as any other dimension we’ve seen before – whether it be the universe of the Raimi movies, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or even the world of the Ultimate comics, where the death of Peter Parker and the origin of Miles Morales played out in a different way – also made it easier to digest. This is something happening off the side of everything, where alterations to story and character aren’t just possible, they’re expected.

I love Spider-Man and the character of Peter Parker. That will always be my Spider-Man. But over the course of this movie, I came to like and care about Miles Morales, too.

YOU SEASON TWO (2019)

By the end of the first season of the Lifetime-turned-Netflix thriller series You, bookstore manager / dangerous stalker Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) had killed enough people that you could officially call him a serial killer – and yet, he has the ability to be so charming and the show does such a good job of letting the viewer get into his head, he still managed to earn adoring fans in the audience. Badgley has always seen the character for the violent creep he really is and has discouraged viewers from developing a crush on the guy... but some still have anyway. He would also ask the writers and producers to make it more clear that the lead character in this show is a bad guy – but if he was giving those notes during the production of season 2, it doesn’t seem like they were paying attention to him. In this season, for the most part, Joe is presented in an almost heroic light, or at least a “misunderstood anti-hero” light.

This isn't too surprising, though, given that You was based on a novel Caroline Kepnes and the second season is loosely based on Kepnes' sequel novel Hidden Bodies, and Kepnes had a lot of sympathy for Joe. In fact, she would bristle when people first started referring to the character as a serial killer. She has said, "I argued 'he’s not a serial killer, he meets these terrible people and has these awful thoughts, but he’s very sensitive.' It’s very strange to realize you have written a serial killer." So it's understandable that the writers might look at Joe in a more positive light than the actor who plays him does.

At the end of the first season, Joe’s ex-girlfriend Candace Stone (Ambyr Childers) had shown up in his New York City bookstore. Since Candace knows some of his very dark secrets, Joe runs off to Los Angeles. So a major part of this season is showing how much this N.Y. native finds the L.A. vibe to be grating. In L.A., Joe meets up with Will Bettelheim (Robin Lord Taylor), who can provide him with a fake identity – and in an effort to cover his tracks, Joe takes Will captive, keeping him in a replica of the glass cage that stood in the basement of the bookstore. It seems very unlikely that Joe will be able to build this cage in a storage unit, but the character gives an attempt at an explanation as to how he was able to do it, so we go along with it. And since Joe is trying to move on from the murderous impulses he displayed in the first season, he keeps Will in that cage for quite a long time.

While the real Will Bettelheim is sitting in a storage unit, the fake Will Bettelheim is getting an apartment where the manager is also an investigative reporter, that’s Carmela Zumbado as Delilah Alves, who is the sole caregiver for her teenage sister Ellie (Jenna Ortega). He becomes obsessed with a female neighbor, because that’s the sort of thing Joe Goldberg does, and ends up taking a job at the same store she works at, a store that’s owned by her wealthy family. The latest person to be obsessed over by Joe is Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti), a chef and baker – and working at the store with Love also brings Joe into contact with Love’s twin brother Forty (James Scully), an aspiring filmmaker who comes to see Joe as a potential writing collaborator.

As Joe and Love figure out whether or not they should be in a relationship (she thinks they should, he’s still haunted by visions of the girlfriend he killed in the previous season), Joe also had to figure out if he trust Will enough to let him go, has to deal with a debt collector who’s owed money by the real Will, and is pulled into an investigation of a comedian called Henderson (Chris D’Elia), who once assaulted Delilah and has now pulled her younger sister into his orbit.

Joe does sketchy stuff in this season for sure, but he is trying to become a better person. He’s trying not to be a killer... and when he does kill people in this season, they’re not innocent victims. The showrunners even throw in flashbacks to Joe’s difficult child with abusive father figures and his unreliable mother Sandy (Magda Apanowicz) to make sure viewers will understand and sympathize with him even more. Most of this seems like the opposite of what Badgley would have wanted, but it still makes for an entertaining season, and Joe interacts with a variety of interesting characters. I found James Scully to be especially fun to watch as the often frustrating and dumb Forty Quinn.

There are times during You season 2 when it almost seems like Joe might be able to better himself and lead a murder-free life. That he might be capable of some kind of redemption; that he could at least be redeemed to the level of Dexter. But he's no Dexter, and by the end of the season, everything has fallen apart in quite an unexpected way.

There may be no redemption for Joe, but this season did "save" You for me. That first season has such a downer ending, if that had been the end of the show, I would have been fine with a "one and done" viewing. But since the show continued with more twists and turns to come, it became something I can enjoy having repeat viewings of.

NO GOOD DEED (2024)

With Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond, Lisa Kudrow and Ray Romano starred in two of the most successful, well-loved sitcoms ever made – but with the Netflix show No Good Deed, series creator Liz Feldman brought Kudrow and Romano together for a show that gets much darker than their previous successes ever did... and yet also happens to be quite amusing.

Kudrow and Romano star as married couple Lydia and Paul Morgan, who have put their home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles on the market and are expecting to make some big bucks off of the sale. Problem is, this home has a dark and tragic event in its recent history: the Morgans’ son Jacob (Wyatt Aubrey) died in this house in a shooting that occurred under mysterious circumstances, resulting in their daughter Emily (Chloe East) pulling away from her parents and Paul’s brother Mikey (Denis Leary) doing some time in prison. Now Mikey is out of jail and looking to blackmail the Morgans over the secrets they’re hiding about Jacob’s death.

While the Morgans have to deal with Mikey’s schemes, their drug-loving realtor Greg Boycelane (Matt Rogers) is doing his best to sell their house, and we get to know several of the potential buyers. There’s Leslie Fisher (Abbi Jacobson), a prosecutor for the district attorney who takes a potentially dangerous interest in the house’s history; Leslie’s doctor wife Sarah (Poppy Liu); O-T Fagbenle as struggling author Dennis Sampson; Teyonah Parris as Dennis’s pregnant wife Carla; Anna Maria Horsford as Denise Sampson, Dennis's mother, who has a bit of an unhealthy amount of influence on his life; and Linda Cardellini as the villainous Margo Starling, who has been cheating on her dimwitted actor husband JD Campbell (Luke Wilson) with real estate developer Gwen Delvecchio (Katherine Moennig), and possibly some other people. As situations spiral out of control, there are also scenes with the Morgans’ gossipy neighbor Phyllis (Linda Lavin) and Mikey’s police officer son Nate (Kevin Alves).

Feldman and the writing team gradually reveal more information about the circumstances surrounding Jacob’s death as the show goes on, and while this mysterious situation becomes less mysterious we’re treated to some great comedic interactions between various members of the great cast that was assembled for the show. Kudrow and Romano both did terrific jobs handling the darker material while still delivering laughs, while all of the cast members around them were given moments to make their characters stand out.

The two who nearly manage to run away with the show are Cardellini and Wilson, with Cardellini doing great work while bringing her awful character to life and Wilson draw sympathy as the poor guy who has to deal with her.

Consisting of eight episodes that are very easy to binge your way through, No Good Deed delivers a fun time while also maintaining a dark edge. If these eight episodes are all we ever get, the show holds up perfectly as a standalone piece of entertainment – but if Netflix decides to order a second season, I would gladly tune in.