The Week In A Bad Education Towers #39

Hello you! Still had the shorts out this week, and also the boys at home because it was half term which was fun. Ish. Point is, spent a lot of the week trying to work whilst watching random video games get played on the TV that I could play myself. So a typical week really.

Into The Spider-Verse was really good, and is still really good. It’s arguably The Best Spider-Man Film (or at least joint top) and in the discussion for Best Superhero Film. It’s also in the running for the best adaption of something from one medium to another, with the way that it combined print and digital art and animation into one amazing visual style.

Which is to say, there was a lot of pressure on its sequel, Across The Spider-Verse; was the first film just lightning in a bottle? Could they push the visual design any further? Would it be as funny?

After watching it, I’d say not quite, yes and yes.

The film follows a year or so after the first film, with Miles and Gwen trying to find their way in their own worlds. A new villain by the name of Spot shows up and fights Miles, and before you know it him and Gwen are off across the Spider-Verse on a new adventure.

Now, I say 'before you know it' but this isn't quite true as the film is around 140 minutes which makes it the longest animated film from a Western studio. And sometimes it does feel that length, it does slow down a bit too much; spending time with Gwen at the beginning makes a load of sense as it brings her into focus as one of the main characters, but then it does the same thing with Miles and seems to go over the same point several times. On the one hand, spending some time with these characters and their worlds is great but at the same time the film is called Across The Spider-Verse so you want to get out there acrossing as much as you can.

When you get out there, and the film stretches its legs, oh boy does the film work. They've really, somehow, found another visual gear; Gwen's world is full of watercolour backgrounds with colours that run and explode around characters reflecting their emotions, so when it's invaded by a Vulture from Renaissance Italy that looks like one of DaVinci's drawings on parchment its stunning. Really, some of the big sequences in this film are like nothing else I've seen on the cinema screen. The way it uses comic techniques (captions pop up remind you of previous characters and stuff!) and comic art and art in general still works and is still amazing. When people say this film is a work of art they're not wrong, you could take any frame of this film and hang it on the wall of an art gallery and it wouldn't look out of place.

Its just a shame that we don't get the whole story; the film ends on a proper hammer of a cliffhanger, a black screen and a big TO BE CONTINUED. Now, I didn't see that coming at all, if I heard about the third film Beyond The Spider-Verse then it had totally dropped out of my brain, and the brains of the other people gasping in the screening I was in. You get all the characters moving into position and about to slam into each other and, nope, we'll see you in 8 months or so.

Despite that, its still another belter that got about ten belly laughs out of me and almost effortlessly places itself at the stop of the Super Hero food chain.

After that, finishing the day with a fairly straight forward action thriller makes sense, maybe?

Its a Netflix film that stars Jennifer Lopez as the eponymous Mother, an ex-soldier who gets caught up in International arm dealing. After falling pregnant she tries to leave, getting the FBI in to cut a deal but bad things happen. After giving birth she has to give up her daughter so the baddies don't get her and retreats to the Alaskan wilderness to live in isolation. Many years later her daughter gets kidnapped by the old baddies so she has to go and get her back mowing down as many bad guys as possible.

Its alright! You can see the original pitch of something like Taken but with a lady, but whereas that film had a grim faced Liam Neeseon killing his way across Paris, this film has Lopez going around all over the place sniping folk and then hiding in a shack in the forrest teaching her estranged daughter how to use a knife. Don't get me wrong, Lopez is good in this and holds the screen well, but it never really gets out of third gear. You never quite get that super bad ass moment where you punch the air and know there's mayhem to come. Its a big too baggy in the middle, and arguably starts earlier than it needs to. You could start the film about 20 minutes in and you'd be okay, which says a lot.

Still, a decent late night saturday night watch but don't expect miracles.

Given new Who is on the horizon, finally got the youngest to sit down and watch the show and we started from season 1.

Yep, we're talking Doctor Who from the space year 2005 with Christopher Ecclestone and hardly any budget and what is still probably the best version of the theme. Now, I distinctly remember when Nu Who was about to come back with the top notch advert showing on TV because I felt a bit sad. Sad because my eldest son was then less than a year old, so he couldn't watch it and enjoy it with me. Given how British sci-fi normally goes there'd be one season and then it'd get cancelled and that would be it.

I mean, who knew? Who knew how well Ecclestone would anchor that show in a way that got attention from the mainstream audience? And then that Tenant would take that ball and run with it, connecting to an even wider audience before Tumblr found Matt Smith and took it world wide. My eldest ended up growing up alongside the show, with Smith being 'his' Doctor. And its still around, and I get to enjoy it with my other son as well with all these series and adventures to watch and enjoy.

Its brilliant! And he's enjoying it, took him a few episodes to get into it but seeing his face as the concepts of the show were nailed down and then his gasp at the end of the first two-parter I knew he was in.

I think its a good time for him to find Doctor Who, if Davies can re-capture that feeling of Who in those first few seasons then we should be onto a winner.

Fingers crossed.

I don't think Twitter embedding works properly still on Substack because of stupid reasons so you'll have to click this link to see what I'm talking about.

Now thats a crazily placed lower third.

Been reading more comics on Marvel Unlimited although it is a bit of a pain on an iPhone. The screen isn’t quite big enough, even on a Max sized phone, to read a whole page. I’ve never been a big fan of the guided panel view; I want to see the whole page and let my eye travel around it rather than the zoomed in views. I miss the iPad Air I used to have, a hand me down from my dad that had a slightly dodgy screen that eventually fully crapped out, then dropped off the bottom of the iOS updates so all the apps stopped working on it. But while it lasted it was almost the perfect size for reading comics.

This will probably end with me buying an iPad Air.

Anyways, despite that I’ve still been reading comics and this last week been working through some recent stories starting Carnage as the lead.

Given he was in the name of a film not too long ago, it made sense that he has had his name of a few series of books recently. This is also off the back of the push Venom has had recently.

Now, when I got into comics it was with X-Men 20 in 1993. Running at the same time was the series Venom: Lethal Protector, this was a series that was re-positioning the popular Spider-Man villain as an anti-hero, as he was growing popular in the grim and gritty 90s. Carnage had come along just before this, if Venom was the extreme version of Spider-Man than Carnage was the extreme version of Venom. He was around as a big bad guy with the odd big storyline, then was seemingly killed at the start of the Bendis Avengers run.

In the mid 2010s he came back, and then shortly after Venom was pushed into new areas, ending up attached to big cosmic Marvel stuff in a way he never was before. And these Carnage series follow that, with Carnage off killing all kinds of folk across the universe.

And they’re good! Big stories that are all building towards a big blow off story just in time for his 35th anniversary, they’ve been good to catch up on and even if I’ve hit the limit on the new books and have to now wait for new ones to land on the service. Still, I can go back and fill on some gaps with Venom which should be a good read.

Two videos this week! Here’s the first:

Think that one turned out okay, the mic held up and it’s lit okay considering it was all natural lighting and a propped up light reflector. And then another:

Next weeks will be back to the style of recoding audio as I play the game, I think that works better.

And still catching up on the Conquistabores:

Not too far off being up to date, actually have videos scheduled out till the end of the month which is just daft.

We’ll call it there as it’s late and finishing this one off in bed. The day was way busier than I expected, but aren’t the always?

Bye!