Balancing responsibilities across the spider-verse
Spider-Man: Across the spider-verse nails the tension between balancing responsibilities for self, family, and society at large.
Last year for Father’s Day I took my oldest kid to a baseball game.
Since I live in southeast Michigan, that meant a Tigers game, but it was quite a bit warmer than many of my southern readers might have guessed. I told my wife when she was buying us tickets, “don’t worry too much about where we sit, the whole thing will be so novel to him that location won’t matter.” But I didn’t factor in the location of the sun.
In fact, I was baking so bad up in those bleachers that I ended up bribing my son with ice cream to let us leave early and get out from under the oppressive heat.
This year I had a different idea. “How about I take him to a movie?” We’d seen the Super Mario Bros earlier in the year and it was a big hit, so I was looking to build on that with another air conditioned experience. The obvious choice was “Spider-Man: Across the spider-verse,” so I showed him the first one a week ago and we headed to the local Cinemark to get some popcorn and enjoy the new one.
If you haven’t seen it, I’m probably going to spoil it, so proceed with caution. It was quite the story to take your own kid to as it’s very much a blend of “coming of age” story along with the role and struggle of a parent to help their kid navigate that period of life. The story punches hard on those themes emotionally and does so with a wild and eclectic tapestry of colors, visuals, and music to say nothing of the diversity of characters both in terms of personality and ethnic/cultural background.
I was deeply impressed and it had me thinking about a lot of things that are tangentially related to football enough to allow me to rationalize exposing you readers to my movie opinions.
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