tick...tick...BOOM! (2021)

This sat on my Netflix list quite a while before I actually looked at the description. The title and poster image didn't grab me, but then I saw that it was a musical directed (not composed) by Lin-Manuel Miranda. And at about two hours, short enough for a comfortable night's viewing.

In 1990, 29-year-old Jonathan Larson (Andrew Garfield) is a bit of a starving artist, waiting at a New York diner but failing to pay his energy bills. He badly wants the sci-fi musical he's writing to be a Broadway hit, but he's stagnating on a key song advised by Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford) in a workshop. As the deadline draws near, Jonathan neglects everything else, including girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) and gay best friend Michael (Robin de Jesús).

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

I opted not to offer to share this viewing with my Jewish dad. He later told me that he may be willing to forgive director Mel Gibson at this point, but I know he doesn't like Braveheart-level violence. I've had my own reservations, basically enjoying Gibson's early work while avoiding anything later than The Passion of the Christ. But this time the story intrigued me.

Country boy Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) gets caught up in his buddies' eagerness to serve in World War II. The only thing is, he has a personal rule against using violence for any reason. Unlike other medics, he won't even touch a rifle in practice. As you can imagine, this conscientious objector status causes a lot of strife with his peers and superiors. Only at the Battle of Okinawa do they understand that he's no coward; indeed, he rescues dozens of wounded, putting Forrest Gump to shame with a more fully earned Congressional Medal of Honor.

Never Let Me Go (2010)

I need to get in the habit of doing more preliminary research before picking a film, seeing as I had written off Kazuo Ishiguro. Furthermore, the Netflix blurb made it sound like just a romantic drama, not an alternate-history sci-fi. Granted, the sci-fi elements are pretty mild -- we don't get any special effects; it's mostly social -- but they are crucial to the plot. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by elaborating.

Thanks to a fictitious breakthrough in the '50s, life expectancy has vastly increased for most humans; but like in Metropolis, the luxury comes at a price to others. The story focuses on a love triangle among those others, starting in their tweens in an English coed boarding school that emphasizes staying healthy. A conflicted teacher breaks the rules and spills the beans: All the students exist solely to donate their organs in adulthood, eventually dying from it. Only in act 2, after graduation, do they learn why they're treated so differently: They're clones. Nevertheless, they try to fulfill their short lives with love, especially in light of a rumor that if two clones can prove their true love, they get a three-year deferral on donations. First-person narrator Kathy (Carey Mulligan) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) like each other first, but Kathy's frenemy, Ruth (Keira Knightley), schemes to interpose herself for reasons beyond love.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

I was not pleased when Sony announced the release of another Spider-Man origin story only ten years after the last. It's not that focuses on origins always bog down superhero movies -- Batman Begins and Iron Man are among my favorites -- but it sounded utterly unnecessary. If Spider-Man 3 was bad enough to induce a reboot, why not try showing him at a later point in his life, like most of the franchise outside cinema? Nevertheless, when I found this title on the library shelf, I got curious to see what changed.

I hope you don't mind heavy, albeit spoiler-free, comparisons and contrasts to Spider-Man (2002) and, to a lesser extent, Spider-Man 2 (2004). It's a bit hard for me to think about the reboot on its own terms, because the original series is something of a sore spot for me. Despite usually liking popular or even middling adaptations from comic books, and despite liking Spidey at least in concept, these entries utterly failed to take my breath away. No way would I check out the threequel. TAS-M has slightly lower ratings across the usual sites, but I knew that I might well beg to differ.