Hey Kesh, Eldorian, and Jezter,
Eldo: You had to go back a ways, but they're there. Here's the biggest one I could easily find. You DO know that you can find old threads by changing the "Show up through" menu option, right? If you're gonna almost lose your lunch while reading my post, you must be intelligent enough to figure out how the messageboards work.
Kesh: A bias against RomComs is not a bad thing... the term RomCom is often applied to a movie that isn't considered funny enough to be called a comedy, and has a boy/girl thing... Very few legitimate RomComs actually exist, in my opinion.
Re: The harshness. Jezter, I apologize for being harsh in the "confusing your opinion with reality" line. I am prone to overreacting when I see stuff like that happening. I have no problem with people having different opinions and liking different things -- but saying that just because you don't like something, then the Academy is stupid for liking it, smacks of a somewhat self-centered universe. So does saying "I like this, so the rest of the world is wrong." Liking or not liking something is an opinion. Stating that an entire genre is lame is an attempt to slide your opinion under the radar in the form of a fact. This always ticks me off. Saying something like, "Hey, that's just my opinion, the Academy is free to pick stuff dull pieces if they want to," is an implicit slam on people who like things that are different than the things that you like. And as someone who DOES like things that are different than what you like, I took umbrage.
I obviously took umbrage out of scope with the degree to which you inteded it, but nevertheless -- other people in the world are going to have different opinions than the ones you have, and they're not all stuffy idiots.
That aside: My Extremely Late Spider-man Review
Things I liked
- Most of the stuff with Peter Parker. Liked the actor, thought he did a good job. It felt like a good reimagining of the comic-book character. His initial self, his changes, his true-to-comic letting the bad guy go scene that ends up costing him his uncle -- all of that was good. Loved him exploring his powers. Loved the fight scene with Flash.
- Liked most of the CG. I'm not a CG-driven person -- I'm more impressed by dialogue and characters and PEOPLE than by flashy effects. That's purely an opinion. If you're paying $9.50, you get to like whatever you want to like. That said, there were only a few times when the CG broke my suspension of disbelief. Most of the time, they did a really nice job with a difficult superhero (harder than Batman or Superman to make real onscreen).
- Liked William Dafoe (or whatever his name is), the GG guy. I thought that as long as I could see his face, he was doing a great job.
- Liked Jonah Jamison (or whatever the character's name is). One of the best character bits in the movie for me was watching him argue with Peter about something, JJ acting completely mercenary and cold, and then the GG bursts in and demands that JJ give up the photographer who shot the Spider-man pics, and JJ, knowing that Peter is right there, lies through his teeth without batting an eyelash. That was a great bit of characterization. I liked it a lot.
Things that were, for me, flaws
- Not a huge fan of most of the fights. I liked the Flash fight because it showed us Spidey's growing power. But then, as soon as we get into full Spidey form, he promptly loses that ability. The GG isn't THAT fast -- why does Spidey completely forget how to simply get out of the way?
I'd have loved to see Spidey act like some kind of Wuxia hero, but I know that that fighting style isn't really true to the character in the comic -- untrained but just naturally fantastic in terms of speed and power. So I was trying to be okay with non-beautiful fights. But these were at times almost at the level of Blade-2 annoyance -- the hero's ability to fight depends completely upon the plot: in one scene, he's knocking around trained people with ease, and in another scene he completely loses any ability to fight and gets slammed through walls just to make the audience get worried.
If the fights had been good but non-Wuxia, I wouldn't have enjoyed them as much, but I would have chalked it up to a difference of opinion -- purely personal preference. In this case, however, it is not a difference of opinion. The fight scenes had logical flaws and did not stay true to the science-or-logic that they established earlier in the movie.
A whole lotta writing for something relatively minor. Not a game-breaker. And people without a ton of combat training are likely not gonna notice, so while it's fact and not opinion, it's a pretty nitpicky fact. Okay.
- Faces. I'm not saying that this was something I could have done better, but I am saying that it messed up a lot of the movie for me. The concept of a completely masked hero works well in a comic, since you can look at the panels and read the words, and you never see his face not-moving while he speaks. And when comic-Spidey sees a busload of puppies crashing into the orphan farm (or the other way around), his eyes change shape to show that he's alarmed.
In a real-life movie, that's not an option. And so we end up with Spidey and GG going at it, their voiced-over voiced fraught with emotion and hatred and angst and betrayl -- and the director shows us long shots of a completely masked face doing NOTHING while the voice-over goes through an impassioned speech. Sometimes, even the director would realize that this was not going well, so he'd have somebody do Power-Rangers-body-language acting, waving their hands a whole lot more than necessary and doing goofy double-takes.
Like I said, I'm not saying I could have done it better. I'm saying that it was a flaw. Maybe they could have altered the costume to give Spidey a mouth, as long as they were altering other things. Maybe they could have done some subtle CG effects on the face -- not enough for it to be goofy, but enough for the eyes to change shape when he was angry or sad or scared or something.
Game-breaker? Possibly for me -- again, I like super-heroes because of the character, the concepts, the battle of archtypes, not for who can do the coolest thing. Anecdotally, everyone else I've mentioned it to agreed with me, although they might not have proactively thought of it on their own. Could it have been done better? Oh heck yeah. I don't recall having any trouble getting a sense of emotion from Darth Vader, and he was done in full mask a few years earlier than Spidey.
- Mary Jane. Mercenary and heartless. We never see her actually love anybody. She dates Flash because she wants the pedigree of "popular guy in school", and the second she graduates, he's gone. Then she needs some money or at least an upper-class date, so she goes for Harry -- but we never see her actually feel anything for him. It's this "Yeah, apparently we're dating, even though I don't let him kiss me and get uncomfortable when he gets anywhere near touching me" kind of relationship -- and she cheats on him by kissing Spidey. Mary Jane's character was obviously after the Alpha Male for the entirety of the movie, right up until she goes for Peter at the end in a poorly written scene that had me cringing in my seat (The "and I love you, I do, I love you so much" scene) and which several of my friends described as complete and utter turnoffs.
Ya know, when you find yourself in agreement with the psychotic villain when he says that somebody is a heartless goldbricker who's only after his son's money, and he's talking about the female lead you're supposed to like a whole lot, that's probably not a great thing.
That doesn't even get into Peter's whiny teenage "No, I must be on my own" thing. That was pure opinion on my part. Some people might have liked it. Some didn't. I'm not attacking that, although it didn't work for me. I'm purely going after the writing and directing of Mary Jane, here. Heck, for what Dunst had to work with, she did a decent job. She looked surprised and happy and cute at all the right times -- the only time that had me physically repulsed was, again, the funeral love-declaration, which just rang utterly false and hollow because it was in direct violation of the previous hour and forty minutes of the movie.
- The idiotic end of the last fight.
Okay, I'm the Green Goblin. I've been beat in the fair fight. I'm pulling out one last trick, pretending to be Norman and lure Spidey into the path of my death glider (or whatever he calls it). When Spidey moves into position, I trigger the Death Glider, which roars toward him at full power. Spidey backflips over it, and the glider continues on at full speed and strikes me, killing me after my one little angst bit. D'oh.
Awright, chalk-talk it with me. I'm a brilliant ENGINEER, and this is the best plan I had? Really? Allow me to diagram:
GG --> --> Spidey --> --> Glider
I've triggered the glider, with it's long sharp spikey bits, to move toward Spidey at full power. What exactly was I thinking? What possible good result could come of this? I mean, not even "Spidey could flip over it and then it could hit me". Let's pretend it DOES hit Spidey. What's gonna happen? It's gonna go THROUGH him. We saw this thing cut through concrete. We saw it tear through metal. You think Spidey's even gonna slow it down? Even if Spidey gets mashed on the front, the spikes are gonna go right through him, and the end result is that the glider is, even if it DOES hit Spidey, going to continue on its trajectory, and it's STILL going to hit me, the evil genius.
Brilliant plan.
The only possible reason for me to do this is if I realize that I've suffered a mortal wound already, and I want to make sure that my corpse is found smashed together in a deadly embrace with Spidey's, leading Jonah Jamison to finally get that "They were secretly gay lovers!" story the hard supporting evidence that it needed.
I can handle the villain beating up the hero and then letting him go. I can handle the villain capturing the hero, demanding that he change sides, and then letting him go. Those are character traits. The end fight was not a character trait. The end fight was a stupid flaw in the writing that left me in disgust that I'd waited that long for a brilliant ending and been served that instead.
End of Review
There you go. Horrible movie? Certainly not. Enjoyed large parts of it, and could respect many of the parts that I did not enjoy as being a simple difference of taste and opinion. The things I listed above were the things I considered objective flaws -- the things that I could not simply chalk up to a difference in opinion. You are certainly welcome to say, "That didn't bother me" or "I didn't notice that", but I would be extremely surprised if you can rebut anything I've said above as demonstrably untrue.
There are plenty of movies with flaws that I don't care about. My wife HATED the singing in Moulin Rouge, because she sings professionally. I listen to her sing professionally, and so I could wholeheartedlly acknowledge that the singing was not of professional caliber. It was a flaw. But I didn't care. You are, in the same vein, free to not care about the flaws in Spider-Man -- but to pretend that it was a miracle of modern film-making that ought to be placed in a time capsule and saved so that future generations can use it as an example of cinematic brilliance is to overlook a few large and fairly unwieldy flaws.
Please go ahead and lose your lunch if my review has caused you physical discomfort, Eldo. Once you've cleaned up, though, perhaps you could come on over -- now that I've showed you how to bump posts in a messagboard -- and rebut?
Eldo: You had to go back a ways, but they're there. Here's the biggest one I could easily find. You DO know that you can find old threads by changing the "Show up through" menu option, right? If you're gonna almost lose your lunch while reading my post, you must be intelligent enough to figure out how the messageboards work.
Kesh: A bias against RomComs is not a bad thing... the term RomCom is often applied to a movie that isn't considered funny enough to be called a comedy, and has a boy/girl thing... Very few legitimate RomComs actually exist, in my opinion.
Re: The harshness. Jezter, I apologize for being harsh in the "confusing your opinion with reality" line. I am prone to overreacting when I see stuff like that happening. I have no problem with people having different opinions and liking different things -- but saying that just because you don't like something, then the Academy is stupid for liking it, smacks of a somewhat self-centered universe. So does saying "I like this, so the rest of the world is wrong." Liking or not liking something is an opinion. Stating that an entire genre is lame is an attempt to slide your opinion under the radar in the form of a fact. This always ticks me off. Saying something like, "Hey, that's just my opinion, the Academy is free to pick stuff dull pieces if they want to," is an implicit slam on people who like things that are different than the things that you like. And as someone who DOES like things that are different than what you like, I took umbrage.
I obviously took umbrage out of scope with the degree to which you inteded it, but nevertheless -- other people in the world are going to have different opinions than the ones you have, and they're not all stuffy idiots.
That aside: My Extremely Late Spider-man Review
Things I liked
- Most of the stuff with Peter Parker. Liked the actor, thought he did a good job. It felt like a good reimagining of the comic-book character. His initial self, his changes, his true-to-comic letting the bad guy go scene that ends up costing him his uncle -- all of that was good. Loved him exploring his powers. Loved the fight scene with Flash.
- Liked most of the CG. I'm not a CG-driven person -- I'm more impressed by dialogue and characters and PEOPLE than by flashy effects. That's purely an opinion. If you're paying $9.50, you get to like whatever you want to like. That said, there were only a few times when the CG broke my suspension of disbelief. Most of the time, they did a really nice job with a difficult superhero (harder than Batman or Superman to make real onscreen).
- Liked William Dafoe (or whatever his name is), the GG guy. I thought that as long as I could see his face, he was doing a great job.
- Liked Jonah Jamison (or whatever the character's name is). One of the best character bits in the movie for me was watching him argue with Peter about something, JJ acting completely mercenary and cold, and then the GG bursts in and demands that JJ give up the photographer who shot the Spider-man pics, and JJ, knowing that Peter is right there, lies through his teeth without batting an eyelash. That was a great bit of characterization. I liked it a lot.
Things that were, for me, flaws
- Not a huge fan of most of the fights. I liked the Flash fight because it showed us Spidey's growing power. But then, as soon as we get into full Spidey form, he promptly loses that ability. The GG isn't THAT fast -- why does Spidey completely forget how to simply get out of the way?
I'd have loved to see Spidey act like some kind of Wuxia hero, but I know that that fighting style isn't really true to the character in the comic -- untrained but just naturally fantastic in terms of speed and power. So I was trying to be okay with non-beautiful fights. But these were at times almost at the level of Blade-2 annoyance -- the hero's ability to fight depends completely upon the plot: in one scene, he's knocking around trained people with ease, and in another scene he completely loses any ability to fight and gets slammed through walls just to make the audience get worried.
If the fights had been good but non-Wuxia, I wouldn't have enjoyed them as much, but I would have chalked it up to a difference of opinion -- purely personal preference. In this case, however, it is not a difference of opinion. The fight scenes had logical flaws and did not stay true to the science-or-logic that they established earlier in the movie.
A whole lotta writing for something relatively minor. Not a game-breaker. And people without a ton of combat training are likely not gonna notice, so while it's fact and not opinion, it's a pretty nitpicky fact. Okay.
- Faces. I'm not saying that this was something I could have done better, but I am saying that it messed up a lot of the movie for me. The concept of a completely masked hero works well in a comic, since you can look at the panels and read the words, and you never see his face not-moving while he speaks.
And when comic-Spidey sees a busload of puppies crashing into the orphan farm (or the other way around), his eyes change shape to show that he's alarmed.In a real-life movie, that's not an option. And so we end up with Spidey and GG going at it, their voiced-over voiced fraught with emotion and hatred and angst and betrayl -- and the director shows us long shots of a completely masked face doing NOTHING while the voice-over goes through an impassioned speech. Sometimes, even the director would realize that this was not going well, so he'd have somebody do Power-Rangers-body-language acting, waving their hands a whole lot more than necessary and doing goofy double-takes.
Like I said, I'm not saying I could have done it better. I'm saying that it was a flaw. Maybe they could have altered the costume to give Spidey a mouth, as long as they were altering other things. Maybe they could have done some subtle CG effects on the face -- not enough for it to be goofy, but enough for the eyes to change shape when he was angry or sad or scared or something.
Game-breaker? Possibly for me -- again, I like super-heroes because of the character, the concepts, the battle of archtypes, not for who can do the coolest thing. Anecdotally, everyone else I've mentioned it to agreed with me, although they might not have proactively thought of it on their own. Could it have been done better? Oh heck yeah. I don't recall having any trouble getting a sense of emotion from Darth Vader, and he was done in full mask a few years earlier than Spidey.
- Mary Jane. Mercenary and heartless. We never see her actually love anybody. She dates Flash because she wants the pedigree of "popular guy in school", and the second she graduates, he's gone. Then she needs some money or at least an upper-class date, so she goes for Harry -- but we never see her actually feel anything for him. It's this "Yeah, apparently we're dating, even though I don't let him kiss me and get uncomfortable when he gets anywhere near touching me" kind of relationship -- and she cheats on him by kissing Spidey. Mary Jane's character was obviously after the Alpha Male for the entirety of the movie, right up until she goes for Peter at the end in a poorly written scene that had me cringing in my seat (The "and I love you, I do, I love you so much" scene) and which several of my friends described as complete and utter turnoffs.
Ya know, when you find yourself in agreement with the psychotic villain when he says that somebody is a heartless goldbricker who's only after his son's money, and he's talking about the female lead you're supposed to like a whole lot, that's probably not a great thing.
That doesn't even get into Peter's whiny teenage "No, I must be on my own" thing. That was pure opinion on my part. Some people might have liked it. Some didn't. I'm not attacking that, although it didn't work for me. I'm purely going after the writing and directing of Mary Jane, here. Heck, for what Dunst had to work with, she did a decent job. She looked surprised and happy and cute at all the right times -- the only time that had me physically repulsed was, again, the funeral love-declaration, which just rang utterly false and hollow because it was in direct violation of the previous hour and forty minutes of the movie.
- The idiotic end of the last fight.
Okay, I'm the Green Goblin. I've been beat in the fair fight. I'm pulling out one last trick, pretending to be Norman and lure Spidey into the path of my death glider (or whatever he calls it). When Spidey moves into position, I trigger the Death Glider, which roars toward him at full power. Spidey backflips over it, and the glider continues on at full speed and strikes me, killing me after my one little angst bit. D'oh.
Awright, chalk-talk it with me. I'm a brilliant ENGINEER, and this is the best plan I had? Really? Allow me to diagram:
GG --> --> Spidey --> --> Glider
I've triggered the glider, with it's long sharp spikey bits, to move toward Spidey at full power. What exactly was I thinking? What possible good result could come of this? I mean, not even "Spidey could flip over it and then it could hit me". Let's pretend it DOES hit Spidey. What's gonna happen? It's gonna go THROUGH him. We saw this thing cut through concrete. We saw it tear through metal. You think Spidey's even gonna slow it down? Even if Spidey gets mashed on the front, the spikes are gonna go right through him, and the end result is that the glider is, even if it DOES hit Spidey, going to continue on its trajectory, and it's STILL going to hit me, the evil genius.
Brilliant plan.
The only possible reason for me to do this is if I realize that I've suffered a mortal wound already, and I want to make sure that my corpse is found smashed together in a deadly embrace with Spidey's, leading Jonah Jamison to finally get that "They were secretly gay lovers!" story the hard supporting evidence that it needed.
I can handle the villain beating up the hero and then letting him go. I can handle the villain capturing the hero, demanding that he change sides, and then letting him go. Those are character traits. The end fight was not a character trait. The end fight was a stupid flaw in the writing that left me in disgust that I'd waited that long for a brilliant ending and been served that instead.
End of Review
There you go. Horrible movie? Certainly not. Enjoyed large parts of it, and could respect many of the parts that I did not enjoy as being a simple difference of taste and opinion. The things I listed above were the things I considered objective flaws -- the things that I could not simply chalk up to a difference in opinion. You are certainly welcome to say, "That didn't bother me" or "I didn't notice that", but I would be extremely surprised if you can rebut anything I've said above as demonstrably untrue.
There are plenty of movies with flaws that I don't care about. My wife HATED the singing in Moulin Rouge, because she sings professionally. I listen to her sing professionally, and so I could wholeheartedlly acknowledge that the singing was not of professional caliber. It was a flaw. But I didn't care. You are, in the same vein, free to not care about the flaws in Spider-Man -- but to pretend that it was a miracle of modern film-making that ought to be placed in a time capsule and saved so that future generations can use it as an example of cinematic brilliance is to overlook a few large and fairly unwieldy flaws.
Please go ahead and lose your lunch if my review has caused you physical discomfort, Eldo. Once you've cleaned up, though, perhaps you could come on over -- now that I've showed you how to bump posts in a messagboard -- and rebut?
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