Spider-Man 2

Well, unfortunately, Doc Ock doesn't have Xmen mutant powers, a full auto assault rifle filled with explosive tracer bullets, or a hidden alien lurking inside him waiting to burst out when his host shell is shattered beyond repair. Maybe they'll put Electro or Mysterio into the next movie along with the Hobgoblin and you can jump around happily because of the special effects as you go home to watch Starship Troopers 2 for the 15th time.

Toby was supposed to be acting sleepy and tired. In the Spiderman stories at the time of the collection of plotlines this movie contained, he was utterly exhausted. Aunt May was getting sicker, and was also dead broke. Bill collectors were starting to call her and she was almost evicted several times. So Parker needed money for her medicine, her rent, her other bills, his rent, food, his tuition, chemicals to make his web fluid, and money to buy a new camera after one of them got smashed in a random fight. But JJJ had hired someone else to compete for his photographer's position at the Bugle since he missed so many assignments, so his income from that job was cut down. He ended up working any other job he could come across (in between getting fired) for whatever money he could make in addition to working at the Bugle. He was going to college, and college classes take a ton of time by themselves - and he was doing badly in many of them. His friend Harry Osbourne wasn't around much any more, and it's not like you'd want to hang around someone whose dad you had killed anyway. He also was suffering from some kind of ailment which made him dizzy at times (either radiation poisoning or a concussion, I forget which storyline was going on at the time). He was having girl problems with Mary Jane. She'd call him up for a date, and he'd have a term paper to complete, or he'd go to meet her and have to Spiderize some random criminal or some random diaster, or he'd fall asleep right before the date, or he'd have to go to work or to some event that JJJ wanted photographed. Add in the random villain-of-the-month fight, and it's pretty easy to see why he was acting dejected, listless, worn out, depressed, unhappy, down on his luck, and disgusted with being Spiderman. I'd be pretty unhappy myself, too.

Was this movie in Academy Award contention for best acting? No...but they didn't exactly have an all-star cast for it, either. I didn't see a better overall level of acting in Xmen2 or Daredevil or Superman or any Batman, despite those movies having much bigger named actors in them. And unlike those movies, this movie was actually something other than a random collection of fight scenes. Sorry you didn't get to see your rayguns and Phoenix flares. Blade 3 is coming out - you should be happier with that.

PS In case you were wondering, I hated the Spiderman character as a kid. I didn't like reading comic books to be depressed. Spiderman comics were half soap opera, and I had enough of that from my grandmother watching those in the afternoon. What a shame that they'd actually make a movie like the comic books, eh?

 

What a fantastic article!

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/arts/11RICH.html
FRANK RICH

THE Michael Moore explosion is now officially unbearable. It's not just that you can't pick up a Time Warner magazine without seeing his mug on the cover. Or turn on a TV news show without hearing another tedious debate about the accuracy of "Fahrenheit 9/11"  conducted by the same press corps that never challenged the Bush administration's souped-up case for invading Iraq. What's most ridiculous is the central question driving the whole show: might a hit documentary swing the November election?

Both political camps seem to be convincing themselves that the answer is yes. Either that, or they are overstating the movie's power to overcompensate for their worst fears. The right is sufficiently panicked about George W. Bush's slippage that it's trashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the absurd extreme of likening it to a training film for al Qaeda (according to MoveAmericaForward.org) and a defense brief for Saddam Hussein (Ann Coulter, who else?). The left is so worried about John Kerry's lackluster candidacy that it is overselling the success of "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill that vacuum, as if Mr. Moore could serve as a surrogate for the vague and charisma-challenged nominee. (That job will now fall, and not a moment too soon, to John Edwards.)

"It has the potential of actually affecting the election, and if it does, it will change the world," said Rob Reiner of "Fahrenheit 9/11," echoing Eli Pariser of MoveOn, who said his members regarded the film as "the `Star Wars' " of its genre. "We literally sold out Peoria, Illinois," bragged the movie's distributor after its opening weekend. So what? Illinois is a safe Democratic state already, and even Peoria is not particularly Republican: Bush-Cheney beat Gore-Lieberman by a mere 251 votes there in 2000, fewer than the 544 votes siphoned off by Mr. Moore's candidate at the time, Ralph Nader. "The sky's the limit on this movie," Harvey Weinstein, a co-owner of the film and a prominent Democrat, told The New York Times. If so, the sky is falling.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is, as we keep being told, the most successful non-IMAX documentary of all time. What that means is that its ticket sales are whipping the bejesus out of "Winged Migration" and "Spellbound." But by any other Hollywood standard this movie, while a bona fide surprise hit (especially in relation to its tiny budget), is not a blockbuster or must-see phenomenon (except to its core constituency). Of course, it is pulling in some Republicans, and you can be sure that the sighting of each and every one will be assiduously publicized by Mr. Moore. ("There was a Republican woman in Florida unable to get out of her seat, crying," he told Time.) But with a take of $61 million by the end of its second weekend, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will have to sweat to bring in even a third of the $370 million piled up domestically by the red-state polemic to which its sectarian appeal is most frequently compared, "The Passion of the Christ." If voting at a multiplex box-office constitutes any kind of straw poll, then Mr. Bush has already won re-election. By a landslide.

But he hasn't, of course. The latest actual polls show the president with an approval rating below (in some cases well below) 50 percent. The election is both too far away and too close to call. And that's why a movie like "Fahrenheit 9/11," with its relatively narrow sampling, may be no more a reliable index to the mood of the country than the Literary Digest poll of 1936. It was so skewed by the demographics of its similarly self-selected participants that it gave Alf Landon a 14-point spread over F.D.R.

If you want to find a movie that might give a more accurate reading of the national pulse, it isn't hard to do: just take a look at "Spider-Man 2," which is now on a pace to outdraw Mr. Moore's film and maybe every other film this year  in every conceivable demographic. It may not be on the radar screen of the Washington pack busy misreading the electoral tea leaves of "Fahrenheit 9/11" 's box-office receipts. No one is shouting about it on Fox. But with an opening five-day take of some $152 million  next to $128 million for the most recent Shrek, $125 million for Mel Gibson's Christ, $124 million for the last Frodo, $109 million for the last Harry Potter  "Spider-Man 2" is front-and-center for most everyone else.

It deserves to be on its merits, by the way. It's hard not to fall in love with "Spider-Man 2." It's not only better than any other movie based on a comic book  not the highest bar to reach  but it's also superior to all the other so-called franchise movies, in which colossal budgets, presold brand-name characters, computer-generated effects and oppressive merchandising conspire to make the product at the center of the marketing blitz often seem as disposable as that new razor concocted to sell you a new line of blades. "Spider-Man 2" is a product of that egregious process and yet it has a delicacy almost never seen any more in the big-ticket juggernauts sent our way by media conglomerates. It thrives on nuance. It's human even to the extent of replacing the standard-issue camp villain of the first "Spider-Man" movie (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin) with Alfred Molina's brooding Doc Ock. Its characters live in a real world that is recognizably America, not the landscape of a video game.

Unlike the sunnier first "Spider-Man," which was released two summers ago but conceived before the terrorist attacks, the new one carries the shadow of 9/11. As the story shifts from Queens into Manhattan, the city becomes a much more vivid presence. The director, Sam Raimi, dotes on both the old (the Empire State Building in silvery mode) and the new (the Hayden Planetarium), on both the dreamily nostalgic (a fairy-book Broadway theater seemingly resurrected from an Edwardian past) and the neighborhood of our freshest wound (the canyons of Lower Manhattan). The movie is suffused with a nocturnal glow of melancholy that casts its comic-book action in an unexpectedly poignant light.

The writers who set the story against this backdrop include the veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose credits go back to "Ordinary People," and the novelist Michael Chabon, who memorialized the Marvel Comics gestalt in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." They're grown-ups, as is not always the case with this kind of Hollywood product. (Mr. Sargent is in his 70's  an almost unheard-of anomaly among employed screenwriters these days.) In "Spider-Man 2," they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in "The Importance of Being Earnest." They are both watched over by Aunt May (the transcendent Rosemary Harris), whose every utterance bespeaks literature and history.

This is a world worth saving, but the superhero who can save it is no Superman. He's a bookish nerd racked with guilt and self-doubt. "With great power comes great responsibility" is the central tenet of his faith, passed down not from God but from his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). He takes it seriously. Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn't want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative. He wouldn't mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can't. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York.

The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year's political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of "Top Gun." There's nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare "Mission Accomplished" after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry's vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography.

Whatever light "Spider-Man 2" may cast on the dueling, would-be heroes of our presidential race, however, it is not going to change the dynamic of the election any more than "Fahrenheit 9/11" will. As far as I can determine, there's only been one national election in which a single piece of moviemaking may have made some slight difference in a close campaign. That was in 1948, when Hollywood studios, eager to curry favor with Democrats who might have been offended by a previous pro-Dewey film, banded together to exhibit a 10-minute pro-Truman documentary (in the guise of a Universal newsreel) in all the nation's movie theaters. The stunt was pulled off in the last six days of the race and, with no real competition from television, reached a captive audience of some 65 million Americans at a time when the entire population was only some 146 million.

Not even "Spider-Man 2" can gather a crowd that large in the fractionalized American cultural marketplace of 2004. But if it or any movie cannot move an election, its box-office triumph shows us something about those who will be doing the voting. "Spider-Man 2" is an escapist movie that serves as a rebuke to what its audience wants to escape from: a pop culture that is often too shrill and an election-year political culture that increasingly mimics that pop culture. It takes us away from cable news screamfests and toxic campaign ads no less than it delivers us from "Dodgeball." It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness. This year that appears to be the heretofore missing formula for capturing a landslide mandate in red and blue states alike.

 

[ QUOTE ]
Well, unfortunately, Doc Ock doesn't have Xmen mutant powers,

[/ QUOTE ]

Well apparently he has since he can take full on punches from spiderman on his face. Get one sniper and he's fucked and will be chanting "Not like the police could stop me anyways!" to the burial grounds.

And yeah, Xmen2 has better acting in case you missed it. Good thing you have the script for Spidey2 and know how people were supposed to act (he needed money for chemicals to make his web fluid in the movie? Eh, no) and what parts of the story you can relate to the comic when they blaytantly fuck over the comic in almost every frame. In case you missed it he couldn't use his spiderman powers cause of his confidence etc so you keep on trying to relate bad acting to radiation illness - I needed a pissed of spidey supporter to defend this movie and make me see the light were there is none. The acting (save James Franco) and the script is / was shit - get over it. Btw, he didn't "kill" Harry Osburnes dad either for the record.

P.S; Fuck you for going personal Shaolin. Shove Blade 3 up your ass but remove the raygun first. Atleast get facts right.

/KiwE

 

Spiderman 2

Fun to watch, mainly for the action.

If you don't take it seriously, it's not a bad film.

However (Kiersten Dunst especially), the acting is pretty bad. At least she looks pretty good (not good enough to forgive this kind of bad acting).

 

[ QUOTE ]
KiwE said:

Well apparently he has since he can take full on punches from spiderman on his face.

[/ QUOTE ]

In the comics, Spiderman would hold back his strength when fighting ordinary humans. Of course, if he used even half his strength, a punch to Doc Ock's head would have been fatal but Spiderman's strict moral code would prevent himself from going to far. So, in essence, Spiderman was hitting Doc Ock very lightly compared to what he could've have done.

[ QUOTE ]
And yeah, Xmen2 has better acting in case you missed it. Good thing you have the script for Spidey2 and know how people were supposed to act (he needed money for chemicals to make his web fluid in the movie? Eh, no) and what parts of the story you can relate to the comic when they blaytantly fuck over the comic in almost every frame. In case you missed it he couldn't use his spiderman powers cause of his confidence etc so you keep on trying to relate bad acting to radiation illness - I needed a pissed of spidey supporter to defend this movie and make me see the light were there is none. The acting (save James Franco) and the script is / was shit - get over it. Btw, he didn't "kill" Harry Osburnes dad either for the record.

[/ QUOTE ]

SH was drawing up examples from the comics. Case in point, Peter was always broke and in despair. I think Tobey Maguire portrayed that well. I thought Kirsten Dunst could've done much better with her role.

The movies has several things that do not relate to the comics(which I'm not going to get into now) but the films take on the Spidey persona is within merit and acceptable in my opinion.

In conclusion, I'm sorry you were let down by this film. I thought it was very good. Let's hope the third film is even better. /versus/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

Re: Spider-Man 2: the GAME!!

I just recently played the game and really, I prefered the first one. This seemed stripped down and very reductive. For a game where the television tag-line was "go anywhere" it really didn't deliver.

Bruce Campbell is still a hoot though.

as for the movie (which I saw last night). I thought it was alright. I enjoyed it and then I picked it apart scene by scene and was astonished that at the end, I still enjoyed it. It certainly did something right.

I think there were far too many logical holes for it to be a "good" movie though.

GE

 

Lego Spider Man

lego spider-man

click it. You know you want to.

GE

 

Re: Lego Spider Man

[ QUOTE ]
GodEater said:

lego spider-man

click it. You know you want to.

GE

[/ QUOTE ]

AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME! Great link man great link!

 

Re: Spider-Man 2: the GAME!!

wow. Here I thought, barring minor differences the PC game and Gamecube/X-Box/PS2 versions would play basically the same!

PC version of Spider-Man 2 is so simplistic it brings tears to the eyes. I think I might rent a console version so I don't burn away money but they sound worlds apart.

GE