spider-movies

Input Cinephile Shodown
21

the venom movie is pretty bad, but still kind of worth watching if you (like me) like tom hardy enough. it has like, 2 or 3 really good parts* and the rest is boring. it feels the most like a movie designed to be slept through on an airplane of anything i’ve seen since terminator genysis

*by which i mean the part where tom hardy sits in a fish tank and tries to eat a live lobster. that’s the best part of the movie, and conceptually i think this gives you a really misleading impression of how interesting the rest of it is

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22

I didn’t expect it to be as goofy as it was, and liked it more for it

23

All of these movies are pretty good, not much to complain about

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24

I feel pretty much the opposite of everyone in this thread, in that I still think the Raimi Spidermans are basically decent comic book stuff that know exactly what they are. Tobey Maguire’s greatest asset is that he is very good at looking like he just got slapped in the face. His worst flaw is that he cannot convincingly look sad.

But yeah, the villains are all perfect and their scenes work extremely well. Watched next to the Marvel Spidermans, it’s kind of astounding how much better Raimiman is than that shit. Like, sure, Raimi Spiderman movies are slightly pro-cop, but they’re not about obeying the whims of a billionaire weapons dealer and beating up the working class.

IN FACT, one of the things that made Raimi Spiderman work for me is how palpably he was not middle class. Meanwhile, MCU Spiderman goes to an elite private school and has no economic woes at all.

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25

I watched the first Raimi movie ages ago. I liked it well enough, but also felt no great desire to watch the rest when they came out, even that first one I mainly just happened to catch on TV in a hotel room. Honestly applies to the later MCU and superhero movies in general, like I’m not inherently opposed to any of it but just have no significant desire to seek it out. Like I saw the first Iron Man and liked it and even there actually kinda want to see the other two but not enough to actually get around to it!

Might be a medium thing, like leave the comics to the comics. If you have to make all your superhero suits out of basketball because you think spandex looks cheesy or just can’t make it look good, maybe that’s a sign that it just isn’t something you should be doing on a fundamental level.

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26

Honestly the number one reason the first raimi one bothered me is that right after they go to great lengths to explain how poor Peter is he acquires a high tech future basketball costume with no explanation of where it came from

I mean I know that’s another “no yeah it’s good because it sucks and no one gives a shit” thing but it’s still stupid

27

I still quite like Raimi Spiderman, 2 and 3 less so, because the whole thing is so broad and naive without being disingenuous. His reference points when making the movie appear to be, like, the Superman movies, his own filmography, and the 60s comic. Incredibly straightforward stuff.

Have not been able to make it more than half an hour into either the Andrew Garfield or Tom Finland movies, my attention just evaporates

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28

No this rules because there’s the scene of him sadly washing his costume at the laundromat and finding out it ruined his socks and underwear also yes no one cares about where he got the costume. Better that it came from nowhere then that he got a supersuit from his good friend elon musktony stark that seemingly gives him 99% of the spiderman powers?

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29

+1

What makes the Raimi movies different from the MCU movies? How about the fact that we call one “the Raimi movies” and the other “the MCU movies”? Who even directed the MCU movies? Does anyone give a shit? Whoever it is, no authorial voice has survived the process.

I’ll take broad, gormy, vaguely pro-cop post-911 NYC working class togetherness over a film so laser-focused on justifying the United States’ massive mechanized surveillance apparatus that it turns a dude who would’ve been an enthusiastic side-character in the Raimiverse into the villain for getting screwed over by the big guys. In Raimiman the weapons dealer is the bad guy! Like he should be. Actually the two series are so overtly converse it’s really hard for me to peel apart the “they’re basically similar” opinion. There’s no SHIELD in Raimi, no Tony Stark.

The Raimi movies are often very funny by way of poking fun at their own soft-focus naivete (is there really anything funnier in any Marvel movie than the Evil Peter montage in 3) but they are never cynical. That is the word that defines all the MCU movies, including the Spiderman ones.

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30

Yeah, this 100%

They’re tongue in cheek but never cynical.

something I noticed on the recent rewatch: the weird constantly-blending-montage editing of the Wachowski Speed Racer movie actually appeared before that in the Spiderman movies. They constantly have just wild atemporal visual language, and it feels like someone earnestly translating comic book language to screen. Functionally could only be a film but always feels like a comic book.

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31

It’s really awesome seeing him practice all those editing techniques in Dark Man and then getting to see him play with those visuals with a real budget in Spider Man.

(Dark Man rules so hard)

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32

Oh I forgot to say specifically how good and creepy Willem Dafoe is. I still think the movie doesn’t take advantage of this enough, but the one scene where he talks to himself in the mirror is really good. But the best scene that character has is the Thanksgiving dinner sequence where he is like telling his son that his girlfriend is not good enough for him, then tells him to “get what you need from her” and then dump her? It has this totally gross Evil Dad lynchian energy that feels like… slightly out of place in the movie but is the most menacing he is in the whole thing.

Also I really like that in the second one his son inherits his dad’s tendency of always drinking Maker’s Mark on the rocks while he broods alone in his mansion. It’s the funniest product placement in the whole movie.

Speaking of that, I know we are all praising the glory of Raimi the auteur, but the amount of product placement in the first movie is extremely over the top.

Anyway I don’t know if I’ll actually sit down to write a long post about how good Spider-Man 2 is, but it is pretty good. I still think the first one is very uneven, but I also don’t think there’s anything in 2 that is nearly as good as those two Willem Dafoe scenes in the first one. I just wish the scenes where he is like flying around murdering people had the same dark vibes as him just being a shitty dad.

It’s less cool to acknowledge this but I think the Tim Burton Batman movies are probably more influential. I mean I think those are pretty good too, but in retrospect it seems very obvious that this is what they were hoping Raimi would deliver and he basically does it, it’s less fun that way. The theme song in the Raimi movies is like hilariously forgettable, but that’s not such a big deal.

That scene is funny, but it still bugs me how the entire plot up to that point is driven by him wanting to earn money to buy a car, then he doesn’t earn any money, doesn’t buy a car, but acquires an extremely expensive spider-suit. It wouldn’t bother me as much otherwise.

But yeah the Tony Stark stuff is the worst part of Homecoming, even though (sorry) Parker already has the web shooters he invented and all his normal powers before he gets the suit. It still sucks though because they add all this extraneous bullshit to make Spider-man more like Iron Man and it’s all completely unnecessary. Though I do think the scenes where his suit’s AI gives him relationship advice (or something? IDK) are funny.

The sad thing about this is I don’t even know which of the Tom Holland Spider-Man’s you are referring to as it could be both of them. Jake Gyllenhal is really funny in the second one though so idk it’s kind of worth it.

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33

god i really want to watch spider-man 3 now but it is too late to start it

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34

Yeah I hope we can all agree Dark Man rules

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35

I was watching a video about rap one-hit wonder Chingy and his song “Right Thurr” and was comforted by just how frivolous everything was culturally around that time (1999 - 2004)

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36

with Tulpa and Cubes here, the first two Raimi movies were often just on in the background coz of my little brothers and i’ve never seen the third but they have good scenes! both the villains’ deaths are real affecting in different if similarly mawkish ways, and that turkey-carving scene has absolutely stayed with me. also the bit in the second one where the octopus arms become self-aware and murder the entire operating theatre is classic Raimi, right? (right? i haven’t seen any Evils Dead either)

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37

when I look into tobey maguire’s eternally doughboyed face the only thing I sense is “stone cold sadist + possible multiple murderer”

where’s the painting, tobes?

in which of your thousand attics?

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38

Cannot believe all of this The Mummy Slander.

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39

The Raimi Spider-Man movies are so good that we managed to go this many posts completely ignoring how god awful the soundtrack albums are. Nickelback blew up because of this movie, and we’re all able to totally overlook that.

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40

I can’t stand child Spider-Man in those new MCU movies. He’s so annoyingly written and not in an intentional feeling way. He’s like a less offensive version of Short Round, but nowhere near as endearing. Plus (Roping) Iron Man (into his origin) is so boring.

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