It’s the one surprise that awaits everyone who decides to revisit these movies.
4 Likes
Anyway, I also like that the dialogue in raimi spiderman movies is always tuned to over-the-top 60s comic, with bits of 40s screwball comedy mixed in. Can’t get over them spouting the most obvious lines but with wild metaphors mixed in.
Also holy shit did you know Michael Chabon was one of the three credited co-writers on Spiderman 2?
It’s unbelievable how well the spidey 2 script worked given what a terrible mess it was in development.
Lot of great lines buried in small moments, like when parker tries to go into his apartment and the landlord comes out yelling about rent.
Don’t try to sneak past me. I have ears like a cat, and eyes like a rodent.
6 Likes
yeah the landlord character is like just disorientingly vague and cartoonish enough to not feel extremely racist. i have always felt there is something very bizarre about the daughter (?) character who has a huge crush on peter also for no reason though, iirc this subplot for some reason continues into spider-man 3 but i can’t remember what happens exactly. it’s super weird, and one of the only things about spider-man 2 that retains the same spider-man 1 energy of there being weird little bits and pieces of scenes that feel like they must have had a purpose in some earlier draft of the script, but retain only a vestigial presence in the final movie.
Nickelback owns.
- Not a Nickelback Fan (Wes)
1 Like
Rudie i watched this for the first time the other month expecting a fun romp and i’m sorry but my main takeaways were “damn all films just had sweeping orchestral soundtracks before like the matrix i guess” and “theres a lot of scenes that don’t really go anywhere huh”. also “that mummy lady was robbed”
1 Like
Damnnnnn…
Guess I have to watch it again for myself. I’ve returned to it…no wait we had it in gaywatch 2 years ago and Half the chat kept yelling it sucked (tulpa?) while I kept going I love this.
I also watched the 3 main sequels on a plane and remember not liking any of them.
Shit I never made this connection but you’re absolutely right. “Let’s get that weird funny horror director to make our giant budget comic book movie, it worked for Batman”
It is pure Evil Dead. Imagine a whole movie made of Spiderman 2 Doc Ock Killer Surgery Arms scenes and you’ve got Evil Dead
3 Likes
My experience was a group watch a few years back that I went in expecting Jurassic Park 2 levels of air conditioner background noise, and the entire room was shocked that like 80% of it was a movie we had no regrets watching and would watch again.
1 Like
what does this mean
You pay for the air conditioning, and there’s also a movie being played.
4 Likes
oh that makes a lot of sense. i was imagining some convoluted scenario in which jurassic park 2 was somehow a movie known for having like really poor audio mixing or something, such that it sounded like there was a noisy air conditioner on in the background of every scene
3 Likes
i thought spider-man 3 was on netflix but it’s not this is kind of throwing a wrench in my plans
The morning after our prom, at the hotel we were staying at, a few friends of mine and I sung that one song “in the round” style in the lobby
Honestly these movies are just a font of great teenage memories for me no wonder I can’t bring myself to dislike them
3 Likes
Finally managed to watch Spider-Man 3, it was honestly a lot better than I remember it. This is pretty superficial, but the special effects are so much better than the other two. They are still a little dated, but not in a way that totally takes me out of it like the bad CGI in the first one.
On top of that, all of the action sequences are much more interesting to watch than I remembered. The Sandman sequences are where the seams on the CGI really start to show, but it’s forgivable because everything else is so well designed that it still ends up being really cool looking.
I also like that throughout all of these movies they have a lot of scenes of Spider-Man just saving people from random disasters, rather than every battle having to be some kind of epic superhero showdown. A huge sequence in the beginning of this movie, that I had completely forgotten about, is about a crane on a high rise building going haywire. It’s just really hilarious the way this makes New York seem like a city in which some kind of industrial infrastructure malfunctioning is constantly imperiling people. That and the amount of bank robberies that involve crooks stealing huge bags of money that may as well have giant Scrooge McDuck dollar signs on them really contribute a lot to the atmosphere of these movies.
I guess me liking James Franco’s performance in the first two is an unpopular opinion that pays off in this one. He is kind of doing his own thing in the first two, but in this one it merges with the general campiness of the series to make something that is just like… hilarious to me. Like what other summer tentpole movie can you say has a standout moment that is just one character eating pie
One thing that seems obvious that didn’t really connect with me the first time I saw this, and maybe is part of the reason these moments were seen as so cringey when the movie came out, is that scenes like this are supposed to show Harry kind of channeling Norman Osbourne. It’s not like he’s doing a Willem Defoe impersonation, but he really has a lot of the same energy in that it is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Unfortunately, like a lot of stuff in these movies, it seems like a plot thread that could have been executed better, and in this movie in particular his “redemption” story is really rushed to the point of incoherence.
I was happy to see that the motif of Osbournes using bourbon to symbolize their descent into evilness continues in this one, but sad that the extremely “poor person’s idea of what rich people do” detail of Norman preferring Maker’s Mark for his late night brooding sessions is not continued. But you can see a Maker’s Mark bottle flying across the screen in one of the scenes where Peter fights Harry, so I’m glad someone must have enjoyed that as much as I do.
The dancing sequence was this huge controversial moment in the movie, and in retrospect I think it has as much to do with how completely unsympathetic Peter is in those moments as it does with the general corniness of it. But I did find it really funny this time just because of the like shocked and disgusted expressions of all the women he encounters when he is strutting around. And you gotta hand it to Tobey Maguire for just like, really going for it in that sequence. It’s hilarious.
But yeah, in terms of stuff I didn’t like about the movie, I think my general uneasiness with what a moron Peter is throughout the series is really taken to the extreme here. It is Raimi at his most Coen Bros. esque, in which the characters are not exactly meant to be people you sympathize with, but people you observe with derision from afar. That type of shit can be funny, but it is made worse by the fact that he doesn’t ever apologize to anyone or, really, redeem himself in any way other than just by Being Spider-Man and Saving People. Like, the audacity of his big moment at the end of this being forgiving the Sandman, and not apologizing to Mary Jane for humiliating her in public and punching her in the head, is kind of ridiculous.
Speaking of that, you could basically cut all of the Sandman stuff out of the movie and it wouldn’t really impact anything in the plot up until the very end of the film. The problem is those scenes are the most visually interesting ones in the movie, and although I think it would flow better if you made more room for both Peter’s rivalry with Eddie Brock and Harry’s Goblinification, none of that stuff would be that interesting to watch.
The movie expects you to get a surprising amount of context from really brief moments, like Harry regaining his memory or Eddie creating fake images of Spider-Man stealing shit. That part is especially confusing because it comes right after Black Suit Spider-Man does a lot of questionable stuff, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for Eddie to catch him in the act of being a dickhead, but instead it turns out that Eddie fabricates his pictures and then gets fired after Peter exposes him.
I get that part of the idea here is that Peter is just “going too far” rather than just becoming totally evil, as in he is still acting out of a sense of “justice” that gradually just becomes more like “revenge,” but then his treatment of Mary Jane later on in that sequence is still just too much.
It’s weird to me that being caught doing something obviously wrong and facing consequences for it is enough to Jokerfy Eddie Brock (also right before he becomes Venom he prays to Jesus to ask him to kill Peter Parker, which is hilarious), and yet, again, at the end of the movie we are still expected to believe Mary Jane is still in love with Peter even though what he did to her is indefensible. It just seems… sloppy.
But other than that I think the movie is really unfairly maligned. The tone throughout the trilogy is surprisingly consistent. If this movie didn’t rely so much on building off of things that happen in part one, I would honestly say it is my second favorite in the series after 2. But without the first movie I don’t think anything in this would really work, so it’s hard to call.
12 Likes
Oh another weird thing about this re: underwritten moments or essential stuff probably left on the cutting floor, Eddie Brock as Venom says a ton of stuff that on the surface just feels like… we are missing some scene in which Brock learns a bunch of stuff about a) Spider-man and b) the plot of this movie specifically. Like when he looks at MJ he says his “Spidey-senses are tingling”, and he later refers to Sandman by his legal name, and suggests that he knows he killed Peter’s uncle, even though they just met in a really short scene just a few minutes before.
But it actually kind of makes sense if you assume the symbiote is somehow melding his memories with Peter Parker? Like it isn’t that much of a stretch, but there is just no context for it so it feels like a “cinema sin.”
1 Like
Oh also, I’m retroactively deciding that I am watching Spider-man movies in honor of Goblinization Day
Which reminds me that earlier I was talking about how a lot of stuff about Spider-Man 1 bothered me because there’s no, like, in-universe explanation for why things happen. Such as Spider-Man getting his hi tech suit, but also, Osbourne deciding on a Goblin Aesthetic for his villainous persona.
I get that it is on some level cool that they decided this stuff didn’t need some kind of “gritty” “realistic” explanation, but based on the tone of the movie in practice this just means we have been collectively deprived of a Willem Defoe monologue in which he sips Maker’s Mark and ruminates on how he has always admired the humble goblin… the craftiest and most wicked of the fantastical beasts…
4 Likes
I do not care for the Mummy at all and I’ve decided that the funniest part of On Cinema is the continued appreciation of Brendan Fraser, that dude’s career has like no good movies yet I remember feeling for him after that piece that came out a few years ago about how bad he had it but it turns out I was just ignorant, this dude’s been working consistently for the last 30 years, why the fuck were people acting like he was reduced to wearing a burlap sack and living off the free peanuts at Five Guys
2 Likes
I think the Raimi Spider-Man movies are the only American superhero movies I’ve enjoyed aside from…Batman Returns, maybe? I have no clue if I’d be able to stomach watching any of them now but 3 is definitely the last time I had any fun watching a new one, I thought it was hilarious, the multiple villains and heroes are a mess but it feels like an adaptation of a fill-in issue of Marvel Team-Up so thumbs up for that. The depiction of a neurotic self-righteous unlikable dweeb transitioning into deluded playboy is really great, that sorta shit definitely woulda happened as Ditko’s four-eyed rage-filled aunt-obsessed cash-strapped Peter blossomed into the matinee-idol lookin’ Romita version. And the revelation that Ben dying wasn’t Peter’s fault totally guts the character and is a fitting ending, Peter just standing there watching that dude escape as dust in the wind or whatever, it’s so funny imagining top tier objectivist Ditko’s reaction towatching that. Like, based on what I know of the dude you’d probably have to do some Clockwork Orange scenario to get him to watch those movies and even then he may not care but still. It’s very funny, to me, that is why I end up making this post whenever this movie comes up.
10 Likes
I remember only seeing the part with scarabs in The Mummy, it was on cable television at one of my mom’s friend’s house. I watched the Spider-Man movies with my pa in theatres. It’s all vague to me and I have no opinion.
2 Likes
This is kind of why I wanted to watch them again! Spider-man was a huge detail to me as a kid/teen, but when the movies came out I was surprisingly flat on them. I mean, I think I enjoyed it, but I was just kind of going through a phase where I didn’t really care too much about stuff like that. It has been interesting to revisit them for that reason.
1 Like