Going Unclear

So, the very first and obvious thing I could figure out from having seen Louis Theroux’s 2015 documentary My Scientology Movie is that Theroux has seen The Act of Killing.

The very premise of My Scientology Movie feels like an attempt at using the film to self-indict somebody in the form that Joshua Oppenheimer did in his infamous documentaries on the 1965-66 Pancasila Youth massacres. Early on, the film establishes that Theroux is actually unable to get any actual access to the very controversial and very secretive Church of Scientology and that’s the basis of Theroux trying to recreate one thing – the make-up of the Church of Scientology and their regular process – and trying to actively capture something else – the Church’s outright attempts to obstruct him and his film. He does the second thing aptly as My Scientology Movie is full to the brim with conflicts between Theroux and some representative of the Church, normally with an amusing standoff of cameras with each party demand the other stop filming. And to be fair, that’s more than enough to portray just how oppressive and bullying the Church’s tactics are, but you get the point well before the halfway point in this very short movie and the amusement certainly doesn’t last as long as the end of the second time that same old woman and her “I’m just freelance” cameraman pop up.

See, the problem with Theroux’s approach as opposed to Oppenheimer’s is that at no point in the film is it very clear who his actual target is meant to be. Is it the actual Church of Scientology given how he expresses an intention early on to cast people as big faces of Scientology such as David Miscavige and Tom Cruise to re-enact allegations of violent behavior on their part? Or is it Mark Rathbun, the former official of the Church, that had walked away under clear hardships on his life since and spoken out against the church’s cruelty over? Rathbun is there as an advisor and informant that practically co-directs most of these re-enactments of beatings and abusive behavior that Rathbun claims occurred (and claims to have been present during), but something about Theroux’s attitude during the film and insistence on accusing (fairly) Rathbun’s own involvement in these actions despite Rathbun’s clear anger at that makes My Scientology Movie feel like, in lieu of its inability to get deep inside The Church’s dealings, to instead use Rathbun as a window for those dealings in more ways than just the one he consents to.

And, I don’t know, using Rathbun in that fashion (especially at the moment where we actually witness his family being implicitly threatened near the end) just seems shitty on Theroux’s part. By the end of the movie, it’s clear that Rathbun certainly has some issues of paranoia and anger management and he’s probably still more than a little bit stuck in the mindset of a Scientologist despite his breaking away from the Church, but he’s also graciously getting involved in Theroux’s project in the hopes that it would spread awareness of what kind of harmful practices the Church indulges in. He’s literally Theroux’s only link to these going-ons and it feels like punching yourself in the face to alienate Rathbun like this.

Granted, My Scientology Movie doesn’t entirely seem to know how to approach itself and Theroux doesn’t feel anywhere near as confident as he did in his most famous documentary work The Most Hated Family in America. He’s chasing his own tail and between poking and prodding at Rathbun and John Dower’s direction of the film (indeed Theroux is not the director) is at times dropping and forgetting about the re-enactments it wants to stage instead for more moments of Theroux and another member holding cameras at each other for so many senseless minutes as to numb myself to the Scientologist’s bullying. It doesn’t help that My Scientology Movie assumes you’re already well-enough informed on Scientology practices and doesn’t spend any of its much-wasted time informing us on what the Church’s ideology is. Maybe Theroux felt that was unnecessary with a much definitive portrayal provided by Alex Gibney’s Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief but that’s still quite a leap assuming your audience would have already watched another film.

In the end, the whole thing just feels like a great big bucket of flop sweat, so much work and pain and anxiety that Theroux and company have put themselves through only to not really come to any revelatory conclusions and only deciding to stop at a moment when it feels clear that they didn’t really have much of an end-game, just aggravate people who could sue them all into an assisted suicide. Not even Theroux’s portrayal of being targeted or stalked feels entirely correct, as a sudden appearance by an actor who has long been known for being crazy is somehow misread as a direct attack rather than just an infamously not-well person acting out.

Perhaps My Scientology Movie would feel better if it felt funny or like it was worth anything in the end of it all, but instead it just feels like Theroux and Rathbun just hired a few people to get locked inside a room and shouted at and there’s really no conclusions or results to be figured out from what they re-enacted. Just a bunch of abused kids. Theroux didn’t shine any further light on the Church of Scientology’s dealings than even the infamous South Park episode “Trapped in the Closet” and when a cartoon feels more in-depth than your documentary… how is that not supposed to be a disappointment?

The Horror… The Horror…

The following is my reprinting of a write-up done for a Facebook group titled The Horrors of the Dissolve where every week somebody gives a Triple Feature suggestion. For that reason, I hope you will excuse the very casual manner of this particular post and enjoy!

Oh boy, mah fuckin’ turn! What’s good, bruh? If you saw Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, you’re aware that sometimes the social climate of a country can affect their national cinema and if you’re anything like me, you were wondering what some of those people were smoking when they came up with their theories. Still there is the certainty that pop culture can’t be said without the word “culture” (seriously try it. You just end up with, like, “pop”) and that the national identity of some cinema has to be swayed by either current or past affairs and concerns as a way of squaring with it as a community, hence why sometimes people will read into them the state of a nation (my favorite of these readings is Stephen King in Danse Macabre implying The Amityville Horror is based on anxiety over home ownership in a terrible economy).

Personal affairs come into it too (for what is cinema but personal?), but that’s not what I’m here for, I’m here for the communal affairs. The type of thing that recognizes an emotional earthquake just happened around its target audience and wants them to face that fact, and usually war is the best source of that. That’s why I’m here to give y’all my

NATIONAL TRAUMA TRIPLE FEATURE!

Three horror movies focusing on the affected nations in the wake of some violent af conflict. Here we go, baybee!

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George Romero, USA)

Of course, this was going to be my number one, for it is my favorite horror movie of all time. And I’m sure everybody is aware of how the film unconsciously comments on race relations in the middle of Civil Rights era America, but what is hardly discussed is how direct it is as a reflection of the still fresh scars from the Vietnam War. The cynicism, the undeniable madness and the closeness to home of the violence all presented by Romero and Russo in their framing the information given to our characters through the news – nevermind the fact that the horror is happening right outside that door. Romero may have considered it an accident that Night of the Living Dead was such a potently angry indictment of race relations in 1960s America (which is still outrageously relevant in 2010s America), but there’s absolutely nothing unintentional about his mirroring of the conflict overseas and how invested American families felt in the carnage we watched. The anonymity beyond the zombies while it’s clear they’ve all once been people and personalities has been read as being representative of the “Quiet Majority” against the war, but I think the movie is a lot more damning than that. The fact that our “protagonists” (if you can call them that) are eagerly striking them down without any problems (beyond Barbra’s clear shell-shocked manner) reflects the inhumanity and refusal to recognize the Vietnamese as people or casualties with weight, just people to be cut down. It’s not just the complete inability of our characters in-fighting and having no clear compromise on what to do that promises Night of the Living Dead won’t end well, it’s the chilling vibe that we’ve been through this before as a nation that hammers down that nihilistic certainty.

2. Ugetsu (1953, dir. Mizoguchi Kenji, Japan)

Like any other country involved in World War II, Japanese post-war cinema of the 1940s and 50s are of a very rich variety all sort of having some kind of attitude on life in the aftermath of it all (in fact, post-war Japanese cinema is maybe, like, my favorite kind of cinema). They’re usually dramatic and full of mandates on society in no small words (I mean… fucking Godzilla, y’all) and Ugetsu is obviously no different except in that it’s the only movie to use horror in a sense to portray what kind of devastation war leaves and how that diverges on its effects based on things like gender and class. The ghostly specter is always a possibility in this movie, even if ghosts don’t actively appear until 30 minutes in (and you’re not aware of what the ghosts are until later), what with the amount of smokiness on the river in which our lead family evades death by bandits and how they encounter a dead body (quickly exclaiming that it must be a ghost on the river). So yes, tension is at the very least present from square one of the picture, though horror is in how the characters we witness and align with are treated and have to suffer without ethics at the feet of Civil War (standing in for World War II). Once the supernatural enters the screen, it becomes outright eerie in its invocation of nature (dat hot springs scene) and history, as we listen to the noblewoman explain how her once proud family was practically erased by Nobunaga only to truly see the devastation at the end of it all. This gives the themes a base to move onto a relatively optimistic ending of moving on beyond what devastates us – after Genjuro is warned he must or die – and rebuilding from our ashes in spite of the unfairness of the world.

3. The Devil’s Backbone (2001, dir. Guillermo Del Toro, Spain/Mexico)

Kind of cheating a bit on account of the fact that it was more than 40 years past the Spanish Civil War and obviously the Mexican Del Toro never actually lived through it (nor did producer Pedro Almodovar). Originally, it was based in the Mexican Revolution so it’s a story that can be fluid enough to reflect on most armed conflict in the face of oppression and I don’t think it’s such an accident that it was nearly based in Mexico and so soon after the infamous kidnapping of Del Toro’s father. The idea that even an orphanage cannot become a sanctuary for fearful souls (nor even Catholicism), the disappearance and re-appearance of faces always more damaged than the last time, and the always remaining aftermath of conflict and war sitting around. There’s no sense of safety in The Devil’s Backbone despite barely having any war combat in it, which is why I find it more devastating a portrayal of war than Del Toro’s return to the Spanish Civil War in Pan’s Labyrinth. And that inside of that nihilism, Del Toro saw to craft some of his most ghastly and nightmarish creations to pop out of the black dark corners of the orphanage end up making The Devil’s Backbone feel like the very pinnacle of his career thus far and everything he ever wanted to say about the anguish of a torn Mexico state that he and his father still felt the effects of, even after he followed his contemporaries Lubezki and Cuaron into Hollywood, an escape that Del Toro knows many cannot afford. “Every day, every week, something happens that reminds me that I am in involuntary exile.”

And now some honorable mentions AF, y’all.

War of the Worlds (2005, dir. Steven Spielberg, USA)
The very film that inspired this triple feature suggestion to me, though I did not want to make it US-centric and Night of the Living Dead was going to be the ONE I put in. Still, you’d have to be incredibly dense not to recognize how much of 9/11 lives inside the devastation and confusion present in every single second of War of the Worlds and the distanced lens on the amount of people dying en masse makes it certainly the darkest film Spielberg ever made and a strong anti-thesis on claims of his sentiment, even despite its ending.

The Host (2006, dir. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)
Likewise, I didn’t want more than one East Asian film (as well as the fact that the attitudes in The Host are not necessarily representative of all of South Korea), though Bong Joon-ho is no stranger to political commentary and probably knew as best as we all do that Monster movies make the best indictments on chemicals and politics (Godzilla, Them!, etc.) but Bong wanted to go one step further than them pointing a finger at “who the fuck did this to my nation”. Hence, the ever-presence and incompetence of the U.S. military’s encampment in South Korea (ever since the Korean War) being the very source of the beast and their inability to take full accountability for their negligence proving to be just a greater example of dysfunction than our broken family protagonists themselves and a clear polar opposite when that family takes immediate action to save one of their own.

It Comes and Goes at It Pleases

There’s a letterboxd post by Julian Towers that essentially sums up Trey Edward Shultz’s sophomore feature It Comes at Night as a feature-length episode of The Walking Dead and I honestly cannot imagine a more apt way of describing the movie (well, maybe a more competently-made version too with less budget). It is similar in aesthetics right down to the worn grey and charcoal color palette that establishes our horror film as grounded post-apocalyptic atmospheres, it is similar in character relations and tensions being the true “incidents” that pace to efficiently use the runtimes, and they’re both thematically shallow enough to only sum up themselves as “people don’t trust each other in times of strife and that leads to everybody dying.” This was not revelatory well before The Walking Dead’s premiere in 2010, let alone 7 years later, and none of the characters or plot developments provide anything new or of interested beyond that very simply concept.

This is a shame because Shultz is no slouch as a craftsman and I can’t imagine anybody walking out of It Comes at Night thinking it was a remotely lazy film. Far from it, a movie this efficient in trying to make its post-apocalyptic world, on the tail of an epidemic, is clearly not going to get away with laziness and yet despite largely remaining on the perspective of the young Travis (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) – there are very notable exceptions to this but nothing that I want to say hurts the film – there’s a sense of the world beyond our periphery being ravaged and torn without any doubt about it. The movie smartly begins this by showing upfront the effects of this contagion and how very easy it is to suffer from it, as Travis’ grandfather Bud (David Pendleton) is infected within the walls of the family’s secluded wood-surrounded sanctuary and quickly dispatched with by Travis’ father Paul (Joel Edgerton) and mother Sarah (Carmen Ejogo).

Hence the ability to set up tension easily with anybody who approaches the family’s home since we’re seen how severe it is and the explanation on why Paul is immediately hostile towards an intruder one night named Will (Christopher Abbott) arrives desperately trying to find supplies and shelter for his own family – wife Kim (Riley Keough) and child Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner) – again wasting no time in establishing how shaky the co-living arrangements of the two families will be in such a desperate time and the certainly that Paul will possibly kill Will and his family if the slightest thing goes wrong.

Obviously, this is the sort of movie that goes wrong. It doesn’t waste any time with things going wrong, even before the families move in, there is ever the slightest belief that Will is hiding something or that something unusual happening is his fault. And Schults plays up that ambiguity as much as he can, leading to a portion of the film leading into the finale act that uses Travis’ nightmares (most of the film is stuck in Travis’ perspective and there are places where it helps and places where the movie knows it shot itself in the foot) and the ever-constant vigilance of their dog Stanley to play with the paranoia and the uncertainty of a sequence of events that leads to the untangling of their tense peace.

And that’s frankly all Schults can play with in this story. Which is sadly why I’m not impressed with It Comes at Night. It’s incredibly shot with the darkness of the film whole enough to direct our eye to one of the few things to be lit, complemented by a weathered and battered physical home design to keep us aware of the walls surrounding the characters, the bright red door that spells flat-out danger beyond, and even in the light through windows of day, the winding claustrophobia of all the hallways around. It Comes at Night is a very visually dark film, dark enough to earn some amount of horror that the otherwise misapplied marketing promised*. Its cast are all dedicated to selling the paranoia and confusion of the film and making their lives as destitute as possible.

But it doesn’t… have anything to say. It’s such an empty movie. That may be deliberate for the nihilistic intent of the film, but it doesn’t feel rewarding in that nihilism nor even profound. It’s a collection of post-apocalyptic tropes that amounts to as much thematical material as… well, as an episode of The Walking Dead, like I said. “Bad things happen when you mistrust people” and that’s it. It seems to be wanting to at least make up for that emptiness in psychological exploration, but that doesn’t really work out when the movie moves back and forth between Travis’ perspective and Paul’s – both distinct enough as moods, without much distance between how their mindset is at the beginning of the movie and how it is at the end of the movie (I am somewhat interested in Schults’ debut Krisha which is a psychological thriller, but the staticness of Travis and Paul as characters makes me uncertain now).

I don’t know, all I could think after watching the film (other than the fact that it felt like a shallow re-do of The Witch) is how I could easily have had a short story version of this film and not lost one single element. It Comes at Night clearly wants to be more than it actually is, but it doesn’t itself enough rope to be much more than a disposable genre film.

*and boy did that end up shooting it in the foot. For It Comes at Night is NOT a horror film and pitchforks were raised over its marketing, ruining its financial performance.

Girlfriend in a Coma

There are elements of The Big Sick that it’s going to be impossible for me to be objective about. Thankfully, those elements are such a small mix of the collision of plot threads that make up its story, an autobiographical account of how screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani (who also stars in the film as himself) and Emily V. Gordon met and went through a trial of life and ended up marrying each other. It’s after leaving the theater that I realized that such a seemingly straightforward premise actually had a lot cooking inside of it and it even backloaded most of the best things about it to the second half. So when I say that I can’t help the fact that I’m also a Muslim-raised atheist mostly Americanized who at one point drove Ubers (the very earliest indication that this will mostly be fictionalized, the fact that Nanjiani drives Ubers is an anchor to the rom com element despite the real-life couple being together in the early 2000s) whose still Muslim family insists on arranging a marriage that wants to be involved in some manner in the entertainment industry that has mostly dated white girls*, it’s like… maybe the fourth most important tangent within this movie. Maybe the fifth, I can’t keep track of it all.

But for the first hour at least, it feels front and center to have Nanjiani introduced as two things from the start, a Pakistani American comedian living in Chicago. Early on this look into a comedian’s life segues into a romance Nanjiani has with a heckler named Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) and the two of them are clearly bad at pretending they’re not a couple because before we know it they give up their mutual “we’re not gonna speak to each other anymore” thing and end up spending time together at each other’s apartments before a pretty unsavory part of Nanjiani’s Muslim parents trying to throw him into an arranged marriage upsets Emily enough for the two of them to break up (the biggest diversion from Nanjiani and Gordon’s true-life story and something I can understand interjecting drama into the film but also ends up making Nanjiani look a lot more unsavory than I think the film wants him to be later on).

Shortly after Gardner ends up hospitalized for a lung infection nobody saw coming or knows what’s up and Nanjiani is forced to sign a medically-induced coma order (despite the fact that she’s literally sitting in the next room talking to somebody) before calling over Emily’s parents from North Carolina, Terry (Ray Romano) and Beth (Holly Hunter).

Now, The Big Sick is clearly about a lot of things, which is the beauty of it. Nanjiani, Gordon, and director Michael Showalter have been able to tell Nanjiani’s story by letting all these very distinct strands of his life – his struggles as a comedian, his romance with Emily, his Pakistani-Muslim background – with the same sort of “this is my life” weight and generous charm that makes it hard not to be endeared to every single person that appears in the film and I’m most impressed with the way the three of them let all these strands bleed into each other, especially in the second half where Nanjiani’s attempts to separate all these parts of his life start collapsing and demanding more dramatic momentum. Still, as sure as those three storylines are present in The Big Sick, they don’t captivate me nearly as much as Kumail’s attempts to connect with Emily’s parents does. That Kumail’s first meeting with them has to be during such a trying time (and starting on the wrong foot as they know of Kumail’s ex-boyfriend status) is the most extraordinary circumstance in a film full of extraordinary circumstances and Terry and Beth end up anchoring a lot of the rest of the film from their very first appearance halfway through until pretty close to the end as Kumail has to figure out how to help them find their way through both their fear for their daughter’s life and Chicago itself.

It can’t hurt that Hunter and Romano are clearly the best performances in the whole cast. Romano is nobody’s idea of a great actor, but being the concerned father who might be a pushover is hardly a tough role for him to inhabit and he’s very lived-in with his relationship to Hunter’s on-edge, semi-confrontational mother (a role she can do with her eyes closed). They easily steal the show without showboating away from the conflict of Kumail’s own family concerned for his absence, played by Adeel Akhtar, Anupam Kher, Zenobia Shroff, and Shenaz Treasury, nor relegating either side to being just stereotyped caricatures.

If Emily’s lack of presence in this romantic comedy’s second half does bother me (something the movie keeping leaning towards acknowledging and then forgives outright by the end), if the clear anonymity in its aesthetic does as well (especially the editing, where the decisions made seem to be exactly the wrong ones in my eyes… namely shots and angles used where the most obvious ones are staring right in our face), if parts of the story don’t interest me as much as other parts (I haven’t talked about the comedian’s life side because – much as it is well-written – I could have lived without it), I can’t lie to myself and pretend that I didn’t still love The Big Sick in all of its heartfelt messiness. It’s a movie that asks for sympathy from all possible ends, doesn’t fault anyone, has characters that I don’t mind living around for two hours, and it speaks to a side of my life I don’t think is much represented. This is the sort of cool hang-out friend version of a movie where you know everything will be ok in the end and if some people think that doesn’t seem challenging, I can’t disagree but it’s their loss.

*My mother has not had any negative reaction to my last girlfriend, my dad didn’t even know about her because he wasn’t in town. So no, my life is not nearly as dramatic as Nanjiani’s.

There’s No Place Like Homecoming

There is a beautiful moment in Spider-Man: Homecoming, perhaps my favorite moment in the whole film where the youngest-looking incarnation of Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) yet is trapped under a hell of a lot of rubble after a building collapsed on him in an image nearly reminiscent of the famous cover of Amazing Spider-Man #33 (something I doubt was unconscious on the part of the mothership company Marvel themselves finally getting to co-produce the superhero after all of these years). And there’s obviously no way Spidey won’t make it out of here but for once Holland breaks away from his otherwise joyously bubbly and bright performance as the young kid to start crying for help under the weight and selling the threat of his crushing death, before getting to see his makeshift Spider-Man mask under a puddle of water with his reflection filling out half of the watery darkness, thereby recreating another famous Spider-Man image halving Peter’s face and the Spidey cowl as one. And it’s a very inspiring and self-reflective moment for the character that assures both Parker and the audience and gives him the resolve to get himself out of this situation.

And the movie redundantly ruins this wonderful moment with a hamfisted voiceover reprise of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr. both literally and metaphorically phoning his performance in) saying “if you’re nothing without this suit, then maybe you shouldn’t have it.” Which is not only a shitty misfire of tone in its condescending wording, even if it’s an attempt to re-establish the message, but it’s also emblematic of exactly how I feel about Spider-Man: Homecoming. It’s not exactly a classic in the sense of Raimi’s works, but it’s a movie with its own strengths that could stand on its own if only the Marvel Cinematic Universe would kindly stop butting in every once in a while.

I do have to give Spider-Man: Homecoming (and that title keeps me just shuddering at the unnecessary shade of Marvel Studios towards Sony Pictures) some credit. As would be common sense, producers Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal, director and co-writer Jon Watts, and the dizzying six man revolving door of the writing team knew that it would be completely unnecessary and redundant to re-establish the origin story of one of the most famous superheroes of all time and yet Homecoming feels every bit like an entry tale for our favorite webslinger. And it wouldn’t be able to do that without the greater context of the Avengers and how Spidey is THIS close to earning Stark’s approval and joining them, but I wonder if it would be a bad thing if we didn’t have that?

It just feels so ultimately divorced from the truly stellar element of Homecoming: the “friendly neighborhood” aspect. Holland is so boyishly charismatic and engaging within the part that just having him interact with anybody – the people on the streets in which he helps out, the A.I. in the suit Tony Stark gifts to him, the overabundance of high school friends that doesn’t fit my idea of “outsider” Peter Parker but certainly gives us a lot of charming high schooler material – is not only wonderfully entertaining, but reverses the scope of the whole MCU and gives a sense of tactility to the community sense of localized superheroes, a concept that doesn’t really come to play anywhere else in the MCU except their Netflix series.

The entire cast is the best salesman on this premise: Holland wrestles eagerly with this sense of anonymous celebrity, Michael Keaton as the villain Victor Toomes has a sense of frustrated blue-collar workaday escalation to his aggression (his one big EVIL moment where he kills a man on-screen is undercut by him mistaking the weapon he used and I don’t think it’s an accident that Keaton sells that surprise very well). Donald Glover, in a two-scene cameo, essentially delivers the tired inconvenience you’d expect New York would have facing alien forces and consistent destruction. The strength of Homecoming is in the smaller human elements, those touches of a living city underneath (even if it’s Atlanta playing New York City in a conspicuous way). It is no accident that the best setpiece in the whole film is a comical one of Spidey finding it very hard to swing webs in a suburban residential area and forced to superpower-Ferris-Bueller his way around, a wonderful moment of character and geography.

It is unfortunately the ONLY great setpiece, which is a shame because anybody who has seen Holland at work on stage knows he’s certainly the most athletically capable of all of the screen Spider-Men. But Watts and editors Dan Liebental and Debbie Berman just don’t give him his due, never finding a true rhythm to the moment whether it’s a bank robbery, a jet heist, or scaling the Washington monument and never finding dynamic ways to represent the high-flying physicality of Spidey the way Holland’s hollerings do so, nor does it bother to cover up its CGI much beyond the “night time means no lighting to see it”. And that’s really disappointing for a climax as restrained as this film’s.

I can’t say it feels less like a product than Marc Webb’s time with the character, but it also is a lot more fun with it. Sure, the aggressively eager-to-please nature of having every character that isn’t Mac Gargan (Michael Mando) be able to perform a quick gag seems kind of insincere, but it’s nothing less than platonic. Spider-Man may have found himself in a new prison confined to being another stepping stone to the next Avengers movie, but he seems to at least be having fun there and he’s got great company, so there’s no big problem. It could be worse.

Now THAT’s What I Call a Fiasco

Note: Anybody who can tell me what famous Spidey moment the title of this review comes from wins my eternal respeck.

Other Note: This is re-do of a previous review from when I first saw this movie in 2012 because maaaaaaaaan, it’s not only too long, but a godless mess of a ramble.

Spider-Man, like any comic book icon, is a versatile malleable figure. He means different things to different people, they have a different idea of what his defining trait may be, and many artists and writers have put in different contexts and styles just to twist his imagery around as much as Batman. Now for some people, their idea of Spider-Man’s defining trait is that he is a unrelentingly quippy sort and that means that Andrew Garfield was (until Tom Holland thankfully disabused them) the best screen Spider-Man. And for sure, Garfield might have been able to foreground the sarcasm of high schooler Peter Parker behind the mask (though claiming Maguire’s Spidey wasn’t humorous and full of levity is an outright lie – he was directed by Sam Raimi, the creator of one of the quippiest heroes cinema has been blessed with), but he’s not my ideal Spider-Man because I have a different concept of the defining trait of Spider-Man.

That trait being he’s not a complete piece of shit*.

To be fair, Garfield did not go full throttle on making Spidey a despicable son of a bitch. That happened in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But rest assured, when it comes to his first go in the red tights for Marc Webb’s (a director’s title I’m all but certain feels ceremonial) The Amazing Spider-Man, there is nothing to his performance that feels living beyond his sarcasm and his casual ability to look like him and co-star Emma Stone (as the doomed first love Gwen Stacy) have some kind of affection for each other. This is definitely informed by the fact they were, at the time, in a relationship and not any of the giggling dialogue afforded to them by co-writer Steve Kloves (he focused on that side of the script most while co-writers James Vanderbilt and a definitely begrudgingly returning Alvin Sargent worked out other areas). Beyond that, his Spider-Man is a empty mass of high school cool tropes that seem out of the ordinary for the character except in a desperate attempt to mangle some protagonist to a desperate film.

The Amazing Spider-Man is not as bad as I thought it was on first watch. It’s clear Webb and his studio puppeteers (this movie and its sequels have studio interference fingerprints all over it) was not flailing around, but it’s a soulless product. Time passing by, especially in the face of all the Sony leaks and the eventual entry of the character into the MCU, has only shown that this was Amy Pascal and company trying to hold tightly to the character by implying the promise of a further movie franchise, with the subplot on Peter’s parents (something that always alarmed me as so dismissive of Martin Sheen and Sally Field’s potential in the roles of Uncle Ben and Aunt May), the deliberately illogical overshadow on a hologram of Norman Osborn, the terribly out-of-place mid-credits scene, and so on. It’s like Iron Man 2 in those self-reflexive attempts of foreshadowing, except less confident and without the charisma of Robert Downey Jr. to guide us through it. And that’s what really gets under my goat about what “universe-building” has done to this decade of popcorn cinema: it leaves us with only half a story.

The Amazing Spider-Man feels like the bare minimum of what you need to create a plot (with half of the beats already done to more emotional effect in Raimi’s first film) where the content goes no deeper than “Peter becomes Spider-Man to avenge his Uncle’s death, battles the Giant Lizard that Dr. Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) has become, and courts Gwen.” You’d only need one more sentence to throw in “Gwen’s police captain father George (Denis Leary) is a bigger dick than Spidey and wants to arrest him, because something something vigilante.” Nothing about it has the same explosion of personality Webb’s earlier debut (500) Days of Summer got to have and everything is just calculated to get this movie out in time to hold tightly to the Spider-Man property and make it seem like it’s still relevant.

Actually, there is some kind of tone in it but it’s obnoxiously self-serious. It almost feels as parodic as Spider-Man 3 except without the parody. Underlit scenes in alleys and sewers, attempts to make Parker’s isolation a lot gloomier than Raimi, even the costume went like three shades down in darkness. There’s nothing that gives me less confidence than realizing the aesthetic for The Amazing Spider-Man could go hand-in-hand with Trank’s Fantastic Four and not thank my stars Kevin Feige rescued a sinking ship. The only true moment of inspiration comes from when Parker begins his ascent as Spider-Man and we witness his playground treatment of New York in first-person camera. But that’s the only place for fun in The Amazing Spider-Man‘s world and it’s back to making superhero movies feel like an obligation in one of the most disappointing moments in the genre’s history.

*There are many defenders of Garfield that sit on the thesis “Spider-Man is supposed to be a dick, Maguire was too nerdy”. Same as the Tobey Maguire crying meme, I flat out ignore such an asinine complaint and suspect they never picked up a comic in their life, let alone a Spider-Man one.

Turn Off the Dark

There’s a brand spanking new cut of the infamous third and final incarnation of Spider-Man with Tobey Maguire in the suit and Sam Raimi behind the camera entirely authored by Raimi’s regular editor Bob Murawski that’s been making rounds in a new Blu-Ray collection release and I’m kind of upset that I haven’t found time to buy and watch it before writing this review (maybe I might add an addendum to this once I find free time for it). By all accounts, it is a significantly better and tighter version of a film that clearly had a lot of behind the scenes drama that strangled and tattered the final result to the point of the strong hate the film receives ten years later.

I can’t say I don’t see where the hate for Spider-Man 3 comes from. It’s a broken movie, full of flaws and imperfections and absolutely demolishing the portrayal of one of the most canonical and beloved villains in the entire Marvel catalogue. But I’d also be lying if I said that I end up disliking the film, let alone despising it the way the rest of moviegoers seem to. Anyway, let me divert those angry “you’re stupid for liking this movie” comments just for a second to target on the problems I’m sure anybody would acknowledge about it.

The first and most glaring one is Tobey Maguire was miscast for this movie. I’m sorry, he’s still my favorite screen Peter Parker/Spider-Man (now that I’ve seen Homecoming) and you can’t help the fact that he’s been cast two movies ago (and supplied great performances in them), but this is not his material. I mentioned before that he’s an extremely limited actor and one of those limitations is his inability to sell any kind of darkness in a manner that isn’t comical and overwrought even for Raimi’s stylings. And Spider-Man 3 is unfortunately a film that feels like it desperately wants to be dark, incorporating the Symbiote and Venom storyline – where Spidey finds a new suit in the amorphous alien liquid that attaches to his body but affects his attitude so negatively as to turn him antagonistic to everyone around him, before he forces it off of him and the symbiote finds a new host in obnoxious and pathetic rival photographer Eddie Brock (the spectacularly miscast Topher Grace), transforming him into the dark version of Spider-Man known as Venom – demands that kind of darkness. But, Maguire is holding it back in the most severest manner, for reasons not his fault (his face is way too boyish for him to play off the kind of despicable cool Raimi and co-writers Ivan Raimi [who almost certainly added more of the campy elements] and Alvin Sargent want) and reasons entirely his fault (he cannot sell the violence of certain moments).

Now, that’s Maguire. The other big problem that hinders Spider-Man 3 is no secret: Sam Raimi did not want to make this movie. At least, he didn’t want to make the Venom movie and it gets in the way of his intended storyline where The Sandman Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) fights for his family and Harry Osborn (James Franco beginning his wack descent into actor I despise), now aware of both his late father and Parker’s secret identities, takes up the Green Goblin mantle to avenge the latter figure in his life. As a Spider-Man fan, I can’t say I disagree with this attitude – Venom does not interest me as a villain, totally the type of work as character and design that the dated Todd MacFarlane could come up with in a transparent manner.

As a result, the parts that Raimi truly feel inspired with – such as the beautiful effects work witnessing The Sandman slowly building himself up again after having been changed into his superself in an experiment gone wrong – have that epic pulp quality that Raimi supplied to every single second of Spider-Man 1 and every possible second of 2. But the parts where he’s clearly disinterested in… well, it shows. In some places, it turns terrible such as every moment Grace is on-screen (and I feel like the casting was one place where Raimi was flipping Sony of) and in others… when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Raimi took the most dismissable facets of Spider-Man’s dark development and turned them into one-part comedy, one-part musical cinema and I would be lying if I said I was not entertained by the infamous dance scenes showcasing how the symbiote has developed Parker into an insufferable prick. He’s never as outright dislikable as Andrew Garfield’s Spidey until the very moment the characters realize something is wrong with him, but he never becomes unwatchable either.

At least, not to me, though I am aware this is a point of hatred for many viewers of Spider-Man 3. Maybe if I didn’t love Raimi’s sense of humor or jazz or musical numbers, this act of clear defiance would make me just as well demand Spider-Man 3‘s execution by firing squad, but I instead admire the idea of keeping the bold color and lighting of Spidey, applying it in a new context, and taking ownership of a movie despite how much the studios wanted to shove in. Some people don’t like lemonade, I guess. I love it.

Still, there are many areas of neglect. The acting is so much more anonymous here whether Kirsten Dunst as Spidey’s girlfriend Mary Jane Watson or Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy in another love triangle plotline within this overstuffed film, but where a superhero movie counts, Spider-Man 3 holds its own more than we give it credit for. Its spectacle – with an echoing subway battle, an narrow sky chase, and a very coherent three-pronged climax – doesn’t slouch, its themes are clear and delivered (responsibility, moving on, and restraint), and most of all… it feels like a proper close to a story.

Obviously, that ended up the case when Raimi unsurprisingly walked from Spider-Man 4 and Maguire right after him, but there’s a sense of finality in all of the chickens coming home to roost, the consequences of actions all over the trilogy making Spider-Man decide on how he was going to develop for the rest of his and Mary Jane’s lives together. And Raimi sells that more than anything, looking back on how Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry’s relationship have been shifted over three different movies, tying the Sandman to Spider’s origin (albeit in a very unforgivable manner that is my biggest problem with the movie), and the final scene’s decision to sit within Peter and MJ silently deciding to face any other problems together (easily the best acting both actors get to do in the whole movie).

Spider-Man 3 is a troubled film, no less so than Suicide Squad or Fantastic Four, but that didn’t turn into on-screen misery for me. It’s still in love with its characters and wants to carry all of them to the finish line, even Venom gets more dignity than he deserves (as much as you can with Grace). It’s a step down from two all-timer superhero classics but the result is interesting and the tying knot of the last few scenes shot in solemn sunrises and spotlight blacks makes me feel it works as a curtain call to some of my favorite comic book character incarnations on the screen. Raimi’s heart is battered and bruised but still beating. I can’t help being more forgiving to that sort of thing.

Shut Up and Drive

I’m in exactly the perfect age bracket to be surrounded by the hype and frenzy for Edgar Wright’s latest Ant-Man–rebound passion project, the 2017 crime caper comedy Baby Driver. And I can’t say a lot of that acclaim it’s received is entirely undeserved, as a stylistic montage of car chase and foot chase setpieces soundtracked by some of the most body-jiving music you could ask a kid to listen to music older than him for, it is an absolute joy. It’s nothing exactly revelatory from either Wright (given his early Mint Royale’s “Blue Song” video feeling entirely recreated by the opening five minutes) or the car chase subgenre (‘cause y’know Mad Max: Fury Road, John Wick: Chapter Two, The Raid 2, and Nightcrawler literally just came out, y’all), it’s a candy-colored rhythmic distraction that is both fun and exciting as the demands of each scene go, from square on all the way to… well, all the way to close to the end, but well, let’s square with this before this and get the ugly stuff out of the way before I can return to what’s really good about Baby Driver.

I’m surrounded by dozens of calls by peers for it being a masterpiece or one of the best films of the year and I so very much wish I could side with that because I barely like Baby Driver as it is, when it spends most of that nearly two-hour runtime focusing less on the caper side of things and more on our protagonist getaway driver Baby’s (Ansel Elgort) quick courtings with waitress Deborah (Lily James). This is the first film that Wright has written on his own and without any actual source material to go on (I’ve heard the comparisons to The Driver and Drive, but Baby Driver feels so absolutely different than those) and the last two movies without the co-writing partnership Wright had with his previous muse Simon Pegg have been very informative. Wright finds a lot more free reign to play along with visuals and music in those than he kind of got to do with The Cornetto trilogy, but there’s also less believable humanity in those movies (I don’t wanna say heart, because come on, Wright clearly loves making movies) than when Pegg himself was dedicated to crafting and fully-fleshing out these characters, where we could see these characters however weird they are – Nicholas Angel the closest to caricature – living in the real world.

We get some of that in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World but not as much, we absolutely do not get that in Baby Driver, which is fine since that’s not the point. But it means James has so little material to work with – a brief backstory dump in a Laundromat attached to no real character beyond “likes baby and music” – and try as she might, she’s clearly struggling with having all these reactions coalesce into a compelling romantic lead rather than just in-the-moment acting.

Elgort, on the other hand, holy shit. He’s bad, people. The Divergent series, he was barely noticeable in a sea of vanilla performances. The Fault in Our Stars, he turned an on-paper joke of a character into a smug self-satisfied twerp. And Baby Driver just demands things out of him that he’s absolutely incapable of doing. When he’s first meeting Deborah, the lines coming out of Baby’s mouth are so delicately obtuse (in that self-protected way) that they need somebody who can provide them with sincere uncertainty and instead Elgort recites them with the smirking shallow satisfaction of a serial killer. When the movie gets much darker in its second half and the stakes escalate, Elgort’s idea of toughness is to pout his face as hard as he can and maintain that monotonously like a kid’s impression of Ryan Gosling in Drive. When he shares scenes with Baby’s foster father, he… Well, actually that’s one of the few moments Elgort actually is great, providing a personality that actually seems genuine and fun. I’m gonna be nice and not imply that’s only because he has a stellar scene partner in the one-man-show deaf actor CJ Jones.

Indeed, the supporting cast to those two lovebirds – namely the ones who inhabit Baby’s life of crime that threatens to interrupt his romance – are much better but not by much. Jon Bernthal plays “Douchebag” reliably again but is gone after one scene. Kevin Spacey likewise is inhabiting the kind of sardonic wise guy personality he can do in his sleep, but when the movie demands a fatherly warmth out of his character at the last minute, he has no clue what he’s doing and it’s a tonal whiplash from his preceding coldness. Jamie Foxx is certainly dangerous presence but he’s also replaying the same beats as Motherfucker Jones in Horrible Bosses, so that leaves Eiza Gonzalez and Jon Hamm as the last folks standing as a scene-stealing cocaine Bonnie and Clyde-esque couple and between the two of them, Hamm is the only one that gets enough screentime for us to see a whole person with his own tragic story going on.

Basically when the movie tries to get a story going on, it’s between weak (the crime side) to DOA (the romance), it doesn’t have the script or cast to support it. But when it gets to being just dances of camera, cuts, and drum beats, Wright has an enviable grip on tone and form that leaves on catching their breath after every chase and resembles a bunch of impromptu music videos with all the joy of that Mint Royale music video. The very opening credits is grooving one-shot stroll that feels light as a Nora Ephron comedy and the “Brighton Rock” finale is just a bone-shaking barrage of impacts that imperils the viewer alongside our hero, central to the film is a bicathlon of foot chases and car chases and gunfights from the busy streets of Atlanta and through a shopping mall and it is the most sophisticated and joyous action work of Wright’s career since Shaun of the Dead’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” and a clear sign that Wright belongs in this atmosphere of popcorn movie homages, mixing its musical cues so wonderfully with the roar and squeals of the pursuits that the marriage feels natural and just sinks into the whole experience.

These are aesthetics that demands to be seen in a big screen with a big sound system in all the biggest senses and if it gets interrupted by a watery plot that’s hard to feel emotionally attached with, I can’t help shrugging that off. I’m very clearly in the minority on that script matter anyway so if you’re like the rest of the world, you won’t even need to shrug it off. You can very well leave Baby Driver with a bigger smile on your face than I did.

Spider vs. Octopus

Let’s go back, boys and girls, to a time before 2008 when The Dark Knight nuked the whole cinematic world into a frenzy and remember the last time a comic book movie was close (but not that close) to being as widely acclaimed as the Nolan Batman films. Just four years prior, right on the first rise of the superhero waves, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 came out and had honest-to-God film critics proclaiming it as the second coming of popcorn movie Jesus, most notably when Roger Ebert (who had given the first Spider-Man an unenthusiastic “ok”*) titled it to be the Best Superhero Movie since Superman.

When I saw Spider-Man 2 a little later than the rest of the civilized world in July 2004, I was in Algeria and isolated from all of that noisy celebration. And my response to it was… I didn’t like it. This has changed significantly over the years to which I hold it close if slightly below its predecessor in my esteem, but when I remember the reasons I wasn’t fond of it, I’m not sure I’m entirely ready to dismiss 12-year-old me’s thoughts. The biggest one, as he’d ineloquently put it, is that it “doesn’t have much action”.

As I am now, I’d deviate a bit and say that Spider-Man 2 just doesn’t have that much energy. It still feels like Raimi is happy to return to the web-slinging superhero and help him grow like he’s Richard Linklater and the films are his personal Before trilogy. Spider-Man 2’s script (now by Alvin Sargent) is a lot more grounded in the human drama, expanding beyond the points in which its characters had been left off – namely Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) totally alone of his own volition and his regret for taking up this responsibility so overwhelming that he’s apparently losing his web-slinging and wall-crawling powers alongside his will, struggling actress Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) tired of waiting for Peter’s call and making decisions on her own terms, and boiling “friend” Harry Osborn (James Franco) who obsesses over revenge against Spider-Man for killing his father Norman (Willem Dafoe) just as their strained relationship was beginning to heal, unaware that Norman was Spider-Man’s foe, the Green Goblin. And while that grounding means the excitement is gone, the drama has more stakes and this allows the cast in on giving fuller performances than they already gave in the original.

This lack of pizzaz is also reflected in the new cinematographer Bill Pope and his attempt to reel back from the original’s comic book color into providing New York City as a working town backdrop to Peter and Mary Jane trying to figure out where they stand in their relationship.

Spidey’s new foe this time around is also anguishing over the death of a loved one, Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina), seeing red for his wife’s sudden death during an accident gone wrong that left him under influence of his four metal A.I. tentacles** that earn him the nomiker Doctor Octopus. Octavius begins rampaging his way through Manhattan in movie monster sequences (including his awakening after the accident) of big sound and effortlessly breakable sets. Molina doesn’t have half the dizzying frenzy Dafoe had in his round (and that seems a casualty of giving him that tragic background, which prevents Molina from playing Ock as a total mad scientist monster like he clearly wants to), but he compliments the movie’s balance between soap opera drama and gigantic creature feature nicely, working so well with his co-star tentacle effects (puppets provided by Edge FX) to feel physically one with them.

He’s also the best thing about the movie’s sudden adoption to anamorphic aspect ratio, filling out the screen real nicely with the width and length of his evil robotic claws. Raimi and Pope aren’t 100% sure what to do with that screen space when Doc Ock isn’t eating it up, but every once in a while we get some really inspired moments like the unstoppable train being rescued by Spidey’s might with his exhaustion visually portrayed by his stance (though the idea of all these people knowing Spider-Man’s face REALLY put me off as a kid and I still think the Christ imagery is pushing it more than any scene of New Yorkers throwing trash at the Goblin). Or of course the comic book image of Parker walking away from an alley with his Spider-Man costume in the foreground and in the trash.

The concept of Raimi and Pope’s visuals being able to compliment both the action and themes of the film is an aesthetic bilingualism that polishes Spider-Man 2 as possibly the most mature work in Raimi’s whole output, which again turns back to all of the dialed down Raimi-esque silliness (it’s there in teaspoons: Hal Sparks and Joel McHale both have comic cameos – Sparks’ is more farcical in the slightly extended and slightly inferior Spider-Man 2.5 cut, as well as the addition of J.K. Simmons hopping around his office in Spidey’s discarded outfit, and my single favorite bit of acting in Maguire’s turn as the character giving a passenger on the doomed train who’s criticizing his efforts a great big “are you fucking kidding me?” look). But the tonal groundings give more breathing space for Dunst, Franco, and Rosemary Harris as Aunt May to get to tease out their characters’ internal conflicts and have their little subplots as visible as the superheroics. Maguire himself meets up with most of the emotional arcs and stakes of the film, but seems to put up more of an effort than he should have to in this film, which only makes me turn once again to preferring Spider-Man.

At the end of it all, though, Raimi’s still having a ball of a time. The horror movie awakening of Doctor Octopus, the grandiose battle between Ock and Spidey on the Clock Tower followed by the train battle and rescue, these are all inarguably more interesting setpieces than any of the fights in the first movie, full of velocity and impact and opening many opportunities for the CGI Spidey to strike comic book poses like the final shot of the original film. The melodrama feels genuine and sincere, somehow having a few layers too many but propped up by a cast willing to justify all of them. And the saga of Spider-Man himself growing from outsider to big time hero continues to evolve thanks to Raimi’s sense of pace and utter love for the material he gets to hash out.

*Indeed, this “meh” attitude to Spider-Man was literally my first encounter with a review by Ebert and given I was a child who loved that movie, it got us started on the wrong foot.

**Shout out to D.M., whose criticism of the film comes down to “1. How the fuck are people more impressed by this failing sun project than the invention of functioning, personality-full Artificial Intelligence? and 2. Why the fuck are they automatically evil robots who want to rob banks?” If anybody would ever come close to murdering my enjoyment of this movie, it’d definitely be you.

Does Whatever a Spider Can

I think I already went over in the X-Men review about Spider-Man’s placement in movie history blew the doors wide open for comic book movies to saturate the market, so let me open instead with my personal anecdote to break open some nostalgia.

The night of 11 May 2002, I recall clearly. My mom had brought my 9-year-old self and my siblings to the only-2-year-old shopping mall next to my elementary school and when our paths crossed the box office of the then spanking-new AMC multiplex and I saw a very very late 11 pm showtime for the already week-old release of Sam Raimi’s superhero adaptation Spider-Man, based on one of my favorite superheroes of all time*. It had already been a hard week because despite my excitement for the film, I haven’t been able to watch it yet. All the showtimes were sold out, but all my peers in school were able to watch it.

On the spot, I convince my annoyed mom to take that late showtime opportunity and I finally watch the movie I was hardcore anticipating.

Shortly after I left the theater, Spider-Man was the first experience I’ve had where I consciously had a favorite movie of all time. And while, some of the 15-year-age has knocked the dust off of it from being my idea of a perfect movie, it’s one of the few favorites of my childhood where I don’t look back and think “what the hell was I on?” On maybe a better day, I could imagine it having made the lower end of my favorite movies post.

So, if you’re expecting me to have a problem with Tobey Maguire’s portrayal as Spider-Man like the rest of the world inexplicably does, no, I’m sorry. He may not be much of an actor in his doughey pushover look and his soft-spoken two-steps-away from crying demeanor, but it’s perfect for a role like Peter Parker, a tired kid on a learning curve in the real world who has too much piling on top of him and can only hold on to his morality. Maguire doesn’t even have to try to act – this is Keanu-Reeves-in-John–Wick kind of casting for a limited actor***. When he smiles, you still feel there’s something wrong in the back of his mind (or Spider Sense), when he tries to win something that’s not a supervillain battle, you get the vibe he’s going to lose because he looks like he knows he’ll lose. It’s miraculously undepressing (Maguire sells both his casual underplayed scientific brilliance and his ability to inspire Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane Watson no matter how low they both find themselves), but clear this kid is overwhelmed by the stuff life is throwing at him.

It would be such growing pains that writer David Koepp throws as the Queens-based hero, who finds himself quickly graduated from high school within the first hour (as would have to be, Maguire was 26 at the time of filming) and living with his best friend Harry Osborn (James Franco), son of scientist Norman (Willem Dafoe). Peter is still helping his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) deal with the murder of his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson), the man who inspired Peter to don his costume as Spider-Man with the immortal words “With great power comes great responsibility” after being bitten by a radioactive spider in Columbia University’s lab causing him to sling organic webbing, climb up walls, and become physically enhanced in strength, speed, and all of the above except still looking like Tobey Maguire. Meanwhile, Norman himself has his own secret performance enhancers causing him to go so crazy he dresses up as a Power Rangers villain and enacts a bloodthirsty vendetta against his corporate competitors under the name of Green Goblin.

A lot of tangled web strands for the story and it’s kind of impressive that Koepp and director Raimi are able to streamline this into one great big arc of Parker’s growth as a responsible young adult while finding time to insert super battles in the skies of Manhattan, all of them with that in-your-face comic punch that Raimi supplied in spades with his Evil Dead trilogy. He, cinematographer Don Burgess, and composer Danny Elfman supply weightless enthusiasm to all of Spidey’s web-slinging (most notably in the final shot – some of the effects aged poorly, but that scene alone still dazzles and entertains me even up to the Matrix in-joke) and jazz up the energy to match with Dafoe’s expected mania at being able to embody such a cackling monster, even under the gaudy design of his robotic suit. Raimi’s the kind of filmmaker that clearly makes them for the love of being silly and young again and having the context of a comic book property to let his fan-status translate to pulp popcorn cinema is the best thing. He even gets a chance to play up his horror roots with Dafoe’s self-confrontations in the mirror, two jump scares, and a climax in dark and damp ruins (of an abandoned mental institute, Peter David’s novelization informed me because of course I was so excited I bought the book) where the action gets really violent and colors get dusty and dark against the earlier tones of episodic thwarting in bold colors and mirrors.

Now, the other big complaint I hear is that the movie is too corny or sappy because of Raimi’s eager beaver tones. Just recently, I heard somebody claim that Spider-Man had “too much heart”. Now, what a surprise from somebody like me who swears by Spielberg, but I think “too much heart” is precisely the best kind of problem to have for any work of art. If Spider-Man wants to include post-9/11 portrayals of unity and solidarity of New York helping out Spidey, why should I complain about the positive energy of these moments? Or the human honesty in having the first lines Harris and Robertson deliver give the coziest possible ways to say “Don’t fall on your ass” and “I’m already on my ass”?

Raimi’s Spider-Man may be sloppy in a sense from a lot of tangeants – I barely got through J.K. Simmons ripping Spider-Man’s newspaper boss J. Jonah Jameson right out of the comic panels or the love triangle between Peter, Mary Jane, and Harry – but it’s sincere in all of that sloppiness and that’s always the easiest way to make me fall in love with your movie. Raimi’s just as bold about his human melodrama as he is about his superhero splashes and he has a very incredible cast to help him out, including two actors I normally despise (Robertson and Franco; I had this attitude about Dunst but she’s been impressing me more and more) turning in understated and casual enough performances that when they actually have to work their big moments like Uncle Ben’s death** (including one of my favorite silence cues in all of film music) and Harry’s feeling of betrayal towards Peter and Mary Jane’s closeness, finding out I’ve actually been fond of these people and hate seeing them go is like having the rug pulled out from under me.

That’s to say nothing of Dunst as Mary Jane, pretty enough to understand exactly why Peter’s affections are fixated on her, weathered enough to understand she has her own life and problems beyond Peter’s perspective (and Koepp’s script is VERY generous to her on this front), and charged enough as a presence to sell that iconic upside-down kiss that immediately became a part of film canon like nobody’s business. Her and Maguire make terrific foils and watching their relationship grow (and especially to the script’s credit, not meeting our expectations) is a warm and comforting thing you wouldn’t expect from the same movie where Willem Dafoe has a great big green plastic suit wobbling his head wildly saying “Hello, my dear”.

The main point is Spider-Man is one of the best examples in my mind of letting people make movies because they really want to make this particular movie. There’s not a single frame of this where it feels Raimi isn’t over the moon with what he gets to do with all that Sony money and in an industry right now where comic book films almost uniformly feel more like obligations rather than any real sense of personality, Spider-Man‘s exhuberance at presenting the character kicking and swinging over the city never ceases to endear me.

*In fact, around 2002, Ultimate Spider-Man began its run – those first few stories still hold up – and rejuvenated my love for Spidey.

**And flat out fuck people who make fun of Maguire’s crying. I’m sorry, is it supposed to be photogenic? These folks ain’t worth talking to.

***And we will definitely discuss Maguire’s limitations when it comes to Spider-Man 3.