Revenge of the nerds

Via Chud, the first images of the black Spidey suit being used in Spider-Man 3 have surfaced. This is the living, alien suit that will eventually be revealed as the symbiote that will meld with angry newspaperman Eddie Brock to become Venom, one of the most fascinatingly twisted villains in the Spider-Man canon. Add this to what we’ve seen of Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman, and there’s every indication that this sequel could, yet again, one up its predecessor. Despite Chris Orr’s exceptionally good, and nearly convincing, argument for all sorts of problems with the second Spider-Man film, I think the sequel is far better than the original and, in general, a damn near perfect summer blockbuster. So what if some of the dialog is stilted? It’s a comic book movie! And, to my mind, one that captures the bemused, four-color fun of the source material’s paneled pages exceptionally well. Maybe the characters aren’t the stuff of a 70s Scorsese film, but they’re nicely developed, flawed, funny people, dealing with everyday problems—exactly what made the comic so wonderful to begin with.

It gives me supreme pleasure to see Sam Raimi pull off these wildly entertaining, charmingly uncynical, megabudget cinematic behemoths with such wit and grace. He doesn’t just get the comic book part right (as is the case with, say, the totally underrated Hellboy), he gets the movie part right too, and it shows at the box office. Who would’ve thought that the guy behind Evil Dead II would eventually end up making summer blockbusters that gross in excess of $400 million?

Factor in the giant-sized victory, both critical and commercial, of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and, to a lesser degree, the success of geek auteurs like Tarantino, Rodriguez, and the Wachowski Brothers, and there’s a strong case to be made that the fanboys and movie nerds were right all along: they really did know how to make better movies, and when they finally got the chance, they pretty much took over. It’s the most delightful irony in Hollywood that the guys who spent the early 90s making ultra low budget splatter films like Evil Dead and Bad Taste are now the toast of the industry. Gimme some sugar baby is right.