Sinking Fast

The more I think about Spider-Man 3, the less I like it. Anthony Lane's review didn't do much to keep me on the good side of the fence either.

Update: Chuck is right. Doesn't matter too much what anyone thinks of this sucker; we're now pretty much predetermined to get more. It broke all the single day records and opened with more than $59 million domestic and $104 million worldwide. Holy geeks in spandex, Batman. That's a lot of money.

Update 2: Thinking about it a little more, I've decided that there were two things that drew me in. The first was the screening itself--a massive affair in Times Square where, even with only press in attendance, it took 45 minutes to wade through all the lines and security to get in. It definitely drove home the point that Spider-Man 3 is a big deal in a way that the usual critics' screenings at small, private screening rooms hidden throughout the city's office buildings don't.

The second is that, despite the myriad script and plot issues, I still really, really like Raimi's basic approach to the material. He simply gets the boyish, morally simplistic, fun-loving, sprightly comic tone of classic Spider-Man right. Whether in the color schemes, the run-down expressionism of the middle-class New York housing, or the way the small, personal dilemmas are always paralleled in the larger hero plots--the Spider-Man movies all feel exactly like the best incarnations of the Spider-Man comic books. And so, in the same way that, as a kid, I used to love getting the newest issue of Amazing or Web of (did anyone actually read Spectacular?), and enjoyed reading each issue even if I also knew it was pretty mediocre, I still enjoy going to sit in a big, downtown movie theater and watching Spider-Man swing and wisecrack and have girl troubles on the big screen. Call it weakness, call it nostalgia, maybe even call it lack of critical distance--but whatever it is, Raimi captures the aura of his four-color source material so effortlessly that, when watching his Spider-Man films, I cease to be a jaded, cranky, critic judging a movie from a dispassionate distance and go back to being a 12 year old boy reading a comic book. And think my review is a pretty accurate impression of that.