Movie Review
Spider-Man 3

By: Patrick McKay
2007-05-15



Posted 05/15/2007 - 11:59:17 AM by meatbreak:
 Oh man, the Emo side of Spidey is hilarious. It made me cringe so much I think I put my back out.
 
Posted 05/15/2007 - 01:09:20 PM by AKMoose:
 "Superheroes aren’t supposed to 'go bad'", "Bryce Dallas Howard has to serve as a rival for Mary Jane, seemingly only because the studio wanted another ingénue..." etc. I just love when reviews of comic movies call plotlines from decades ago things that "aren't supposed to" happen, or blame them on the film studio. Additionally, "Ok, so, that’s pretty campy. But it’s a comic book movie—it’s supposed to be campy," is a line I would use to give this movie a much higher rating. But my overall perception of a great deal of people who dislike this film but like the first two is that they never actually read comics enough to realize this is, in that sense, the truest of the films.
 
Posted 05/15/2007 - 01:50:52 PM by pmckay:
 HA!
 
Posted 05/15/2007 - 01:58:04 PM by super_are:
 those plotlines would suck if they were from centuries ago, let alone decades. This isn't worse than Superman Returns, though.
 
Posted 05/15/2007 - 02:28:15 PM by syurix:
 I've seen Spidey 3 twice because, even though the script is a debacle, it feels like 6 years worth of cultural warfare distilled into 2 hours. It's so far over the edge and so stuffed with accidental surrealism that I feel like it'll take another few viewings, possibly with chemical help, to fully understand it. The sexualized cooking scene, the play that Harry wrote for MJ (A la "Richard Mc Beef", the play written by the VT shooter... unfortunate coincidence or hard-wiring into the cultural mind-meld?) and the part where the Fall-Out Boy suit gives him the ability to play the piano? "Can You make some with nuts?" the part where he runs past the flag and there are firemen spread through the crowd for some reason? God, if Sam Raimi was doing that with a straight face, I'm terrified. What spidey 1 was to the communal sense of (and yearning for) an elevated everyman that followed 9-11, this is to the non-sequiters and reduction of heroism to a way to sell genocide that have defined the 5 years that followed. Is this a great, era-defining film like "Children of Men?" No, but see this thing while high, drunk, and surrounded by like-minded friends in a neighborhood where people yell at the screen and it fucking kills in a totally different, but equally valid (especially in terms of cultural-product-as-cultural-insight) set of ways.
 
Posted 05/16/2007 - 12:23:26 AM by IanMathers:
 "But my overall perception of a great deal of people who dislike this film but like the first two is that they never actually read comics enough to realize this is, in that sense, the truest of the films." Oh no you don't, AKMoose: I've been reading Spidey comics since grade school, and this is emphatically not the 'truest' of the films, unless you're thinking of eras when the comics had shitty writing.
 
Posted 05/16/2007 - 04:12:57 AM by prohibitedart:
 Nice work, Patrick. I've been enjoying reviews at Stylus lately; maybe that's because I'm agreeing with a fair amount of them. I saw Spidey 3 at a midnight showing. The theatre was packed (obviously), but there was minimal applause after it ended and rightly so. Raimi's hatred of Venom, to me, is unfounded. He's a great villain, and probably my favorite. If only he devoted the film to Brock and ditched the Sandman and Gwen... obviously there were unresolved issues with Harry, but the way they were handled seemed borderline retarded. I guess I'm going back to the 90s FOX animated series...