A "review" of Spiderman 3

I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only person in the world who wants to do terrible, kinky things to Bryce Howard.

You know who Bryce is. She's the wet, naked lady in the water from Lady in the Water, and she basically yellows around The Village for two hours with great big eyes that just beg for someone to bend her over a plowshare and churn her butter until they invent penicillin. Bryce plays Gwen Stacy in Spiderman 3, Peter Parker's runner-up lady friend when things go sour in his asexual relationship with Mary Jane.

I can't count the number of things wrong with this situation.

In short, Spiderman 3 is a story about people fucking up, breaking the law, breaking hearts and somehow never getting their comeuppance. Spiderman, if you recall, is a "superhero". He swings in on a strand of super-resilient silk, nabs the bad guy, and then the police show up and take the bad guy to jail. Somehow, that formula got lost in this dense, two hour and twenty minute whirlwind tour of downtown Cleveland, Ohio.

That's right. When Sandman tries to rob a moving armored truck, he's doing it right outside my office building. They shut down the street for two weeks to shoot about two minutes of punchy-swervy.

So there's a lot going on in this movie. It's clearly the result of two scripts that have been pushed into one film. There are three (count 'em), three bad guys vying to kill Spidey in this one. Peter Parker flirts with about 90 percent of the female population of Manhattan and has a lot of conflicting emotions about what it's like to wear black. Let's iterate through a few of them.

A comet crashes to Earth, immediately seeks out Peter Parker, and turns his suit black. This spontaneously causes Pete to grow the pair of balls I've been hoping he'd get for Christmas every time he meets some inconsiderate jerkwad and just "aw shucks" and "gosh darns" his way to humility with his tail between his legs. With black power comes black responsibility, so Pete gets his life in order: he starts dressing like a GQ model and thrusting his crotch towards strange women on the street. He also starts wearing his hair down in front of his face, causing at least one person in the audience at the theater in which I sat to refer to him as "emo".

Meanwhile, Mary Jane struggles with the burden of insignificant celebrity, forced to live a life where the only options are Broadway stardom or abject obscurity waiting tables. She's dating Spiderman, and he is apparently too focused on saving the goddamn world to look at Kirsten Dunst's constant fish-staring-at-the-bubble-burping-deep-sea-diver expression and ask "Hey, I wonder if MJ is hiding a profound dissatisfaction with her professional prospects and is compelled to be dishonest about it because of some deeper emotional intimacy problems." Really, at this point Peter Parker is better off dating a big ol' piece of corrugated cardboard. It can act better than Dunst, and is much less likely to be completed pissed off at him all the time.

During all of this, Pete's best friend Harry, who found his dad's old stash of crazy supervillain gear at the end of the last film, plots Spidey's demise. Completely tangential to all of this, an escaped convict falls into an open-pit physics lab, where some scientists are anxious to disintegrate a pool of sand, outdoors, in the middle of the night, under completely unsupervised conditions.

Uh, OK. I suppose that if I'm willing to believe that our hero was bitten by a radioactive spider and ended up with webspinners in his wrists instead of dying from six different types of cancer, then I can believe that quantum particles of feldspar can turn a con into a transmutagenic shape-shifter.

This movie doesn't really give you time to think about the logistics of these kinds of things. The film is fast and fast-paced, and with so many plot points, I'm sure Sam Raimi agonized over cutting out every last frame that didn't specifically contribute to advancing the plot. They don't even spend time discussing the rivalry Peter Parker develops with another photographer, one who goes head-to-head with with him maybe twice and develops enough of a hatred for Parker from this limited interaction to eventually beg God to strike him down.

It's actually a good thing that this movie is so quick. Sure, it blurs the action sequences and reduces any hope you may have of watching the CGI special effects. But it's great for helping you forget about The Fucking Red Dot in the screen.

We ended up catching the 10:10 digital screening of Spiderman 3, and I was excited to experience it in a digital format instead of celluloid after seeing the miserable film quality of 300 when I saw that in the theater. I'm told that 300 looked fantastic in digital, so I figured "what the hell". There are a lot of problems with film stock, to be sure. There are flecks, scratches, cigarette burns, and sprockets to break everything eight ways from Sunday. But you know what they lack? A big red dot, right there in the upper left-of-center of the screen. It was there for the trailers. It was there for the entire film. It was there for the chases and the emotional, teary "What's happening to our relationship, Mary Jane?" scenes.

It's even there for the hot stud disco montage. It never went away.

Now, I know George Lucas loves digital media, and if he had his way every theater in America would be, basically, a giant computer monitor with a screen resolution of about 800,000 x 600,000. Screw him. I know how hard it is for people to figure out their monitor settings when the screen is only 17 inches across. God help us when it turns into 417 inches and the projectionist can't figure out what "RGB no signal attached to device" means.

Personally, I would rather see Roger Ebert's dream of MaxiVision go nationwide and we can move beyond this whole inferior "digital" idea. That Fucking Red Dot kind of ruined it for me forever. I could have spent this space raving about how clear and clean the picture was, and how there was no discernible jitter in the film, and that would have been amazing. In truth, it was amazing how clear the picture was, but when you have a dead pixel pissing you off for the duration of the movie, you kind of have your choice made for you. We don't need digital movies, we just need to fix the problems we have with traditional film with modern technology.

But poor digital quality of the picture aside, this review is supposed to be about Bryce Howard. I mean Spiderman. Spidey gets a peck from Bryce in this film, outraging MJ beyond all capacity for rational thought. It could have been worse. I mean, getting a kiss from the naked chick from Lady in the Water is hardly grounds to end a relationship that is, by all accounts, already a lifelong obsession built atop lies and false identities. If I were Spiderman, it probably would have been a fair bit more than a kiss, but fortunately for everyone Peter Parker is the type who would never have to explain why there are a bunch of eight-legged baby heads that look suspiciously like Opie Cunningham running around.

Of course, with their relationship on the rocks, Pete does the unthinkable and Listens To The Black Gunk On His Clothes, which is never a good sign. He starts dating Gwen, but seems primarily interested in showing off his Real Cool Moves, which largely amounts to improvisational jazz piano and doing something that's a cross between The Bump and that tequila dance that Pee Wee Herman did in Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Throughout all of Pete's bad decisions, he ends up hurting the people he cares about. He hurts MJ, he embarrasses Gwen, he blows up his best friend. He punches Sandman into a pile of goo and gets his photographer rival fired from The Bugle. In the end, Pete decides that Listening To The Gunk is a Bad Idea, and he rips off his clothes and decides that maybe having great power includes some additional caveats that he may not have considered.

With the cool black suit disintegrated into some oily slop, Peter basically gets off scot-free. His reprehensible behavior really endures no lasting repercussions, aside from the whole "somebody tries to kill his girlfriend" thing, which is pretty much inevitable in every film. Pete basically gets to say, "My bad, everybody!" and the world moves on, pretty much oblivious to the fact that a superhuman vigilante has crossed over the line and has made no indication that he's keeping himself in check other than going back to the old uniform.

As far as morality tales go, Spiderman 3 fails to hit the mark. Ditto for action, ditto for romance, ditto for coherent plot. It looks good though, if you can stand staring at a goddamn dot for two hours. I think Sam Raimi's goal was to show a more complex interpretation of the classic good guy/bad guy superhero movie. The good guy has a dark side. The bad guy has actual motivation for committing his crimes. (No more "I'm going to blow up the city with a synthetic sun because I feel like it" mad scientist schemes.) The impact of this approach is lost amidst a rapid flurry of plot points from a story jam-packed with about four movies' worth of bad guys and exposition. Spiderman 3 is just too much stuff for one film, and the final result is hectic, rushed, and off-center. Characters don't really grow or learn their lessons, they remain static and stilted, and they only really change their perspectives when the storyline magically shifts and they have a sudden change of heart.

That's not how you run a movie. That's how you run sweeps week on All My Children. There are several parallels to a soap opera in this movie: the abstract rivalry; the hand-wavy and promptly-dismissed explanations of major elements that should probably result in newspaper headlines and Nobel prizes in the real world. Most substantially Spiderman 3, like a soap opera, requires you to have a working knowledge of the characters and their backstory. You'll love Spiderman 3 if you know off the top of your head the convoluted love stories and origins of characters as easily as you know that on Guiding Light Elani was just pretending that Alan Michael was the father of her child so that he wouldn't cut her out of his lucrative cosmetics company (which he was about to lose in a trumped-up lawsuit to Jenna the Reformed Catburglar) and.... Basically, there's so much convoluted development of character interactions that the story is just sick with continuity, which is ignored and reinforced, seemingly at will, just to put another scene in the can and move onto the next one. You're not going to be able to just jump into this movie if you haven't seen the first one. My guess is that Sam Raimi is assuming that the whole wide world has seen his other movies. Perhaps that is his greatest mistake with this feature: assuming that anybody gives a damn enough to want to remember all this instead of seeing a nice new superhero movie that doesn't require Cliff's Notes.