More on Spider-Man --"Tangled Web"

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Not so oddly, both articles share the Shakespearean title. One excerpt:
"Forty thousand years of human evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of human potential," [the Green Goblin] declares. A hundred years of cinema, on the other hand, and we've barely progressed beyond the stage where the villain is asked to signify evil by laughing like a jackass.
Go Spidey!
clark
TANGLED WEBS
by ANTHONY LANE
The New Yorker
What happens to movies? Whom should we blame when a big studio picture goes astray, or does it have an entropy of its own? To be specific: how come "Spider-Man" begins in such good humor and ends, like Eensy-Weensy, completely up the spout? The opening credits throw themselves into position with an off-kilter, nineteen-fifties brio; the Saul Bass who put together the title sequence of "Vertigo" would have looked on with approval. Then we are tipped straight into Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire). "This story, like all stories worth telling," he informs us, "is all about a girl." True enough, especially when the girl in question, Mary Jane, is played by Kirsten Dunst, who gives a dreamy, near-perfect impersonation of someone who really doesn't mind having to dye her hair red for the sake of a movie.
Peter is a supergeek. This we know because he wears spectacles, runs for the bus, and aces science. In short, he is crying out for an alternative personality. (So many comic-book heroes turn out to be extended riffs on the before-and-after promise of a Charles Atlas advertisement.) His wish is granted when a genetically modified spider nips him on the hand during a school trip; back home, where he lives with his uncle (Cliff Robertson) and aunt (Rosemary Harris), Peter enjoys a refreshing sleep and wakes up with an improved physique, sharpened vision, and an overwhelming desire to clamber out of people's drains when they're about to run a bath.
There is, it emerges, nothing disgusting about becoming an arachnanthrope. Peter fails, for instance, to sprout a further quartet of limbs or a funky tarantula fuzz on his upper thighs. His cutest new knack is for ejecting long, twangy threads of sticky stuff from his wrists; there is, perhaps, a happy touch of Portnoy to this unfamiliar gift, and I think that Maguire is wise to it. Certainly, the smartest scene in the movie comes when, full of the joys of his spring, he leaps onto a roof and tries, for the first time, to shoot his silk into the void. "Go, web, go!" the desperate teen-ager cries, madly flipping his hand back and forth. Hmmm. Maguire is much the best thing about the film. The more those millions of comic-book addicts (Where are they all? Do we get to see them in daylight?) fretted online that he might be wrong for the part, the more I knew that he was right, not least because it is the essence of Peter to worry whether he deserves the role of hero. The glum-nervy smile, the sidelong glance of the slightly bug eyes, that modest arching of the brows: all the Maguire tics were ready to roll, and there is something absurdly winning in Peter's expression as he realizes what heights he is now at liberty to scale. With so much in prospect, he is almost afraid of himself.
The trouble with the older comic-book ethics is that they have a simple, thudding solution to this dilemma: civic duty. As Peter's uncle puts it, "With great power comes great responsibility." Not so. With great power comes a great ability to check out the view from the top of the Chrysler Building without having to wait for the elevator. The director of "Spider-Man," Sam Raimi, has enough B-movie serum in his bloodstream to know what manner of kicks we want from this picture; we want to see Peter swing down the avenues on long, looping arcs of thread, a trapeze of his own devising, like a flying Sinatra. It may be the hippest method ever devised for beating traffic. No wonder you can feel Raimi losing interest in the project, if not losing the plot, as Spider-Man is forced to quit horsing around and start battling for the soul of New York. Worse still, a nemesis arrives in the form of a rich scientist named Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), who suffers a regrettable incident in his laboratory involving Oz-style smoke. From this he emerges as the Green Goblin, an airborne lump of id in a safety helmet. "Forty thousand years of human evolution and we've barely even tapped the vastness of human potential," he declares. A hundred years of cinema, on the other hand, and we've barely progressed beyond the stage where the villain is asked to signify evil by laughing like a jackass.
And so the movie, with spiderlike timidity, scuttles into a corner and freezes. The second half could have been made by a committee: as ill-fitting sequences come and go, we get a loud, anachronistic parody of a newspaper editor, we get Spider-Man saving a baby from a burning house (Is that truly the best that anyone could do?), and we get an attempted rape scene that segues with inadvisable haste into a Wet Tank Top scene. We even get Willem Dafoe bringing a cake to a Thanksgiving dinner and storming out with the words "Enjoy the fruitcake," as if we hadn't already been enjoying him for the last hour and a half. He gets his comeuppance, of course, in the form of a large steel blade puncturing his lower abdomen and groin. Contrast this with the delight on Peter's face as he peeks down his shorts on the morning after the bug bite, and you wonder what kind of hormonal power play is going on here. All the more reason for Peter to accept Mary Jane's love when she offers it at the close. Instead, he outs himself as a good friend and strides away to continue his manly task. What are you doing, Pete? Why not spirit her to the rooftops and make hundreds of spider babies? The answer, I fear, is the need for sequels. Once you're glued to a worldwide web, it's hard to get off.
..........................
Tangled web
Spider-Man doesnâ€™t quite swing
BY GARY SUSMAN
The Boston Phoenix
In the end, itâ€™s all about frustration. No matter how much he tries, Spider-Man canâ€™t please the city that benefits from his heroics, the people closest to him, or himself. So it is with Spider-Man the movie, which struggles mightily and succeeds often yet is doomed to disappoint the fanboys whoâ€™ve waited 40 years, general-interest newbies looking for the usual summer action spectacle, and maybe even Columbia Pictures, which ponied up big bucks to build a popcorn franchise and ended up with a glum opera of pop existentialism.
The genius of the Spider-Man comics has always been that their hero, like all the Marvel Comics characters created in his wake, is still just an ordinary guy with real-life problems and neuroses. Over at DC Comics, Superman doesnâ€™t suffer from self-doubt, and Batman never has money woes, but poor Peter Parker has those problems and others that his spider powers not only fail to alleviate but often make worse. Heâ€™s a superhero whose saga is not an adolescent power fantasy but an adolescent angst trip.
So Tobey Maguire turns out to have been an inspired casting choice. Given his past roles (The Ice Storm, The Cider House Rules), heâ€™s an old hand at geeky teenage awkwardness. Bitten by a mutant spider in a science lab, his Peter wakes up the next day to find his body has gone through a parody of puberty. His muscles fill out, little hairs sprout all over his body (thatâ€™s how he clings to walls), and a sticky white goo shoots out of his body and splatters all over the place, at least until he develops some wrist control. (This is his webbing, which, in a felicitous change from the comics, spews organically from his forearms instead of being a synthetic creation that dispenses from a wrist-mounted reservoir Peter has invented.)
Once he masters his new attributes, Peter becomes a web-swinging hero out of guilt; an early failure to use his power to stop a robber comes back to haunt him when the thug strikes again closer to home. But even using his power for good brings him no satisfaction. It makes him a totemic target for tabloid publisher J. Jonah Jameson (a scene-stealing J.K. Simmons), and a literal target for supervillain the Green Goblin, who also goes after Peterâ€™s loved ones â€” Aunt May (Rosemary Harris), whoâ€™s raised him as a son, and unrequited crush Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), whose growing attraction to both Peter and Spider-Man puts her at constant risk.
Not that using his power for evil is an option, though itâ€™s one the Goblin offers him. Gobbo, it turns out, is Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), a wealthy defense contractor and father of Peterâ€™s pal Harry (James Franco). Like Peter, Norman is a science whiz and the subject of a lab accident, but his transformation is a horrifying travesty of Peterâ€™s, driving him mad and creating a split personality. He provides a cautionary example of the road Spider-Man might have taken, but to fight him is to risk hurting still more of the people closest to Peter.
The movie is best during its first half, which breathes fresh life into the myth of origin that will be familiar to Spider fans but also offers what even non-fans will find a resonant coming-of-age story. The second half, with its big battle scenes, is probably more of what the studio wanted, but itâ€™s far less satisfying. Thereâ€™s a lot of unconvincing CGI, some outrageous scenery chewing by Dafoe, and some oddly draggy, stop-start pacing from director Sam Raimi, whoâ€™s usually a master of forward momentum, whether headlong (the Evil Dead trilogy) or deliberate (A Simple Plan, The Gift). Thereâ€™s also some spectacularly bad dialogue (the screenplay is credited to David Koepp but was the product of several writersâ€™ pens) whenever Peter/Spider-Man has a heart-to-heart with Mary Jane, and that stops the movie dead.
Even when he fights, Spider-Man has nothing memorable to say â€” a change from the comics, where he was cracking witticisms and skulls at the same time decades before Schwarzenegger, and with more panache. On the page, the costume frees Peter to be the brash, cool, carefree, popular teen he longs to be the rest of the time, but Maguireâ€™s Spider-Man is just Parker in spandex. The movie artfully nails the comicsâ€™ take on adolescent helplessness, but its sense of comic-book fun is in too short supply.

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Topic - More on Spider-Man --"Tangled Web" - clarkjohnsen 10:19:54 05/09/02 (0)

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