Friday, May 31, 2002
Tonight we were able to get the babysitter at the right time, so we set out to do what we intended to do the previous Friday, which was to go out to the local pub and then go on to see Spider-Man.
I picked up the tickets on the way home from work, and I made it home early as well, so we had plenty of time to sit down at the pub and relax. Erika agreed to the idea of going to see a play at Stratford this summer. So far, Richard III is at the top of the list, though Three Penny Opera and King Lear come in a close tie for second. After a pleasant and filling meal, we walked across the street to the theatre.
I have to say that Spiderman comes across as perhaps the best-realized story of all of the comic book hero movies that have hit the screen in the past decade or so. The psychology of the characters seems the best-realized of the bunch (though not exactly deep), supported in part by better-than average acting by both the main actor and his foe. For once even the bad-guy seems plausible, both in terms of what drives him to be the way he is, and where he gets all of his whiz-bang gear (he's the insane head of a military research firm -- now there's a pleasant thought). Even the newspaper editor seemed almost plausible -- his character always struck me as being the hardest to believe in the comic book series.
I did see bits of this film before on a pirate CD-R a friend downloaded. I doesn't seem to translate well onto the small screen -- the fight-sequences look too cartoony when seen on the small screen, but is just believable when seen in the large.
Spiderman was never one of my favourite comic book characters when I was a kid -- I was much more into British comics when I was young. I remember that some of my friends were really into him, but I kept wondering when Stan Lee was going to let him grow up (he seemed to be stuck in that timeless netherworld where characters never grow and never change, putting ol' Spider up there with the likes of Family Circus in my mind). I seemed to go for the quirky and off-beat even while young -- I remember that one of my favourite comics was "Howard the Duck", which was about as anti-comic a comic-book hero as you could get at that time.
Anyways, the movie was good -- not deep, but arguably the best of its genre.
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