Spider-Man

Spider-Man now takes the lead with the highest-grossing opening weekend ever, at $114 million. I'm glad my little $5.25 could be a part of that.

I suppose the biggest mistake I could have made was to assume that this was just going to be some movie about a red guy that jumps around from building to building and rescues people in danger. Well no sirree, Bob, that isn't the half of it. That isn't even the fourth of it.

Spider-Man is a surprisingly down to Earth movie. You got the school setting. You got the guy, and you got the girl. The cliches are there, but they are subtle and if anything, they will make you feel more comfortable than bored.

Peter Parker (Tobey Macguire) is the high-school senior, class nerd, and soon to be endowed with strange and wonderful powers. Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) is the sweet girl next door (I can't emphasize the "sweet" part enough), dreaming of being an actress, struggling to make ends meet with her life, and living with a Homer Simpson from hell who calls her "trash". Put these two together, along with the obvious boyfriend competition, and you have one heck of a ... love story. Wait a minute, is that right?

Yeah, I gotta tell you, Spider-Man not only surprised me with its effects and action, but also with its versatility as a movie. It could easily pass as a chick flick, comedy, action, even a drama. It will clothe you with the shoes of its characters and walk you for a mile. But then it'll turn around and beat the living crap out of you.

The comedy, though, is what really puts the 1 in the 114. (Which, I might add, is 411 backwards.) The entire audience, myself included, were treated with several good laughs, all spaced out through the entire movie, and most of them being the result of either a witty script or just all out creative shots. One such example that I absolutely have to mention... shortly after Peter gets his new powers, he gets into a fight with Mary Jane's boyfriend. The guy tries to punch Peter in the face, but he dodges it. In the shot where he dodges the punch, it goes into slow motion (to show what it's like for Peter with his super reflexes). The guy's fist heads off the right side of the screen, and Peter has enough time to dodge the punch, look at the extended arm for a second, glance at the guy's face, then back at the arm again before the guy pulls his hand back after missing. You really have to see it for yourself to get the full effect.

William Dafoe triples out nicely as a scientist, father of Peter's best friend Harry, and of course, the Green Goblin himself. James Franco, as Harry, fits like a condom on the jealous son role. (What part of "O" don't you understand?) The two of them look so much like each other, you'd think they were really related.

There is some real nice chemistry going on between Peter and Mary. These two are both extraordinary actors and together, I felt so much for them, I really did. I found myself thinking of them when I heard songs on the radio the next day. That doesn't happen too often (although I'm sure I said the same thing about some other movie before).

It's just too bad that Harry's name couldn't have been Paul instead... then when the three of them were together, they would be Peter, Paul and Mary.

Spidey scales the walls of buildings; that's what everyone was there for. I'll tell you right now that by the end of some of those sweeping shots, I lost all sense of which way was up. It was fantastic. Granted, there could've been more climbing, but what you get in place of it is far better anyway. On some of the "swinging" scenes, it's a little tougher to follow since the angle is always changing, circling or swinging back and forth like a pendulum, and the speed is riveting!

The action is pretty sweet; when a villain makes an appearance, he doesn't cop out and run away, or receive the mercy of a quick death. Spidey kicks their butts and does it with graphic eloquence. Some of the fights are pretty darn brutal. I imagine that the big "kids and violence" debate will soon erupt with renewed vigor after word of some of this gets around. But hey, the good guys win (surely you know that), and the message is clear enough to me, that you have the right to fight back when people screw with you. Even when Kirsten gets mugged by four guys, she fights back too.

On the other hand, there is a surprisingly high occurrence of tears that fall throughout Spider-Man. That is what makes it so alive. I wanted to hug Kirsten so many times. I saw her before, on the cover of Entertainment magazine a few times and remember thinking yeah, she's pretty cute. But I didn't expect her to get to me so much. She is great in this movie. Hope to see a lot more of her :)

The end shot of Spiderman and the American flag is worth the whole trip alone.

But you don't have to take my word for it.
Go see it for yourself and take your own word.