Spider-Man 3 (Page 1 of 2)

....So, hey Teague....Let's talk.

Seriously, though. Three moments. There are three moments that I love in this movie. They are as follows:
1. Bruce Campbell.
2. The birth of Sandman. The effects/animation are quite good, the music in the scene is moving and it's overall touching. For instance, my twin sister was watching the movie for the first time. She has no attachments to this franchise or these characters, but when he tried to reach for his daughter's locket and couldn't grab it, she genuinely went, "Aaawww." Also, she gasped out loud when the engagement ring escaped Peter's grasp earlier.
3. James Franco and the pie. "So good".
Most everything else, I can either take or leave, except for the things that make me cry blood tears.

Last edited by johnpavlich (2011-11-14 09:37:30)

Yay sentimentality! Writing movies is easy!
SAID WHILE REACHING OUT TO TOUCH A PHOTO OF HIS DEAD BUDGIE

Does the Spidey 3 banner on the main page say FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU in the background?

Yeah, this is possibly my favorite commentary you guys have ever done.

You know, if Peter had just left after talking to the Sandman at the end and not gone to talk to Harry, Harry would have never died. He only died because Peter showed up. He was waiting for Peter.

They should have made aunt may venom.

They put Gwen Stacey in this movie and then didn't kill her. What the hell?

I wanted Mary Jane to die, and every scene in this movie with Mary Jane I was waiting for something to kill her. I don't really know why.

Why did they put her astronaut boyfriend in the previous film and then not follow that up by having him get the symbiote? Was that not the reason they put him into the second film?

The thing about these movies is that they dangle these cool things at you and then don't do those cool things. "Hey, here's Venom! Look at Venom guys! OOOOh what are we gonna do with Venom!?" And then they gave Venom about five minutes of screen time and no real motivation at all. Sandman's character starts out with an interesting motivation and goal, and then they totally ignore all that crap so they can have him hit stuff a lot. They take the - granted, very flimsy and stupid - tension between Harry and Peter and throw it out the window for most of the movie due to amnesia. All the character stuff they could have done there was just thrown out because they literally made him forget his motivation and goals for half the movie.

The movie as a whole was a huge mess of setting up potentially cool stuff and then saying "nope, we need to totally ignore all that stuff we just set up, so let's change all of this and establish a new scenario". It's not even like it's 2nd act "upping the ante" type changing. It's full on changing the goals of all the characters and then moving into the second act. Except Sandman, whose goal they just ignore, really. Venom doesn't even show up until well into the second act, just before they go into the third act / climax. I guess that's upping the ante, eh? Just throwing in a new villain at the end? Hrmm...

<EDIT>
It's like they started off the script and said "OK, we've got these two or three good ideas for what we want to do with this story, let's do it like this", and then they got thirty pages in and thought "no, this is dumb, let's just add a scene or two to undo all that crap and set up these new ideas instead" and then they spent about 80 pages doing that and thought "no no no, this isn't working...  let's just go back to the first ideas we had...  just add a scene or two to undo the changes we already made before...  and... good..."

But then someone said "hey, wait...  people will probably get pissed off that we just wasted like 90 minutes of screen time with plot stuff that we just threw out..." so someone else said "I know! Let's just add this other character to the end and we can pretend like it was all building up to this the whole time!"

And then they all had a congratulatory party where they all got drunk as hell before they sat down to finish writing the last bit of the movie.
</EDIT>

Something to add to the money-making discussion at the end: the thing that gets these films to make a buttload of money is the fact that it's something that a family can go see, and kids - older kids - will want to go see these movies. A lot of the audience for these movies is the 8-14 year old kids that have families that all go to the movies together. That's why they keep trying to make every movie PG 13 now, cause parents won't take their 8 year old to go see Watchmen cause it's R-Rated. Why do you think Watchmen bombed? Wasn't cause it was bad. It was cause there was naked blue guys and dirty sex and people getting brained and stuff like that in there. While the 10 year old kids out there might see a preview for that and say "wow, I wanna go see that movie!" their parents are gonna say "That's R-rated, so it's probably violent and full of boobies" so they won't take their kids to see it.

I KNOW there are a lot of people who will drag their 5 year old kids into a theater to see se7en, but those are the truly retarded people of the world. The people who give Monies to Spiderman 3 and Transformers 2 aren't really stupid, they're just trying to give their kids a good time, or they are themselves teenagers and thus just kinda dumb in general.

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2011-11-15 10:46:35)

The Zoidberg levels on this forum are getting incredibly high, incredibly fast. Not that I'm complaining.

Anyway, they should have made the symbiote the villain instead of Venom specifically. What if Peter defeats Venom early on, and the symbiote goes on to infect other people in his life? Heck, that provides a better explanation for Harry's revolving door arc. He gets infected and turns evil. Then he fights back with the old "I know you're in there somewhere" thing, and teams up with Peter in the third act.

I'm glad you said this.  It's one of those words a lot of moviepeople I love throw around disparagingly.  What is the difference between story sentimentality and actual sentimentality?  There must be a difference because I don't see anything inherently wrong with it.  Is it Norman Rockwell vs Piss Christ? 

Is it Hallmark? Not that I want everything to be a Hallmark card, but sometimes a Hallmark card does the trick.

I hear Spielberg described as sentimental frequently.  What does that mean?

...help.

The best I can offer is "tone." Which I feel is only a slightly more insightful description than "magic."

*shrug*

Good commentary and I liked it a lot, especially Teague flipping out from time to time

Spiderman 3, to me, is just a mess of missed opportunity. It's like they had all this good source material, lessons on what not to do as well as good villains to work with-what could possibly go wrong?

Yeah, we all know the answer to that question.

In my opinion, Spidey 3 is just too much al packed in to one movie with no clear direction or focus. I honestly do not think I would have made it through the movie without having watched or read an other Spiderman material.

First of all, Venom, as many have said, is completely underused. Venom is probably the most iconic of the Spiderman villains and instead of getting his own movie, he is relegated to 3rd fiddle against Sandman and a poorly designed Green Goblin redux. Venom should have been the capstone villian, or a build up for a (dare I say it around Teague) 4th movie where Venom is the villian and is tearing around Manhattan in a brand new alien suit. The fact that Spiderman is powerless against him provides a little more character motivation.

Secondly, Peter's transformation as being close to bad is not even close to frightening or shows any risk. In all honesty, I think the animated show presented the the Venom arc much better. Instead, we get the unintentionally funny scenes of him "going to far" or something like that.

Lastly, if you are going to introduce conflicting love interest, shouldn't there be some chemistry between the characters?

All and all, I think DiF did a great job reviewing this movie. I could say more, but I think I will leave that to the commentators

To be fair to the scientists in that scene, they didn't say, "It's a bird, it being in there won't affect the test." They said something to the effect of, "It's probably just a bird; it'll fly away before the experiment starts." Use of the word "probably" is still a totally fair complaint.

I cannot see pictures from this movie without thinking of Teague and his hatred...

and yet, this is so Teague.

It was fixed