Spider-Man 2

[RDK]

One of my favorite issues...

[jazzbo]

Kraven! That would be a good one for the next one, Kraven the Hunter!

These movies make me feel about 8 or 9 years old again, hiding my collection from my Dad!

[BruceH]

Oh please, the Lizard!

[RDK]

It could feature a jazz score...

"It's Sand Man"

"Misterioso"

?

?

?

[BruceH]

Maybe Benny Golson and Curtis Fuller could do a cooking jazz version of the old Spiderman theme song.

[Alexander]

I always liked Woody Shaw's version.

[jazzbo]

Yes, it's so much better than the version they included!

[jazzbo]

Man I now am hoping that the franchise lasts long enough to have Kraven in one of the films, my gut tells me that would be a great one!

[couw]

empty trousers

[Christiern]

• 
  
  July 11, 2004
  FRANK RICH
  
  

Spidey Crushes 'Fahrenheit' in 2004

THE Michael Moore explosion is now officially unbearable. It's not just that you can't pick up a Time Warner magazine without seeing his mug on the cover. Or turn on a TV news show without hearing another tedious debate about the accuracy of "Fahrenheit 9/11" — conducted by the same press corps that never challenged the Bush administration's souped-up case for invading Iraq. What's most ridiculous is the central question driving the whole show: might a hit documentary swing the November election?

Both political camps seem to be convincing themselves that the answer is yes. Either that, or they are overstating the movie's power to overcompensate for their worst fears. The right is sufficiently panicked about George W. Bush's slippage that it's trashing "Fahrenheit 9/11" to the absurd extreme of likening it to a training film for al Qaeda (according to MoveAmericaForward.org) and a defense brief for Saddam Hussein (Ann Coulter, who else?). The left is so worried about John Kerry's lackluster candidacy that it is overselling the success of "Fahrenheit 9/11" to fill that vacuum, as if Mr. Moore could serve as a surrogate for the vague and charisma-challenged nominee. (That job will now fall, and not a moment too soon, to John Edwards.)

"It has the potential of actually affecting the election, and if it does, it will change the world," said Rob Reiner of "Fahrenheit 9/11," echoing Eli Pariser of MoveOn, who said his members regarded the film as "the `Star Wars' " of its genre. "We literally sold out Peoria, Illinois," bragged the movie's distributor after its opening weekend. So what? Illinois is a safe Democratic state already, and even Peoria is not particularly Republican: Bush-Cheney beat Gore-Lieberman by a mere 251 votes there in 2000, fewer than the 544 votes siphoned off by Mr. Moore's candidate at the time, Ralph Nader. "The sky's the limit on this movie," Harvey Weinstein, a co-owner of the film and a prominent Democrat, told The New York Times. If so, the sky is falling.

"Fahrenheit 9/11" is, as we keep being told, the most successful non-IMAX documentary of all time. What that means is that its ticket sales are whipping the bejesus out of "Winged Migration" and "Spellbound." But by any other Hollywood standard this movie, while a bona fide surprise hit (especially in relation to its tiny budget), is not a blockbuster or must-see phenomenon (except to its core constituency). Of course, it is pulling in some Republicans, and you can be sure that the sighting of each and every one will be assiduously publicized by Mr. Moore. ("There was a Republican woman in Florida unable to get out of her seat, crying," he told Time.) But with a take of $61 million by the end of its second weekend, "Fahrenheit 9/11" will have to sweat to bring in even a third of the $370 million piled up domestically by the red-state polemic to which its sectarian appeal is most frequently compared, "The Passion of the Christ." If voting at a multiplex box-office constitutes any kind of straw poll, then Mr. Bush has already won re-election. By a landslide.

But he hasn't, of course. The latest actual polls show the president with an approval rating below (in some cases well below) 50 percent. The election is both too far away and too close to call. And that's why a movie like "Fahrenheit 9/11," with its relatively narrow sampling, may be no more a reliable index to the mood of the country than the Literary Digest poll of 1936. It was so skewed by the demographics of its similarly self-selected participants that it gave Alf Landon a 14-point spread over F.D.R.

If you want to find a movie that might give a more accurate reading of the national pulse, it isn't hard to do: just take a look at "Spider-Man 2," which is now on a pace to outdraw Mr. Moore's film and maybe every other film this year — in every conceivable demographic. It may not be on the radar screen of the Washington pack busy misreading the electoral tea leaves of "Fahrenheit 9/11" 's box-office receipts. No one is shouting about it on Fox. But with an opening five-day take of some $152 million — next to $128 million for the most recent Shrek, $125 million for Mel Gibson's Christ, $124 million for the last Frodo, $109 million for the last Harry Potter — "Spider-Man 2" is front-and-center for most everyone else.

It deserves to be on its merits, by the way. It's hard not to fall in love with "Spider-Man 2." It's not only better than any other movie based on a comic book — not the highest bar to reach — but it's also superior to all the other so-called franchise movies, in which colossal budgets, presold brand-name characters, computer-generated effects and oppressive merchandising conspire to make the product at the center of the marketing blitz often seem as disposable as that new razor concocted to sell you a new line of blades. "Spider-Man 2" is a product of that egregious process and yet it has a delicacy almost never seen any more in the big-ticket juggernauts sent our way by media conglomerates. It thrives on nuance. It's human even to the extent of replacing the standard-issue camp villain of the first "Spider-Man" movie (Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin) with Alfred Molina's brooding Doc Ock. Its characters live in a real world that is recognizably America, not the landscape of a video game.

Unlike the sunnier first "Spider-Man," which was released two summers ago but conceived before the terrorist attacks, the new one carries the shadow of 9/11. As the story shifts from Queens into Manhattan, the city becomes a much more vivid presence. The director, Sam Raimi, dotes on both the old (the Empire State Building in silvery mode) and the new (the Hayden Planetarium), on both the dreamily nostalgic (a fairy-book Broadway theater seemingly resurrected from an Edwardian past) and the neighborhood of our freshest wound (the canyons of Lower Manhattan). The movie is suffused with a nocturnal glow of melancholy that casts its comic-book action in an unexpectedly poignant light.

The writers who set the story against this backdrop include the veteran screenwriter Alvin Sargent, whose credits go back to "Ordinary People," and the novelist Michael Chabon, who memorialized the Marvel Comics gestalt in "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." They're grown-ups, as is not always the case with this kind of Hollywood product. (Mr. Sargent is in his 70's — an almost unheard-of anomaly among employed screenwriters these days.) In "Spider-Man 2," they seem determined to remind us that it is a civilization, not merely a crowd of extras, that is the target of attack. The hero, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), turns to poetry to woo his girl next door, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). She is an actress appearing in "The Importance of Being Earnest." They are both watched over by Aunt May (the transcendent Rosemary Harris), whose every utterance bespeaks literature and history.

This is a world worth saving, but the superhero who can save it is no Superman. He's a bookish nerd racked with guilt and self-doubt. "With great power comes great responsibility" is the central tenet of his faith, passed down not from God but from his Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). He takes it seriously. Spider-Man wants to vanquish evil, but he doesn't want to be reckless about it. Like the reluctant sheriff of an old western, he fights back only when a bad guy strikes first, leaving him with no other alternative. He wouldn't mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can't. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York.

The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year's political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of "Top Gun." There's nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare "Mission Accomplished" after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry's vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography.

Whatever light "Spider-Man 2" may cast on the dueling, would-be heroes of our presidential race, however, it is not going to change the dynamic of the election any more than "Fahrenheit 9/11" will. As far as I can determine, there's only been one national election in which a single piece of moviemaking may have made some slight difference in a close campaign. That was in 1948, when Hollywood studios, eager to curry favor with Democrats who might have been offended by a previous pro-Dewey film, banded together to exhibit a 10-minute pro-Truman documentary (in the guise of a Universal newsreel) in all the nation's movie theaters. The stunt was pulled off in the last six days of the race and, with no real competition from television, reached a captive audience of some 65 million Americans at a time when the entire population was only some 146 million.

Not even "Spider-Man 2" can gather a crowd that large in the fractionalized American cultural marketplace of 2004. But if it or any movie cannot move an election, its box-office triumph shows us something about those who will be doing the voting. "Spider-Man 2" is an escapist movie that serves as a rebuke to what its audience wants to escape from: a pop culture that is often too shrill and an election-year political culture that increasingly mimics that pop culture. It takes us away from cable news screamfests and toxic campaign ads no less than it delivers us from "Dodgeball." It gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness. This year that appears to be the heretofore missing formula for capturing a landslide mandate in red and blue states alike.

  

[.:.impossible]

Awesome movie. Everything everyone else has already said!

How about the Doctor with the Grateful Dead t-shirt?! Any insight on that one?