• Some of you reading this have families, friends, careers, rich and rewarding social lives, hobbies, maybe you volunteer; you’re members of the community in good standing.
  • Suckers.
  • Live that way and you don’t have seven hours in the middle of the day to get high and rewatch Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy.
  • I am a sick man; I am a spiteful man; I am a weak man; join me!
  • Set fire to your family and join me.
  • We’ll entropize together.
  • Not a word, and I need you to be less weird.
  • I need you to be “fewer” weird.
  • Stop it and talk about the stupid-ass children’s movies, please.
  • The Raimi Trilogy (Spidey-Man, Spidey-Man 2: The One With Doc Ock, and Spidey-Man 3: Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off) are movies from, if not another universe entirely, a different era.
  • The style of the films, which came out in 2002, ’04, and ’07, is more in-line with 1978’s Superman than with the barrage of Marvel films that would follow.
  • Sadly, Marlon Brando does not appear via disembodied voice to mispronounce the word “Krypton.”
  • From scene to scene, the tone shifts from camp to corn; occasionally, like every second Willem Defoe is on the screen, these aesthetics mix; these are chipper movies.
  • They are also, as befitting the superhero genre, incredibly dumb.
  • Mind-meltingly, pulse-poundingly, neck-nibblingly dumb.
  • None of the villains have any good reason for fighting Spider-Man: two of them (Green Goblin in the first and Venom in the third) just hate him because they’re eeeeeeeeevil, and the other two (Doc Ock in 2 and Sandman in 3) keep running into Spidey accidentally.
  • A quick note on superhero/bad guy conventions: each hero gets his or her own rogue’s gallery, generally themed to match the hero’s abilities.
  • Except for Flash: he can run really fast, so his villains include a guy who throws boomerangs and a psychic gorilla.
  • Otherwise: themes.
  • Superman uses his physical powers to fight crime, so his bad guys are smart: Luthor and Brainiac.
  • Batman is a man with a code, so he gets agents of chaos like Joker and Riddler and Two-Face.
  • Iron Man’s enemies, to a man, can be found wearing stolen or reverse-engineered Stark technology, because Tony Stark is the cause of every single one of his own problems.
  • And as his powers are derived from the animal kingdom, so too are Spider-Man’s bad guys’.
  • There’s Doctor Octopus, and the Vulture, and the Scorpion, and the Man-Bat, and the Cobra, and The Lizard, and Rhino, and Chameleon, and Jackal, and Tarantula, and also quite a few goblins.
  • (Full disclosure: Spider-Man has also fought a guy who throws boomerangs. Which makes more sense, honestly. Spidey’s quick, but you could probably wang him with your ‘rang once or twice during a fight. Flash can run so fast he travels through time. There’s no reason some bogan who knows how to fancy-toss a stick should be able to fight the Flash.)
  • But the bad guys are the backups here: the Raimilogy is first a romance.
  • You are not correctly recalling how much Peter and Mary Jane bullshit there was in these three films.
  • James Franco wanders in and out of their love, but then he gets his face melted and Peter and MJ get married, maybe, I don’t remember.
  • So much longing.
  • So many shots of someone standing in a window, sadly.
  • Peter loves MJ, you see, but he also wants to be Spider-Man, so he dumps her four or five times.
  • I may or may not have entirely checked out of the kissy-kissy part of the trilogy halfway through the first flick, except for the scenes in which Kirsten Dunst was clearly not wearing a bra.
  • Nobody could not wear a bra like Kirsten Dunst.
  • (An aside, and then a note: to defend my indulgence of the Male Gaze, you will note that in the scenes I refer to, Ms. Dunst’s thingamabobs were so evident that it must have a conscious decision on the part of the filmmakers. She’s literally wearing a wet tee-shirt at one point. The note: these are some of the last tits in any Marvel movie. The men take their tops off in the MCU, not the women.)
  • If there is a fatal flaw with these movies, it is Tobey Maguire, and his face.
  • It is round and soft with blubbery lips, and he has eyes like cow vaginas, moist and rheumy.
  • And he speaks his lines like a simpleton.
  • He is not, admittedly, given much to work with: the dialogue is basic and consists mostly of characters declaiming to one another, and there are very few jokes.
  • Here, Spider-Man does not taunt his opponents while fighting them.
  • He just kinda mopes.
  • The Raimilogy follows the pattern established by the Godfather films: two excellent chapters, and then complete insanity.
  • One, in short: Peter gets bitten, Uncle Ben gets shot, Willem Defoe is all kooky and wackadoo, Mary Jane gets captured by the bad guy, and then dangled, punching!
  • Sam Raimi thought I wanted to spend a lot more time getting to know Uncle Ben and Aunt May than I actually did.
  • It should be noted that the Aunt May in these three films was the proper Aunt May.
  • Aunt May is a million years old.
  • Aunt May has always been a million years old.
  • I disagree with the new, hot Aunt May.
  • Aunt May is not an AILF, Kevin Feige.
  • Macy Gray is in the first film; she does not make a return appearance.
  • Two, in short: Doc Ock strikes, James Franco plays Hamlet, Willem Defoe shows up a couple times even though he’s dead, Mary Jane gets caprtured by the bad guy and then dangled, punching!
  • Just like in Superman II, Peter loses his powers.
  • Not to worry: he gets them back just in time for the third act.
  • Why?
  • And where did they go in the first place?
  • Those are great questions!
  • If we show you a scene of Jumping-Around Guy fighting Tentacle Man, will you stop asking those questions?
  • This installment features the best action of the three, and CG that still holds up 15 years later.
  • It was better than Black Panther, at the least.
  • And then there’s Spider-Man 3.
  • Oh, you poor thing.
  • Look what the bad men did to you.
  • Common movie nerd wisdom is that Raimi was screwed by the studio; they made him include Venom.
  • But no one made him include the jazz club scene.
  • Or Kirsten Dunst’s two musical numbers.
  • Two.
  • We are also treated to James Franco and Kirsten Dunst making omelettes while dancing about an enormous kitchen to the sound of Oldies but Goodies.
  • And Gwen Stacy, who does not die.
  • Which is absurd.
  • Gwen Stacy is the Chekhov’s Gun of the Spider-Man mythos.
  • You can’t introduce her and not chuck her off a building.
  • And the studio did not make Sam Raimi cast Topher Grace as Venom.
  • There was too much going on, and yet not enough; the movie is at once rococo and jejune.
  • Yeah, I called a Spider-Man movie “jejune,” what are you gonna do about it?
  • Next up: the Andrew Garfield years!
  • Oh, no.
  • Oh, yes!