Summer movie season is finally in full swing! (Gene Shalit, eat your heart out.) I’ve been out of review writing for a while and it’s not really my bag, but this year’s summer movie blog will be more of the “Notes on …” format I originally pictured. It’s just a record of my thoughts on films as I see them, without trying to sand down the edges and make the pieces fit too nicely. Essentially, you’ll be looking at an unstructured rough draft of a review that will never be written.
Spiderman 2 ripped off Superman 2 with the whole “Hero turns his back on herodom to get the girl only to return to the tights to save the day in the end,” so it seems fitting that Spiderman 3 had a little too much comedy and a corrupted dark version of our hero. I was waiting for Thomas Hayden Church to ski down the side of a sky scraper or black suited Spidey to straighten out the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Spidey 3’s excessive running time left a lot of movie to fill, even after ripping off one third franchise film, so let’s pad it out with another. Spiderman is now loved by the public and has become somewhat of a commodity, and it has gone to his head. Sound like a certain part three, which features a drunken Paulie busting up the Rocky Pinball machine? I believe the film was called Rocky 3. Fortunately, Peter teams up with his antagonist from the previous two pictures to get back the Eye of the Tiger and defeat Clubber Lang 2000, also known as The Sandman. You a paper champion, Parker!
If we want to throw a third part 3 rip off to complete the set, I can offer the half-scarred face from Batman Fovever, but there were so many better choices. How about The Green Goblin finally adopting his trademark Hockey Mask? Peter climbing down into that ravine to get the bonsai tree? Or maybe Spiderman in the Old West? There were so many choices, but obviously they had to avoid Return of the Jedi, as that has been reserved to rip off in a few weeks (if last summer’s Pirates entry is any indication).
Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy has to have been the worst piece of casting since the ill-fated Betty and Veronica TV Movie that featured Shannon Doherty as Veronica and a bleached and shaven chimpanzee as Betty. Not that the Howard genes boast a whole lot of pin-up potential, but she made cookie bakin’, bugeyed Ursula the sexy choice for Parker’s symbiote-fueled dalliances. 
On the other hand, the casting of Topher Grace was inspired. Not only is there the obvious genius of putting the actor who should have gotten the role of Peter Parker in the role of a guy who resents Peter Parker, but Grace’s smarm is some of the best we have sampled since before Jason Lee grew that mustache.
Movie nerd that I am, I enjoyed Aunt May’s little throwaway line about how great Uncle Ben looked in his swim trunks as an obvious nod to Cliff Robertson’s turn as one my all time personal heroes, Big Kahuna. Any dude who’s too cool for Gidget and smokes a cigar while surfing needs more attention than a fleeting reference that almost no one would ever think to translate.
Considering this is a Summer Blockbuster featuring two sitcom stars as supervillains, the film is much better than it has any right to be. Is it a brilliant triumph? Probably not, but Raimi seems to be much more sure footed about to how to make a fairly smart superhero everyfilm. Decent action, some good laughs, an actually interestingly thought-through theme of doppelgangers and split psyches; even the episodic nature of the source material was honored, feeling like the picture could break down nicely into a 5 or 6 issue story arc instead of one long single issue.
The only problem was that the first 2 issues were classic Stan Lee Spidey, and the 2 in the middle were Todd McFarlane in his laziest, most derivitive days of Spidey, and issue 5 and 6 were pounded out by a committee of suits and a 13-year-old girl with a My Chemical Romance boner.