Back Seat Producers

Spider-Man 3 is, of course an obvious continuation of both of the other Spider-Man films, and there’s a lot that goes on in this film- at the start, our man Peter Parker is on top of the world, things are going well for him at school and at work, he’s got the love of his life in Mary Jane Watson, and the city loves him as Spider-Man, although J. Jonah Jameson is still doing his best to tell the city that he’s a menace through his paper, The Daily Bugle. But soon things begin to unravel- Mary Jane appears in a musical that gets less than stellar reviews and sends her into worry, a criminal, named Flint Marko has escaped from prison and soon finds himself transformed into a new super-criminal named the Sandman, up-and-comer photographer Eddie Brock is trying to take Peter Parker’s position at the Daily Bugle from him, a mysterious alien substance crashlands on Earth and begins to attach itself to Parker, and Harry Osborne is still out for revenge, finally making use of his fathers inventions to take Parker out.

That’s quite a laundry list of events for a film like this, and yet it all sort of plays out like you’re reading a year’s worth of Spider-Man comics, which isn’t a bad thing at all… and generally, Spider-Man 3 is a pretty fun movie with a lot of big action scenes with amazing visual effects, some comic moments, a lot of new characters all culled from the comic’s history, and some great moments of poignancy– really all of this feels quite true to it’s source, and that’s the best thing that it can do.

But also, much like the other two movies (which I watched again this past Friday night), there’s a few leaps of faith that it asks you to take as well (with one event with the Sandman being a little detrimental to Spider-Man’s origins) and some little gaps between where something starts off and where it ends up kind of missing that in-between scene that would make a literal-minded audience happy- some of these things can be written off as a read-between-the-lines thing, and others you just sort’ve have to go with.

It’s still a fun ride, and Sam Raimi has certainly packed a lot of meat in his movie- truly if you’re a fan of the character, you’re getting your money’s worth with the film.

Everybody from the previous movies are back (with the exception of Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus- although he is seen in the opening re-cap during the credits)- of course that means Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, J.K. Simmons, Rosemary Harris, Bruce Campbell, all of the regulars from the Daily Bugle and even Willem Dafoe and Cliff Robertson return for brief cameos… and this time we get some new players to the game including James Cromwell as police Captain Phil Stacy, Bryce Dallas Howard as Gwen Stacy (and really looking good here too- the blonde look works for her in a big way), Topher Grace as Eddie Brock, and Thomas Haden Church as Flint Marko, the Sandman. This is really a solid cast and of course Tobey Maguire gets to shine delivering a huge array of emotions in the film, but I’ve also got to call out all of our villains here too- James Franco delivers a really nice performance, even to the point where you’re just hoping he doesn’t go back down another path- Topher Grace, an actor I don’t really care for a whole lot is of course playing a character from the comics that I don’t really care for at all in Eddie Brock and later transformed as Venom, but I give the young man props, he comes into this most enthusiastically and delivers the goods with this role. A huge round of applause goes to Thomas Haden Church though, who is literally the living interpretation of a Steve Ditko drawing as The Sandman. Church obviously threw himself into this both physically and emotionally and very much plays the part of a tragic character who’s made some wrong choices in life.

Of course, everything else about the film is state-of-the-art… Raimi and his crew have really gotten this down… The only thing really missing here is a full score from Danny Elfman, his themes are used, but it’s composer Christopher Young filling in for him and certainly doing an able job, but not the same thing that Elfman would’ve done.

It really is fun, but… it’s setting some traps for itself that if the series is going to go on beyond this, it really needs to start to avoid these traps… For a lot of filmmakers who make comic-book movies, they really feel the need to turn the whole thing into high opera by it’s very end, usually putting the love interest for the hero in danger and featuring ultimate final confrontations with the villains of the piece (often in some sort of setting that’s high off the ground)… and really, we just don’t need this any more. Mary Jane Watson is not Lois Lane, she doesn’t set out to get herself in the jams that she gets into (and she doesn’t here either, but the script calls for the villains to again find out who Spider-Man really is and attacking him through her) and as an audience for this sort of film, I really don’t think we need to have that moment at the end where the hero defines himself by saving the woman he loves… so even though, this film is fun and it all works- please, Sam Raimi and/or anyone else who’s going to make a Spider-Man movie- stop with throwing Mary Jane in the middle of all at the final confrontation…

Also, these villains need to stop meeting final ends- they continue on in the comics, they can continue on in the films too- Now don’t get me wrong, the death of Norman Osborne in the first film certainly does make sense, and the filmmakers have wisely continued to use him as a spectre that haunts his son… but showing Doctor Octopus drowning in the second film just shouldn’t have been done. And here in Spider-Man 3, we also get some finality with some of the characters, although one of them though makes a lot of sense… I guess the Spider-Man films have a bit of exception to this rule, but still… I think that satisfying comic movies can be made without showing what would appear to be the death of the antagonist of the piece.

And speaking of the villains, y’know, I really don’t have a problem with more than one villain in a film, I just think that if they continue with it, they need to get past the idea that they need to build whole character arcs around them… why not start one of these films with Spider-Man taking down another villain and then just going on into the story proper from there, done well, this will leave an audience wanting way more with the character, and that character could then be used in another film.

Now lately in the news, Maguire and Dunst have sort’ve been playing it blase about whether or not they’d even want to continue this series, and some of it could be holding out for the better payday and some of it could be them being a little full of themsleves- Marvel’s made no secret of the fact that they intend for the series to go on for three more movies, and good… it should, even without Raimi at the helm or Maguire and Dunst in the parts, even though you will get fans who just won’t accept that, this character’s history is rich with material that could keep him going on for awhile in film… I was really glad that they brought Gwen Stacy and Captain Stacy into this- right there is a whole other emotional path they could take Peter Parker down… and as far as villains go, with Dylan Baker playing Dr. Curt Conners, they’ve already set-up the Lizard as a villain (and there’s something in this film that could even take that further if they want) and of course the Spider-Man history is just filled with villains- I’d learned that they’d talked to Ben Kingsley at one point about playing The Vulture- now how cool would that have been? And I’d love to see characters like Electro, Mysterio, and Kraven The Hunter make it to the screen as well- there’s nothing that says this series couldn’t go on for another five or six years quite comfortably…

But back to the film at hand… Spider-Man 3 is certainly rock-solid entertainment and it’s quite fitting with what’s been done with the other two movies… it’s a whole lot of big-time fun and I really doubt that fans of the character will be that disappointed by it… they might see the traps that I describe above, but that’s stuff that can certainly be warded off in future films, and Spider-Man 3 gives them that opportunity to make a few fresh starts in some new directions… highly, highly recommended- go out and have some fun with this.

Chris Johnson is a mentalist who performs in Las Vegas under the name of Frank Cadillac… the thing is, his power is for real: Johnson can see into the future for up to a 2-minute period, but even by doing that, he virtually changes the future every time he does it. He’s haunted by a vision not in his two-minute frame though of a young woman that he’s destined to meet in a diner, who’s key to his own life. Now a terrorist group has a bomb that they’re threatening to detonate, and the FBI, with absolutely no clue as to how to find the bomb, decides that their best bet is to recruit Johnson and have him help in finding the bomb and determining what the terrorists will do next…

… and so goes the premise of Next, the newest film from director Lee Tamahori and star Nicolas Cage and in my opinion, right now the leading contender for worst film of 2007.

Oh, just where to begin with this mess… Well, first off, the premise in itself is not bad and it’s roots are in a story from Philip K. Dick called “The Golden Man.” Now I’ve never read the story, but I certainly recognize some of the Dick elements in the film. Where this goes immediately haywire is just in the limits that they put on Chris Johnson’s ability- a man with his ability, it seems to me anyway, would almost constantly be living 2 minutes ahead of the rest of us, in effect, at least to me, seeming that he should be quite a bit crazy from his ability. But instead they have this under control and in a way where Chris can see all the permutations at once of how an event can play out, which is basically there for script convenience and nothing else. What this does, as this plays out, is give Chris an ability not unlike super-speed, but yet that doesn’t make sense considering how his ability is explained to us in voice-over narration by Cage. They add a further wrinkle with this with the girl that Chris has a vision of (played by Jessica Biel) and Chris tells us this complicates his ability and lets him see further in the future which in turn ties into the film’s end twist, which ultimately ends up being a cheat on the audience.

On top of this, there’s the FBI, with a very small force going into finding this terrorist group (led by Julianne Moore), from a practical aspect, it seems that this force is highly misdirected, losing more time looking for Chris Johnson than looking for the terrorists and the bomb. I couldn’t help but think of the TV show 24, during this and knowing to myself that in the time they spend looking for Chris Johnson, Jack Bauer would’ve found the bomb and had chunks of the terrorists floating in his stool. On top of that, once the FBI do find Johnson, their plan is to set him in front of a TV monitor, with his eyes propped open like Malcolm McDowell’s in A Clockwork Orange and then hoping that Chris will see something in the news that will set him off– What the hell? This FBI group is so inept that they’re nowhere near the group… and yet I know that if I was an agent with their resources, I’d be virtually on top of them, and using Johnson in their vicinity, and yet there’s another catch with Chris’ power: with the exception of the girl, he can only see the future in how it effects him!?!? What a mess…

Nicolas Cage plays the whole thing like your only sympathy with him should be that he’s a haunted man by this love that he’s trying to find and that he’s just using his power to keep himself going and I just didn’t give a damn the whole way through… his only point of sympathy is just with the girl, and really there’s nothing there to hook into. This is the third movie that I’ve seen Cage in this year thus far, and I think it says something that I think his best performance of the year is in the brief cameo that he has in Grindhouse. Julianne Moore does as good as she can do considering the limitations of the script, she’s plenty driven, and she seems resourceful, it’s just that the script itself puts her whole team as not having a clue. Jessica Biel plays the part of “the girl” of the film, and personally, I think she’s pretty well miscast here, she’s probably a good 20 years younger than Cage at this point, just seeming wrong for the guy there, and her point of audience sympathy is just in the fact that she’s a teacher for poor, underprivileged American Indian kids… big whoop, again, I could care less…

We had a group of five with us last night to see this, and even though I doubt most of that group will read this, I have to apologize to them for openly talking during this movie as I was making fun of it as it was playing out… and yet, I just could not help myself… fortunately, at the end of the film, we were all pretty much in agreement as to just how bad it was, and our fun just might’ve been in the smart-ass comments we were making… The thing is, on some movies that are meant to be a bit of dumb-ass action romps, I’m willing to forgive on a lot of things as long as they keep some of their pacing brisk and their action entertaining, here they just give you too much time to think about things– and as such, it will fall apart right before your very eyes… A far better film is out there that’s somewhat similar to this called Deja Vu that just came out on DVD this past week, that never had me questioning what was going on there…

The movie itself just seems like another “miss” for director Lee Tamahori– but how much is he to blame here, I don’t know… with the involvement of a star like Cage, it’s really hard to say, and because it is a big budget film, it’s harder to say just how much this film was cut by (it weighs in at only about 90 minutes). Tamahori has also directed such movies as Once Were Warriors, The Edge, Mullholland Falls, and the James Bond movie, Die Another Day.

If you’re a big Nicolas Cage fan, I doubt that there’s much that I can do to dissuade you from seeing this, because he’s at his quirky best (or worst, at least for me) throughout this… and maybe for some, that might be OK, but for me, I put this film a bit lower compared to another Nicolas Cage mess called National Treasure, and so far the leading candidate for the worst movie that I’ve seen for the year 2007, even worse than The Hills Have Eyes 2 more because this has a bigger budget and bigger stars who frankly should know better…

Nicholas Angel is the top of the line on the London police force (excuse me, it should now be referred to as service- force implies to much of a physical threat), he’s so good at his job that he’s making the rest of the service look bad and as such he gets a promotion to sergeant but with that promotion comes a transfer to the sleepy, rustic little village of Sandford, where hardly a crime happens…

… that is until Nick Angel shows up and mysterious deaths start to occur.

Hot Fuzz is the latest film from the team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg, who brought us the Zombie take-off, Shaun of the Dead. This time, their target is big-ass Hollywood cop/action movies, particularly those as produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver and they deliver the goods pretty nicely here, not only giving you a spoof of said films, but also giving you a story that stands well on it’s own terms too (which is just what Shaun did too). It’s longer than what it should be, but really that’s just keeping in tone with the movies it’s taking off on, always seeming to go a little longer than they should.

Simon Pegg plays Nick Angel, and Pegg is really good here and he should be, he’s in damn near every scene of the film- you’ve got to believe in him or else this could really fall on his face, and you do believe in Nick Angel. He’s really earnest in the part, and at times reminds me of a younger Edward Woodward (who’s also in the film) particularly when Woodward made The Wicker Man. Pegg is backed up by his partner from Shaun, Nick Frost as one of Sandford’s police officers who wants to live the life of a Bruckheimer action movie hero. The ret of the cat are solid British actors, the type you expect to see in a movie about a small village like this, with Timothy Dalton leading the way with his devilish smile as the owner of a grocery store in the town who has more going on than just selling groceries. There’s also a nice bit at the beginning with top British talent like Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy that’s really fun to watch.

Now I wasn’t laughing uproariously during this (the kind of movies that do that for me are things like Borat, Jackass Number Two and Clerks II— not anything by Will Ferrell though, never funny, never will be), but I still had a real good time watching it. Some of the film is really quite funny, particularly near the end when it full-out turns into a Bruckheimer film and the rest for me was more quiet humor, but your mileage may vary. Just the same, Hot Fuzz gets a big recommendation here, go see it if you get the chance.