Pageviews, Concern for Ava's Demon, and 2002's "Spider-Man" (Respectively)

Hi, all.

So, first thing's first.  You got me...

EIGHT EXTRA VIEWS!  YOU WIN!  WHICH MEANS I WIN!  WHICH MEANS I LOVE YOU!  Just to be clear, I loved you anyway.  BUT NOW WE WIN!  Thaaaaaank youuuuuuuuu!  ^.^  *gives you virtual cake*  Caaaaaaaake!  (Next time you can, go buy yourself some actual cake.  Because you deserve it.)

Second thing - I realize I talk about Ava's Demon kind of a lot on this blog, but I'm actually a little concerned because it stopped updating recently (I don't have the exact date) completely without notice. Maybe it hasn't been as long as I think (my memory is just shot lately), but the author's usually pretty good about that, so I hope she didn't die or anything?  Also, I think she has a tumblr, but I don't know what it is, so if anybody has that info, I would like it very much.  ((UPDATE: nevermind, it's here, and also she was just sick for a while.  it's all good.))

Now.  Let's get down to business [to defeat the Huns].  Because Spider-Man is my favorite superhero, every now and then I go on a Spider-Man media binge.  This time, as I'm sure you can guess, the binge was brought on by The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  So after watching that and its precursor movie, I grabbed the slightly older series, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (AKA Tobey Maguire/that-kid-from-Gatsby/early 2000's Spider-Man.  That one).  Because IMDb is the very greatest movie reference site ever, I have its Spider-Man page here.

I feel I need to point out that Spider-Man is in no way a prequel for The Amazing Spider-Man.  I think people make this mistake because both came out so recently (in the same ten years, at least), but no, these renditions are in no way related other than that they were both based off of the original comic series.  In other words, trying match up and then make sense of the storylines is like trying to match up Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with 1995's Batman Forever.  Both are great individually (Batman Forever has a special place in my heart), but make absolutely no sense put together, I assure you.

That said, let's review a movie, shall we?

Knowing me, this may take a while.

Let's start with a synopsis.  In Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire plays high school senior Peter Parker, who is fairly smart but painfully awkward, has been in love with his neighbor Mary Jane Watson (MJ) since the fourth grade, and lives with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in New York City.  Here, dear Peter goes on a high school field trip and is bitten by a genetically modified spider that somehow got out of its container (which is never revisited or explained).  He wakes up the next morning with spider-like abilities, such as that to climb and stick to walls and that to shoot webbing directly from his wrists.  Additionally, his eyesight is now perfect (he previously wore glasses), and he has super-strength (he was a total wimp).
     Meanwhile, Dr. Norman Osborn, father of Peter's best friend Harry Osborn, is the owner of Oscorp, the city's largest science research lab.  Dr. Osborn has been working on a human performance-enhancer for quite some time, but his higher-ups threaten to pull his funding, so he skips through the process to human testing - the human being himself.  A possible side effect of the performance enhancer was insanity, and thus it drives him insane, turning him into the Green Goblin.
     Peter has a fight with his Uncle Ben, who tells him "with great power comes great responsibility" and is killed shortly thereafter by a street thug in a car robbery.  Peter then decides to become a superhero and fulfill his responsibility to rid the streets of crime.  You know, basically.

This movie is great because it's lighthearted and Tobey Maguire constitues a very likable Peter Parker because he's cute and socially inept and just completely lost for MJ.  So if you're into that, go for it.  Go see this movie for its cuteness, and to broaden your experiences of Spider-Man.  It was fun to watch.  (Particularly in a group.)  But if you really break movies down like I tend to, um...be warned, I guess.  There are a few kinks in the plan.

So when I watch or read things, I tend to put writers into two categories: those better at plot and those better at characterization.  These were plot writers.  To say the least.  The most glaring example of this is MJ.

(courtesy of: nyctalking.com)

Mary Jane Watson is a perky redhead with subtly accentuated boobs who wants to be an actrice and
speaks in a softly sweet voice.  She'd never hurt a soul, says things you'd sooner expect from a sugary romance novel, and must wait ten minutes for Spider-Man to save her from the crumbling ledge instead of just crawling off it herself.  Mind you, I am being perfectly objective; even though no one beats Emma Stone, and my official OTP is Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy (which I am fairly, if not completely invested in), I actually quite like MJ.  In other versions, she's been this sexy, green-eyed redhead with a sharp wit and a little black dress, a character who knows what she wants and always stands up for the little guy.  But in this, MJ was basically the epitome of a weak female character.  I am a bit influenced from also watching Spider-Man 2, in which this problem is I think exponentially worse, but still.

(courtesy of: comicbookmovie.com)

The other painful character is, I think, Dr. Osborn.  One of the greatest things you can do for a movie is develop the villain, but they did not take that opportunity.  His entire characterization is that he's a rich, uptight father turned crazy, bipolar scientist.  His only reason for becoming a villain is that an experiment went wrong and made him a villain, which I think is a bit of a characterization cop-out.  It started as just a conflict of interests - Dr. Osborn originally just wanted control of Oscorp back because the board kicked him off (because he's crazy), but Spider-Man fundamentally disagreed with killing the board members one-by-one, but he went after Spider-Man vendetta-style, like it was personal.  Which is completely irrational.  It's as if the writers couldn't think of a legitimate reason to make him want to kill Peter, so they just drove him insane instead.

My main dispute with stories is usually poor characterization because it's really important to me that characters - and by extension, people - are imagined complexly.

(courtesy of: splashpage.mtv.com)

However, to end this on a good not, I should point out that there is a character in this movie that I particularly like, and that is John Jonah Jameson!  JJJ is the cheap-ass, no-bullshit, always-talking-never-listening, fast-paced head editor of the newspaper The Daily Bugle, which Peter is a freelance photographer for.  He's not particularly nice, as you might imagine, but he's completely hilarious in his own blunt brutality (and doesn't mean half of what he says).  And though I've been trying not to compare the two because bias, JJJ is the main aspect I'd pick of the Spider-Man series that's actually better than The Amazing Spider-Man series.  The latter is seriously lacking, but JJJ in this is fabulous, and all in all, he makes me happy.

So that's it, I guess.  A fair post with which to end the year.

Thanks for reading,

-Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
  (not really, though.  it's just me.)