SPIDER-MAN 3 ***
DIRECTED BY Sam Raimi
STARRING Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco
US 2007 140 mins.
All across the world, people are watching Spider-Man 3. To say the web-slinger threequel is doing well is a gross understatement; in fact, it’s gobbling up the competition like so many fruit-flies. It made $148 million in the US on its opening weekend, the biggest opening ever – no surprise, since it also opened on the most screens ever (more than 4000) in a coveted slot as the first summer blockbuster (people tend to get jaded as the summer wears on). It also made another $375 million worldwide, which is the biggest global tally in history for a single weekend. Not only did it break records, it took over the box-office; around 85 per cent of all US ticket sales last weekend went to Spider-Man 3.
The numbers ‘speak for themselves’, as they say – though in fact they speak for marketing hype and the obsessive nature of comic-book geeks. Critics (especially in the States) have been mixed, to put it kindly; after Spider-Man 2, which was universally adored, reviews for Part 3 mostly range from grudging praise – “after promising greatness, all Spider-Man 3 delivers is satisfaction,” sighs Empire magazine, spiritual home of the summer blockbuster – to outright contempt. Tobey Maguire, meanwhile, has confirmed that he’s now donned the Spider-suit for the last time, even as Sony Pictures (the studio behind it all) insists there are going to be “at least” three more Spider-Man movies.
All this angst, all this controversy; all this huge success. Yet the film itself is sappy and scrappy, hapless and tender as a child. Spider-Man 3 is like a little baby – a princeling, heir to the throne of Marvel-Land – surrounded by admirers, paparazzi, obsessive stalkers, proud parents, curious passers-by, academics spinning theories on its historical significance – but meanwhile the child itself is simple and sweet, and a little silly. After the po-faced Part 2, SM3 succumbs to the same threequel directive that governed Return of the Jedi back in the day: Make it Cuddly.
Fortunately the film is much better than Return of the Jedi; in fact, I even prefer it to Spider-Man 2. But it’s still very soppy. I never read the Spider-Man comics as a kid (Tintin and Asterix were more my line), but I seem to recall the villains in action comics being motivated by dreams of world domination – think Lex Luthor – or at least the fiery destruction of significant numbers of people. Here, on the other hand, they’re motivated by avenging personal slights, redeeming themselves, trying to prove they’re “a good person”, winning a father’s posthumous love or belatedly being reunited with a little daughter. Venom (one of many villains) wants to get back at Peter Parker for humiliating him at the Daily Bugle offices. Harry Osborn (another) wants revenge on Spider-Man for killing his Dad. Admittedly the Sandman (yet another) likes to rob banks, but this is treated as the minor irrelevance that it is; his main motivation is sadness at losing his family, which is why Thomas Haden Church plays the part with a permanent hangdog expression, like an undertaker trying to look respectful at a client’s funeral.
Structurally, the film is a mess. Not only does it have too many villains, it can’t even build them concurrently; we zigzag from one to the other, neglecting each strand for minutes at a time. In fact, Spider-Man 3 is best seen not as action movie (though the action scenes are splendid) but as a soap, with a soap’s flabby structure; everyone’s looking for happiness, acting like lovestruck high-schoolers. Harry takes revenge by making Peter break up with Mary Jane, who incidentally has become quite neurotic; she sulks, pouts and longs for Daddy’s approval – a bad review of her singing, she says, reminds her of what her father used to say – just as Harry still craves the love of his dead father. “He loved me!” he insists; “No,” comes the crushing reply, “he despised you.” As for Peter Parker, he gets taken over by an alien symbiote, bringing out his Dark Side and causing him to do unspeakable things like … um, make Mary Jane jealous by dancing with another girl at a jazz club. Surely not!
The light, sappy tone may be deliberate, hence perhaps the comment by Sony Pictures’ chief executive that Part 3 “brought the family audience back” after Part 2, which was aimed more at the comic geeks (and film critics, who are often grown-up comic geeks). Spider-Man 3 fits alongside Lost and 24 in the mid-00s trend for mixing hardcore action with mushy personal crises (as in Lost, most of the cast are assailed by flashbacks); the genre is no longer macho, as it was in the days of Schwarzenegger and Stallone – hence the big global bucks, moving beyond the action ghetto to bring in women and families.
Some will say Spidey has been Disneyfied, or perhaps feminized. But it’s quite affecting when, for instance, Harry’s temporary amnesia brings about a truce with Peter, and they think back to the good old days of Spider-Man 1; this franchise has always been about emotion – the casting of gentle, big-eyed Maguire proves as much. Best of all, Spider-Man 3 is in touch with its own silliness. In between the crises and relationships – and special effects, and occasional villain-bashing – we find charming details like a snootily French maitre d’ played by Bruce Campbell (director Raimi’s mate from the Evil Dead films), or a random little boy horrified at the prospect of Spidey in a clinch with a girl (“No, Spider-Man!”), or Peter doing a pimp-roll and flirting with strange women while in the grip of his Dark Side, or the Spider himself after a fight with the Sandman, spitting out sand and emptying his shoe as he wonders rhetorically: “Where do all these guys come from?”. I don’t know, but we’re going to be seeing a lot more of them.
FEAR AND PASSION: ASPECTS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY IN CINEMA
We’ve been happily inundated with festivals this year, most of them organised by the Friends of the Cinema Society – and here’s another one, quite unusual in being based around a theme as opposed to a national cinema.
No surprise that the theme is sexuality, though the festival’s definition is broad, employing sexuality to cover “sexual desires, practices and identities”. Just as well, since it allows the Society to include films like Capturing the Friedmans, one of the greatest documentaries of the past few years though not remotely ‘about’ sexuality. In fact it’s about the messy implosion of a family – sparked, admittedly, by charges of paedophilia against Mr. Friedman and one of his sons – hauntingly captured on the family’s own home movies. It’s also, more widely, about the elusive nature of Truth and Memory (appropriately for a court case that seems to have revolved so much around false memories), everyone recalling the same events in different ways. And it’s also about never really knowing the people we spend our whole lives with – and the stubborn love (in this case a son’s love for his twisted father) that carries on regardless.
Friedmans is the most moving – and upsetting – film in the Festival, but Shortbus is the one most attuned to a festival about sexuality (it’s also the only one being shown three times, though one of those times was last Tuesday). John Cameron Mitchell’s follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch caused a minor fuss at last year’s Cannes, with everyone lining up to see just how graphic the sex could be. The answer is ‘very graphic, but not necessarily erotic’ – though the film is also very far from feelbad sex movies like Baise-Moi.
In fact, Shortbus is a general love-in, a film where everyone gets their rocks off no matter if they’re old, fat, gay, “pre-orgasmic” (i.e. non-orgasmic) or just want to do it alone, “in the dark, like a worm”, the
point of the exercise being that everyone should be free to express his/her sexual desires. We open on a shot of the Statue of Liberty, followed later by a gay threesome with one participant singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – a “call to arms” against Bushite conservatism, according to Mitchell. Liberation comes at the Shortbus, “a salon for the gifted and challenged” where anything goes, but you can’t really call the film political; instead it’s very gay, often funny – the performance artist whose act uses menstrual blood for makeup: “It’s a period piece” – and rather unfocused, missing as often as it hits. That said, I fully expect the Society to schedule extra screenings once word-of-mouth kicks in.
Shortbus is rather like Ken Park from a couple of years ago, another film with a Utopian sex-will-set-you-free message – though you have to wonder why that message never seems to co-exist with straight, grown-up sex (Ken Park’s heroes are all underage). In any case, the Festival takes in a broad swathe of sexual behaviour – and all the films are good, from accepted classics like Gilda (Rita Hayworth tossing her great mane of red hair, albeit in black-and-white) and In the Mood for Love, right down to more obscure offerings like My Summer of Love. This is a lyrical, nicely-handled, British-made tale of the relationship between two teenage girls – one of them incidentally played by Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep’s ‘other’ assistant in The Devil Wears Prada.
Rounding out the Festival are repeats of Brokeback Mountain and Pride and Prejudice (Keira Knightley version), Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast (ooh, bestiality!) and Luis Bunuel’s marvellously sly Belle de Jour, with Catherine Deneuve as the bored housewife turned prostitute; this is obviously a must-see – but is also being shown on projected DVD, so scale down your expectations accordingly.
Nine films in all, running from May 8 to May 31. All screenings at the Cine Studio in Nicosia, with occasional screenings at the Friends of the Cinema Societies in Limassol and Paphos. Check the Society’s website (www.ofk.org.cy) for details, or call 96-420491. Or just keep checking the Cyprus Mail, of course…
