Critiquing Some of RogerEbert's More Woke Reviews

 This is a cursory listing of ways in which the website RogerEbert.com primarily preaches one school of thought through their reviews. That school of thought, whether pejoratively described as woke or generously described as championing identity politics, is not something that many readers and movie fans subscribe to as seen by the comment sections of some of these articles or the differences in Rotten Tomato user scores and critic scores in films where identity politics is an issue.

I am one of those users. I am a lifelong democrat who campaigned on the ground in swing states last year to get Democrats elected to office in the presidential , gubernatorial and senator races but I differ from the reviewers in their point of view. I believe that race, gender, and sexual orientation have significant impacts socio-economically but they can be dangerously overused in explaining and proscribing solutions to the world and this is rapidly pervading the entirely critical sphere to the point where we skip steps in critical thought nowadays.

Here is a list of some reviews that I remembered off the top of my head. I will note that when I tried to find more examples from these ones that came from memory, I found many more even-keeled reviews to the credit of the site

Shang Chi and the Legend of the Seven Rings (2021)-Nick Allen takes a Marvel exec’s comment out of context to frame him as cancel-worthy and gets called out for it in the comments.

Uncle Frank (2020)-Odie Henderson condemns the movie because he prefers films to preach hatred towards anyone who has ever had evolving views towards homophobic people, by refusing to sanction a film in which characters are redeemable (to the site’s credit, two separate reviewers defended against the highly publicized criticism of making a racist redeemable in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri).”

These people are perfectly in character for the year 1969 — hell, I know gay people who had reasonable family members be as baffled by their life choices as recently as the mid-2000s — and there’s little evidence that anyone but Stephen Root’s character was abusive to the protagonist. Henderson’s scorched Earth policy to anyone who might have ever been homophobic is one school of thought but the review doesn’t really speak to an audience who might prefer other ways of dealing with homophobia.

Isle of Dogs (2018)-Odie Henderson finds Wes Anderson’s cultural appropriation enough of a taboo to keep him from recommending the movie. Henderson is a number of critics that subscribes to cultural appropriation as largely a negative act and Wes Anderson as a guilty culprit. I happen to think cultural appropriation is rarely a sinful act and some popular feminist critics such as Lindsey Ellis agree that it’s been a neutral act and many have pointed out cultural appropriation has been a necessary ingredient of cultural development that has rarely discriminated between oppressor or oppressed.

Ironically, a film like Slumdog Millionaire released before woke thought became mainstream did not face legitimate criticism at all and many including Spike Lee noted that the cultural appropriation goal posts had significantly shifted when Kathryn Bigelow made Detroit in 2017 and was bombarded with (in my opinion, unfounded) criticism for her skin color.

Set It Up (2018)-The review largely stays away from identity politics but Matt Zoller Seitz either implies the film is at fault for failing to note that Lucy Liu and Taye Diggs’ characters faced more obstacles than white characters in climbing the corporate ladder or simply wants to enlighten us about what he believes to be this inequality in society. My school of thought is that race is a macroscopic socio-economic measure rather than a one-size-fits-all measure. Therefore, I would say that it is likely those two met more obstacles than white people, but not a definite and it doesn’t have to be a defining aspect of their character.

Val (2021)-Matt Zoller Seitz continues to display a lionization of POC, women, and LGBT populations and uses straightness, whiteness, and maleness as defining attributes often negatively.

Only MZS can answer this (and I have briefly discussed it with him, to his credit) but I wonder whether MZS would not come down nearly as hard on Tracy Morgan or NBA players of the 90s-00s who blatantly disregarded coaches and made their lives hell. My point of view is that any difficult black actors or NBA players deserve empathy as much as someone like Val Kilmer)

What I don’t understand is what MZS isn’t expecting if he clearly wasn’t a fan of Kilmer and my reaction is if the point of writing a review is to speak to your audience, isn’t the audience for a review on a documentary on Val Kilmer, a group of people who don’t have anywhere near the same level of beef with the guy.

As for the specific beef, Kilmer is clearly showing his ability to be professionally difficult by even putting the Frankenheimer tape in the movie and he lets Oprah have the last word rather than film his response to it. Was MZS expecting him to spend the whole movie talking about what a piece of trash he is? He got throat cancer so he’s not in a great state anyway.

With regard to his marriage, an article as recently as 2019 reported Whalley didn’t allege abuse but rather abandonment of his two kids leaving them homeless. I’d hate to not take her at her word, but it’s clear in the video that his two kids are still talking to him unless everything is staged. It should also be noted that if this is a hatchet job on Whaley, it’s a poor one as he says nothing negative about his ex-wife in the entire film.

If Zoller Seitz were to look at life from Val Kilmer’s shoes (which is the point of this film), he would not define himself as a privileged straight, male. Not all people think of life in an oversimplified dichotomy. He would simply think about his life in its regrets and nostalgia. In a mirror accusation of the manic pixie dream girl character or the magic negro tropes, Val Kilmer is a complete person and doesn’t exist to highlight socioeconomic disparities between minority communities.

Tag (2018)-Glenn Kenny essentially argues that white people are not allowed to have fun unless they signal to the audience that they’re thinking about black oppression while having fun. I had trouble believing this was an actual published review when I read it.

Mr. Corman (2020)-I’d argue that reviewer Roxana Hadadi’s insistence on reading the work through a black-and-white (forgive the pun) lens misses the point of the work.

To me, “Mr. Corman” isn’t a work centered around examining white male privilege. Instead, it’s about a white, male character in a funk whose journey towards being a happier person involves being a more selfless person. In the character’s moral orientation, being a better feminist and ally to people of color is important. I agree with the Hadadi that the show is bland but the “finger wagging” is done by Hadadi herself in explaining how the show should be rather than what the show is.

The Quintessential Tennessee film

The Quintessential Tennessee film: Mystery Train

Tennessee is what I like to call the horizontal Chile of the US: A rectangular slab so thin and long that people on one end have virtually nothing in common with people on the other end.

Tennessee might be associated with music as one can see by the state quarter's inscription: "Musical Heritage," but it has three centered around the state's three major cities of Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville as signified by the three stars on the Tennessee state flag. Look at Tennessee's state quarter and you'll see a guitar on the left, a violin (or fiddle) on the right and a trumpet in the middle with three stars on the outside and the inscription "Musical Heritage" written in the center. The message is clear: The state is three distinct regions defined by musical styles.

In the West, the port city of Memphis was a convergence point in the development of the Blues dating back to the 1700s as musicians traveled up and down the Mississippi in river barges. The city is the home of Beale Street, Graceland and Sun Studios where Elvis got his start. In addition to the King, Memphis was instrumental in the musical journeys of Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Jerry Lee Lewis, Aretha Franklin, Al Green and pretty much every other icon of rock and roll you can think of.

In the center, Nashville is the world capitol of country music. Like Memphis, the city's tourist scene is also nearly synonymous with its music scene, counting Mercy Lounge, the Gran Ole Opry and the Country Music Hall of Fame as its greatest landmarks.

While Memphis is the classic Midwestern city and Mississippi River port and Nashville is a bastion of the glamorous side of Antebellum South, Knoxville is squarely in the heart of a distinct cultural sliver of the U.S. known as Appalachia where one of America's most distinct musical styles is king: Bluegrass.

The quintessential Tennessee film is an ensemble film in which different strangers' lives are united through musical fandom and, no, its not Rob Altman's landmark epic "Nashville." That film is more about aspiring dreamers and politicians than people living in the present reality of Tennessee.

Source: New-video.de

Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) has three (our magic number) interlocking stories set in a seedy Memphis hotel tied together in lock-step time by a local radio station playing the Elvis Presley version of "Blue Moon." For added effect, this story about the transcendent power of music has a cameo by  blues musician Screamin' Jay Hawkins in the role of the desk clerk.

The first story centers around a suspicious woman on the run who needs a room for the night and is taken in by a sympathetic boarder. The second one centers around three lowlifes (Steve Buscemi is one of them) for whom a night of drinking turns into all-out criminal activity from which they seek shelter at the same hotel.

The third is the one with the largest thematic connection to Tennessee's musical heritage although the other two stories provide a much-needed backdrop of the ebb and flow of urban life for this story to bounce off of.

A young Japanese couple is making pilgrimage to Memphis to witness its musical history. They're heavy rock and roll buffs who have an ongoing debate over whether Elvis or Carl Perkins was the true father of rock and roll. The young man looks out of place as a Japanese tourist dressed like a greaser. In addition to his attempts to look cool smoking (much like Godard's film "Breathless"), there's another running gag of him flicking out his comb and running it through his hair. Despite the juxtaposition, the film portrays this young couple's relationship to the musicians they idolize with sincerity and a certain delicacy.

Roger Ebert wrote in his review:
In the hands of another director, this setup would lead directly into social satire, into a comic putdown of rock tourism... But Jarmusch is not a satirist. He is a romantic, who sees America as a foreigner might - as a strange, haunting country where the urban landscapes are painted by Edward Hopper and the all-night blues stations provide a soundtrack for a life.

The message is that true passion of music transcends any superficial disconnects (much like the theme on the state quarter suggests). It's also a film that delves into nostalgia and how the pervasiveness of Elvis is both haunting to some and a source of beauty to others.

Ebert and Roeper Version 4.0

Ebert at the movies was cancelled but Roger Ebert made the wise decision that with the right backing, there's no reason why the show couldn't work. I agree: The audience of people wanting to read and delve into film criticism is much greater now than it was decades ago when Ebert and Siskel started. I have a hunch that even if the blogosphere existed when Ebert and Siskel first came on the air, there would be a lot fewer film blogs. The idea of caring what film critics had to say was novel back then.

Seeking to resurrect his program, Roger Ebert hand-picked his successors: Christy Lemire from the Associated Press and the world's luckiest internet film critic in 24-year old Ignatiy Vishnevetsky who was plucked from obscurity.

A little background on Ignatiy: He immigrated to the USA from Russia at the age of 9. Went to film school and dropped out after two semesters to watch three movies a day, so he could learn everything there was to learn about film. Aside from doing some translation work, he blogs on two or three websites and co-manages a video store in Chicago which charges one dollar per film which isn't exactly a powerhouse.

It's a safe bet that he would have had a career indistinguishable from every other film blogger if Roger Ebert hadn't actively looked for a new and different voice. For that, both Ebert and Vishnevtsky are now cult heroes as far as I'm concerned.

Lest you think that Vishnevtsky has no social life because he watches movies all day, he's very well-connected to people in his field in Chicago, he's very charming and articulate, and he recently proposed marriage to his girlfriend and then impulsively got married two days before the first show aired.

So I tuned into this show very excited at what was being awaited. Everything worked very well. Both hosts are photogenic (read: easy on the eyes), knowledgable and able to compress their opinions into informative one-minute discussions.

There was just one little glitch to the first episode: The way they voted.
Vishnevtsky and Lemire both voted the exact same way every time. He liked absolutely everything. Lemire absolutely disliked everything. Thumbs up thumbs down to eveyrhting.

They shouldn't have been dishonest but they should have at least picked a film where someone had a change of opinion. It looks like one's a softy and one's a massive cynic so far, and they would have been better served by picking a film where they meet in the middle. Hope, it changes next week.

Help! We've been attacked!

BEST WEBSITES OF 2008

An article recently surfaced which caught my friend's attention and he asked me to comment on it. The article is http://www.nypress.com/21/17/news&columns/feature3.cfm

Here's my response:
I think this guy has 8 or 9 articles that he merged into one and makes a lot of generalizations which don't generally hold true. You have to read it, however, like a big textbook and agree with some and disagree with some. If the guy wanted to make sense, he should have stated that his article was targeting a specific type of blogger rather than everyone except for himself. For example, I loved Bobby and Darjeerling Limited and promoted the hell out of them, which are two movies he likes.
I also think Premiere was a great magazine (which is ironic because the author hates it) and I mourn its death as much as the next guy. I actually don’t particularly want to be a “blogger” and really want to be in the print media anyway. This started out as a way to promote my stuff so that I might get hired in the print media, and I would gladly seize doing this at once, if it meant that someone in the print media who I am a fan of, could keep their job.
I think it's very sloppy to imply that Ebert has never contributed much. Yes, Ebert the TV critic just does thumbs up or thumbs down, but in writing he has great insights and he is constantly stressing to his readers in his Q and A not to pay too much attention to stars. I agree that a lot of criticism boils down to "Is the film good or bad" but that's mostly in the world of print media, anyway, because print media caters to what the everyday Joe wants to know which is "should I see this movie?” But the internet sites have the advantage along with more in-depth journals and academic literature of analysis.
He might be right that historical context is missing from the great majority of film criticism. I think that's one of the most important things you gain from studying movies is understanding history (and not film history but actual history) better. There are courses in most film curriculums that focus on movies and society, however.

Here is his list of ten things which film bloggers and other critics make the mistake of doing:
1)“The Three Amigos” Iñárritu, Cuarón and del Toro are Mexico’s greatest filmmakers while Julian Hernandez is ignored.

Yeah, sorry never heard of Hernandez. Just like every member of the public I can’t know of every person who’s ever picked up a movie camera and made a film. I’m not making a conscious decision to denounce him. If you want to promote Hernandez, fine, great. Point taken. You might also have a point that as amateurs we don’t have access to someone like Hernandez, but that’s hardly a new discovery.


2) Gus Van Sant is the new Visconti when he’s really the new Fagin, a jailbait artful dodger

Gus Van Sant isn’t that much of an auteur, I personally don’t care for him, but more to the point, he’s not the central point of a lot of discussions. In terms of a couple of his films I know of, Finding Forrester was primarily a Sean Connery vehicle and Good Will Hunting’s autuers, at least in the eyes of the public, were writer-actors Damon and Affleck who initiated the project. So to me, you might call me in agreement with you. I don’t really know who Visconti and Fagin are, sorry.

3) Documentaries ought to be partisan rather than reportorial or observational.

I think that people tend to place partisan labels on a documentary that the documentarians don’t see themselves. I also feel that Armond White shows his blog himself, person is biased against the “liberal elite” or whatever. When he writes. “but it is the shame of middle-class and middlebrow conformity that critics follow each other when praising movies that disrespect religion, rail about the current administration or feed into a sense of nihilism that only people privileged with condos and professional tenure can afford,” he clearly can’t avoid his own partisan biases either, which I think is worse when he’s trying to suppress other people’s right to voice their own opinions.

Nevertheless, I think the view of most critics is that documentaries come in all shapes in sizes: A documentary can be partisan or non-partisan, so long as it doesn’t try to pass itself as the wrong category. The current beating the HBO film “Recount” is taking, is an illustration of that point, since it’s far less observational than it claims. I think Michael Moore, which I imagine White is referring to since a discussion about documentaries can’t possibly exclude the most influential and commercially successful one of the decade, is fairly handled by critics. Most critics advise their audiences to take Moore with a grain of salt, knowing he has a clear partisan bent.

4) Chicago, Moulin Rouge and Dreamgirls equal the great MGM musicals.

Well, I am somewhat of an expert on musicals so I can answer this. First off, there’s hardly any agreement on whether Chicago or Moulan Rouge is the true second coming of the musical. There’s plenty of people who hate Chicago and like Moulan Rouge and plenty who feel the opposite. Dreamgirls is generally considered as a respectable follow-up by Condon to Chicago, treated adequately by the awards season: A proverbial “6th nominee” that feel just short of making the final five. I don’t think much of the literature on Chicago and Moulan Rouge as the revival of the musical is saying that Chicago and Moulan Rouge equal the high point of MGM but they revived the musical and made it marketable again as evidenced by the fact that after 2002, the genre was able to be marketable and Broadway adaptations (Rent, Producers, Dreamgirls), remakes (Hairspray) and all sorts of experimental films (Across the Universe and Sweeny Todd) were able to make it to theaters. If you look at the AFI list of top 25 musicals recently released, Chicago and Moulan Rouge were on their but towards the bottom, behind the great MGM musicals.


5) Paul Verhoeven’s social satire Showgirls was camp while Cronenberg’s campy melodramas are profound.

I don’t know about anyone else but I don’t think Cronenberg’s melodramas are profound. He does a good job at creating tension and makes a good thriller (are you referring to History of Violence and Eastern Promises?) but I don’t know by what criteria you call them campy. Showgirls was rated X and I was like 11 when it came out, so I didn’t see it unfortunately. Should I catch it on DVD or so, so I can enter into the conversation?

6) Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough while all other gay-themed movies were ignored.
No, anyone who follows the Oscars is aware that Transamerica and Capote were honored well-enough. This might have been a complaint perhaps a decade ago when Ian McKellan from Gods and Monsters lost to Hillary Swank.

7) Todd Haynes’ academic dullness is anything but.
Again, I don’t think people are analyzing Todd Haynes in an auteur sense. I think people saw merit in Far From Heaven and I’m Not There (although I’m Not There had fairly mixed reactions).

8) Dogma was a legitimate film movement.
I think you mean “Dogme 95” but nonetheless, I think there’s a great deal of filmmakers who find Von Trier’s films insulting and nonsensical, and surely the general public feels antagonized by him even more. Whether it’s a legitimate film movement is not really for us to judge. That’s like judging whether you have a legitimate article. It’s an article you wrote, but does it say good or bad things, well that’s the debate. I think Dogme 95 creates more constraints on the filmmaking than its worth (he had to break some of his own rules to make Dogville), but at the same time, I think some of his ideas have some merit and some don’t. I also think it’s clearly worth studying the movement’s context in history just as you say.

9) Only non-pop Asian cinema from J-horror to Hou Hsiao Hsien counts, while Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Stephen Chow are rejected. 10) Mumblecore matters.
Don’t know much about Asian cinema, so I won’t respond. Don’t know what mumblecore is.

Roger Ebert answered a question of mine about spoilers

On the December 6th edition of Roger Ebert's answerman column, Ebert answered a question of mine about film spoilers. It was quite an honor:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=ANSWERMAN

Browsing through Ebert's Answerman Columns

I was browsing through Roger Ebert's answerman columns, in which he answers through questions posed by people going onto his website. They are one of the most entertaining things you can read in the subject of film criticism as he is insanely knowledgable on everything film, has great insights and sometimes has a sense of humor.

I saw Roger Ebert on ET the other night and he is in terrible shape right now and can't exactly talk. He has to talk through a computer like Stephen Hawking, so that's quite tragic. When it comes to seeing his printed word, he's still as sharp as ever.

Anyway, since I don't think I should copy and paste some of the questions I found interesting, i could try to post some links:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071129/ANSWERMAN/711290304/1023
This question is about whether actors simulate sex in films.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071129/ANSWERMAN/711290304/1023
This question is about the writer's strike and whether Ebert and Reoper receive residuals

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071101/ANSWERMAN/337/1023
Whether Ebert has a preference toward foreign films

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071101/ANSWERMAN/332/1023
Whether people should wait for the end credits to finish rolling or not before leaving. The question was from an annoyed viewer that people got up and left while Michael Clayton was still on the screen on the .
My opinion is that #1) nothing further in the story happens after the end credits kept rolling #2) it's usually up to people if they want to reap the rewards of the end credits or not #3) as a former movie theater usher, we're generally supposed to wait until the end credits finish rolling before we go in and clean but if it's a busy schedule we usually can't resist the temptation to start a little early

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071025/ANSWERMAN/710250317/1023
The controversy over people saying Al Gore won an Oscar when he didn't. I personally think that even if he didn't win the statue he was a major force behind the film and should receive acknowledgement as the man behind the Oscar-winning film because a) the director didn't really do much but just point the camera at him as he babbled b) you know that someone as media-savvy as Gore knew how to market and promote the film and get behind it and c) there would clearly be no film behind Gore. The analogy that saying Gore is the Oscar winner for Inconvenient Truth being as ludicrous as saying Muhammad Ali won an Oscar for When We Were Kings, is clearly incorrect, because Gore was an active participant in the film.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071025/ANSWERMAN/710250317/1023
Damn, the 6th Sense has just been ruined, I think I'll write a seperate post on this. But that was highly insensitive. I think I'll write Roger Ebert a question about this.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071025/ANSWERMAN/710250317/1023
Controvoursey over whether Francis Ford Coppolla being quoted in a magazine as saying Nicholson, De Niro and Pacino have been cinematically lazy over the last decade. Nicholson made About Schmidt, As Good as it Gets (which I think was a little overrated), and Departed; Pacino made Insomnia, Angels and America, Merchant of Venice, Two for the Money, and Devil's Advocate and De Niro's most notable effort would debatably be Sleepers. I haven't seen Stardust so I won't judge. I've heard a couple good things. Other than that we have films like Gigli, Mars Attacks, Anger Management, Showtime, Godsend, City by the Sea, The Score, Stardust, Shark Tale, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers (shameless money-grabbing sequel), Simeone, The Recruit, Two for the Money, and Something's Gotta Give, so perhaps Francis Ford Copolla shouldn't feel a need to apologize after all.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071108/ANSWERMAN/711080307/1023
When was the first use of a flying saucer in a film. This post also indicates that Ebert is willing to help you with homework projects

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071101/ANSWERMAN/335/1023
Whether that opening clip at Darjeerling Limited had any merit. I admire Anderson for leaving it out of the film and making it a separate movie, but nothing much really happened in the opening clip and I have no idea what the cause for the hatred was between the two people.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071018/ANSWERMAN/710180316/1023
This post discusses how films in the Victorian Era greatly fantasize the period. Elizabeth, in real life, would have had no teeth by the age of 30, because evidently British people back in those days had no dental hygiene (a tradition which proudly still stands). I saw Elizabeth and the Golden Age and I think that they went out of their way to make Elizabeth not look glamorous but realistic and even ugly at times. Certainly, the viewer wasn't drawn into Elizabeth's glamour.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071025/ANSWERMAN/710250308/1023
If Queen Elizabeth II would watch on her TV at home, when Cate Blanchett wins the Oscar this year for playing QEI (which by the way, most people agree is a long shot for a win though a probable nomination at this point).
His response: "If Blanchett were to win for "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," that would mean she'd receive the award from Forest Whitaker. He won for "The Last King of Scotland." I hope he doesn't hold the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots against her."

And the summer season is off: Spiderman breaks all the records

Well, the summer season has started (and I have yet to fully discuss that in another post that I had planned to post up) and it was a bang with the new Spiderman sequel. The critics gave it "mixed reviews" while the public saw it in record numbers. Early Sunday projections come to the tune of $149 million and all I can say is that I saw both these trends coming. It seemed obvious that the critics wouldn't like the 3rd part of a trilogy because they rarely do. The expectations are so high, that they're usually expecting the next Citizen Kane and this is usually more the case when the film directors like the 2nd half of the trilogy better. Roger Ebert called X-Men 2 the best superhero movie he'd ever seen until the year after that when he proclaimed Spiderman 2 the best superhero movie ever again, so again the expectations are going to be high.

My city paper's film critic, Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post, went on to express this self-fullfilling prophecy in her review of the film. She basically said, "Spiderman 3 cements the rule that the third leg of a trilogy will always be a massive disappointment, just like Batman Forever and X-Men 3." As I constantly try to remind people, it wasn't until Batman & Robin that the Batman series took a real dive. Batman Forever remains one of my favorite superhero films and I have yet to hear a rational argument for why X-Men 3 was not a good film. Maybe slightly less effective than the first two films, but the level of acting, plot complexity, and special effects are still way up there. By no means do I equate Brett Ratner and Bryan Singer as directors (I think much higher of the latter), but without seeing the opening credits, I would openly challenge many of the film critics who bashed X-Men 3 to identify whether it was a Singer or a Rattner movie.

I also expected Spiderman 3 to do tremendously well, but duh. The harder question is why. I much prefer the X-Men series and tried to show it to my dad once, but for some reason he has a habit of running in the opposite direction of anything that appears sci-fi and about halfway through, he felt it was just unappealling and walked away.

It was too complex for him and in that respect, Spiderman with only one hero (Peter Parker), one villain (Doc Ock or the Green Goblin), one girl (MJ), and one variable who shifts in between (Harry Osborn), it's superhero/supervillain entertainment watered down enough so that anyone can partake. That's kind of the way I see it, at least. Magneto is a villain of Shakesperean proportions and he plays games of chess with his biggest arch rival. Despite Alfred Molina and Willhem Dafoe being serviceable actors, they played one-dimenstional villains. In Spiderman 1, the Peter Parker-MJ relationship is so cliche of the girl-next-door type story, that she's even literally next door. I also didn't feel that any of the key relationships evolved organically from Spiderman 1 to Spiderman 2. Harry and Peter Parker are "best friends" but that is merely a plot point. Do we ever see the two actually canoodling as friends? Despite the cliche factor, I might say that it was a somewhat effective progression from boy having a crush on girl to the two falling in love in Spiderman 1, but in Spiderman 2, there's an awkward stability between the two and they act as if they're lifelong friends. MJ is expecting things of him as "her best friend" such as being on time to the play. It's merely a relationship established at the start of the picture to move it along from one end of the spectrum to another.

Nevertheless, I do like the Spiderman Series and would give both movies thumbs up. I think that they do a great job of intermixing the superhero within the mundane world and that's another reason why this superhero trilogy has become such a mega force at the box office. Because it attracts the comic book nerds in droves while it attracts the people who aren't drawn to comic book storytelling. I think Tobey MaGuire is cast extremely against type and it plays off especially well. I just don't think it's on the level of really great movie making

Nevertheless, I will probably see Spiderman 3, mainly because when something's this big, you've gotta jump in and see what it's all about. I'm also extremely curious to see what they've done with Thomas Haden Church

Da Vinci Code

Critics so far are giving Da Vinci code mixed reviews but when you're making a film based on a book that apparently has sold more copies than any book since the Bible (as Roger Ebert notes: "good thing it had a different ending") the expectations are going to be hard to live up to. The other mistake critics are making is that they're judging the film along the lines of how controversial it is, and are lampooning the usually middle-of-the-road Ron Howard for once again playing it too safe. That makes no sense to me: a movie has to have picketers at its premiere to be considered successful? The fact is that Howard is in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation with the material and he skirted the controversy smartly by just focusing on making a good movie and even if by sticking to the book he won't get the credit for the great story, that's still exactly what he did.

For those of you that didn't read the book, The Da Vinci Code is an intelligent thriller that starts out with a murder at an art museum in France, and a Harvard professor of symbology, Robert Langdon (Hanks) is called upon to help decipher the victim's dying message. Making their way into the story at intersecting points and building up the suspense level are a French cryptologist and granddaughter of the victim, a police chief with a vendetta (Reno), a bishop who heads a controversial sect of Christianity (Molina), a murderous albino monk (Bettany) and an obsessive British aristocrat (McKellan). The story is filled with cliffhangers and surprises at every turn and the film pretty much follows that same pace, being careful not to cut out too much of the interesting tidbits that made the book so interesting in the first place. The story's genius, after all, comes from playing with familiar historical events suggesting they didn't happen exactly the way we thought they did.

For those of you who have read the book, don't worry, it's not by any means an exact copy of the book. Things are cut and moved around and at least a couple of key elements are changed for the better. For example, Bezu Fache, the policeman, is a member of Opus Dei in the film, which makes for more sensible character motives, and Robert Langdon is a religious man which makes for a slightly more open-ended approach to the religious controvoursey. What really makes the movie work, however, is the casting. Audrey Tatou, Paul Bettany, and Ian McKellan are all vastly underrated actors who give Tom Hanks great support and enhance the movie. McKellan's devious scholar seems to comes straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, and Paul Bettany makes Silas the albino monk sufficiently scary but surprisingly human at the same time.

My friend has a review at:
http://zerogrizzly.blogspot.com/