east village restaurant, Saturday June 3, 2006. 7:36 PM.

Riverside Park, Friday April 20, 2006. 3:52 - 3:58 PM.

NYU Library, Tuesday April 18, 2006. 10:54 PM.

NYU Library, Monday April 10, 2006. 3:43 PM.

picture pages

i just dumped a bunch of pictures from the last year and a half or so (not too many) off of my phone. i thought hey, let's do a series of those pictures here on my blog, in roughly chronological order.

Bus stop, Friday March 31, 2006. 12:22 AM.

no ramones, no mercy

this started life as a brief comment in an email, and quickly ballooned to rant-sized proportions so i thought it would make good blog-fodder.

i thought spiderman 3 was really good, but then again i haven't agreed with the general consensus on recent superhero movies. i thought spiderman 2 was just 'ok' except for that one scene in the operating room which was amazing, and i really didn't like batman begins much.

but in any case, yeah, i really liked spiderman 3. there were definite cheese moments, and toby maguire really can't cry and that did come close to ruining the movie. but in the end, i think sam raimi did a fairly good job of making a movie not about a superhero but about a young guy who happens to be a superhero, and the people in that guy's life.

and honestly, i think that's what's most interesting about spiderman. does anyone really care about his powers? can his one-liners (in retrospect somewhat lacking in this installment) sustain anything more than a half-hour children's show? for me, spiderman works best as a kind of teenaged version of the watchmen, albeit more of a morality play than the watchmen can allow for in its bid for complexity.

were there bits that made me cringe? oh yes. but within the context of a comic book movie, i could accept most (most) of them. and the ones i couldn't, well, whatever, they were over fast enough. and with any movie like spiderman, where I am familiar with the content before seeing it, I am definitely going to think about the choices i would have made in contrast to the director's (the only really important complaint i had was that there was just not enough queens in the movie at all :).

a lot of reviews, professional or otherwise, seem to focus on how there seems to be "too much" going on, with multiple villains and romantic subplots and whatever, but frankly I had absolutely no problem following it, and i didn't feel it lacked cohesion in any way. i recall being specifically impressed at one point with the ease with which raimi seems to be able to careen from the humorous to the tragic. furthermore, the way significant events pile up on top of each other seemed to me like a conscious decision. confluence was in a way one of this movie's major themes.

as an aside... there is a little bit of a dance sequence in the middle of this movie, and some comments i've read might lead others to believe that it is a scene out of a musical. they would be wrong. the way it is framed and shot struck me as more like a fight scene without the violence than a fred astaire number. if i had to pick one moment from a movie that was close to the dance sequence in this movie, it might be the jazz flute scene in anchorman.