Jere-Rigged

Whatever A Spider Can

Sugar continues apace and audiences seem to really love it. At the matinee today, the theatre was adding extra chairs and even that wasn't enough to prevent arguments from breaking out amongst the audience. We go back into rehearsals soon to put in replacements for the August part of the run (one of whom, you will recall, is ME). And I hear that we will be going through a full week of technical rehearsals at the theatre in East Islip. This will be trying, but I suppose it must be done.

Another things that Karl and I did while he was visiting was to go see Spiderman 2 at the Loews down on 34th Street. We saw the original film two years ago on the day we met in the midst of what would turn out to be a 24+ hour date.

While I liked the movie a lot, it had some problems. Beware of spoilers if you haven't seen this little flick yet.

1) No one would ever order a pizza from a place 40 blocks away, no matter how great the pizza is, because, no matter where you are in New York, there are 15 other great places to order your pizza within a 3 block radius. This was just lazy screenwriting on someone's part...they could have made Peter Parker a bike messenger, still kept their opening bit, and maintained some credibility at the same time.

2) The makers seem to have taken New York out of the movie. As you will recall, New York was a major part of the first film with major scenes taking place in Times Square, at the main branch of the New York Public Library, in Queens, and on the Queensborough Bridge and the Roosevelt Island Tram. The sequel seems to take place in some sort of generic city and the words "New York" are never mentioned. Neither do we see many landmarks (the Museam of Natural History and the Flatiron Building excepted).

Taking place in the real New York, where the comic takes place (as opposed to the fictional Gotham City or Metropolis), gave the first film a specificity that the sequel lacks. During one action set piece on an elevated train line, you can even see that the movie was filmed in part in Chicago. (Yes, that is indeed the main branch of Marshall Field's visible in the background.)

The "Broadway" theatre where Mary Jane Watson is appearing as Cecily in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest appears to be the Lyric Theatre in London, though I could be mistaken about that. What I know for certain is that it's not a New York theatre. The film-makers appear to have gone to great pains to make Spidey's urban landscape as generic as possible.

And there's something mildly offensive in that to the New Yorker in me.

3) What exactly is it about water that would stop a fusion reaction? The whole ending of that storyline confused me. And why would a fusion reaction go magnetic? Was this explained in the film and I missed it?

4) Okay, here's the obvious problem that many of us here have complained about. I'm talking about the whole elevated train to nowhere action set piece. As stated above, this runaway train sequence begins in Chicago's Loop and then continues until the track just ends high above what is presumably the East River (the world's longest mass transit ride). Forgetting the fact that there are no major elevated lines in Manhattan where the movie does nominally take place, and that there appear to be no stations on this line, who would build train tracks that just sort of end on a trestle high above the street/river? This sounds like one of those ideas that sounded great on paper, but that someone should have struck down when it just got way too ludicrous.

But, I did honestly like the movie. It was great seeing this year's Tony nominees Alfred Molina and Donna Murphy playing a happy, long-married couple. Gratuitous shirtless shots of Tobey Maguire are always welcome (and the one here is particularly hysterical). By the way, when do we get a shirtless James Franco? And, boy, would I love to be Mary Jane's standby in her Broadway show...between parties with her astronaut fiance and getting abducted by mutants, Mary Jane must hardly ever go on.

By the way, were I Kirsten Dunst, I would go to Sam Raimi and declare a moratorium on shots of Mary Jane being kidnapped by a villain and doing nothing but scream bloody murder. We've had two movies of it so far...can Mary Jane please act like the New Yorker she is and beat the shit out of one of these guys or at least help Spiderman do so? There's no way this chick grew up in Queens without learning a thing or two about self-defense.

Did I mention how much I liked the movie?

Posted by Jere at July 19, 2004 02:30 AM | TrackBack