Back from the dead

Sadly for the internet community, blogging is extremely low on my to-do list. I have a great many school things to attend to, followed by a relatively high number of church things. I’ve been working on improving my social life, so that takes an increasing amount of time. Leaving me with negative hours in my day. How do I fit blogging (a very low dividend activity) into that schedule? The answer is simple. Avoid studying by blogging.

But now that I’ve established a time in which to write, what should I write about? I’ve got weeks and weeks of semi-interesting stuff. I’ve eaten both chili and pepper ice cream. I’ve visited Cedar Point, home of the highest concentration of rollercoasters in the world. I purchased a surround sound system for my apartment. I’ve thrown an American Gladiators Barbeque for 150 people. First things first: Spiderman.

I did see Spiderman at the midnight showing at the IMAX. We played Scum in line for a couple hours to assure we’d have a good seat in the theater, which is fairly ridiculous at IMAX. But it was fun nonetheless. I even put together a Spiderman quiz to test my fellow line-waiters knowledge of my favorite superhero. The highest score was a 60, which made me feel like a good expert of Spidermania.

The movie itself was awesome. I admit that I’m biased and any movie involving Spiderman will be awesome, regardless of the actual quality of the film. So objectively, it wasn’t as awesome as the first two movies. The first two were more coherent and focused than this one. In this “final” movie Sam Raimi experimented more, with mixed results. I liked the extra humor, as well as the variety of characters and extra horror elements. He took many of the elements from the first two films and magnified them. Consequently, the film is very . . . full. I don’t think it holds its own as well as the first two; however, I think it was a very good conclusion. The movie not only pulled together its own plot points, but pulled together the variety of themes from the trilogy. So while it certainly could’ve been a better movie, I think it was a great cap for the trilogy.

I was pretty happy with the various characters. Gwen was good, as was Sandman. I had my doubts about his inclusion (he’s just not as epic or sinister as I’d like) but he turned out very well. They made up a fair amount about the character, but they got the spirit of him right. I was also pretty pleased with Venom. I would’ve preferred comic-book Venom, who’s a 7 foot tall behemoth complete with tongue and slobber, but I’m not convinced they could’ve made him look right. The spider doppelganger they made him was good and more story appropriate. Green Goblin’s amnesia conflict was actually very in tune with the comics and a great (if unoriginal) device to use for Harry this time around.

So I fully support the movie. It’s the last movie I saw in the theaters, and probably the only one I’ll see until Transformers in July. Optimus Prime, you’d better be good.