Afternoon with the Spidermans

Today we saw Spiderman 3, the first movie we've seen in an actual theater since last August. Hell, it was the first non-pirated visual entertainment we've consumed in as much time, discounting I suppose in-flight movies.

The theater was paaaaawsh. Couch-like seats much wider than my hips and shoulders, wide-wide aisles, and a steep pitch so that the surprisingly tall Taiwanese kids in front of me did not block the view at all. The movie was in English, subtitled in Chinese [footnote: traditional Chinese script, not the simplified script we get on the mainland]. Previews were similarly all in English and very surprising inasmuch as we've basically been living at the bottom of the ocean, culture-wise, for the past 10 months. For example, did you know there's a new Pirates of Caribbean movie? And a new Harry Potter movie? And a new Shrek movie? We did not. For that matter, I didn't know there was a new Spiderman movie until we walked past the theater on our first night in Taipei.

It's fun to say "Spiderman" like a surname. "Oh yes, the Spidermans stopped by this afternoon with a nice cheesecake for the bake sale."

How was the movie? My view might be colored by the fact that we were ending a 10 month dry spell but I'd certainly say it was the best movie I'd ever seen in my entire life, and in fact probably the best movie ever made EVAR. (The whole "dry spell" analogy is pretty apt...for about the first 40 minutes the only comments we made to one another were "can you believe we're watching a movie?! OMG!!!

Yeah OK actually the second act sagged a bit, there was not nearly enough development around Venom, and Tobey Maguire had about 1000% more chemistry just walking past Mageina Tova's closed door than he had in any scene with Kirsten Dunst. Besides which I stand by my initial rating of ******!!!! That's six stars (of FOUR) with four exclamation marks (of two and a half), making Spiderman 3 better than Star Wars, Citizen Kane, and Seven Samurai combined!