Loved that Spider-Man 2

The last time I saw an action movie that I felt like seeing again was Raiders of the Lost Ark. That was a few presidents ago. Yesterday I saw Spiderman 2 and will have to go back for more. There’s enough in each scene for one to come back for a a worthwhile second look, but the movie’s more than that: Very good plot, believable actors (even with Doc Ock’s absurd tentacles, Molina was real), the fight scenes were not (like they were in S1) overblown WWF scenarios, plus there’s the fantastic New York, and exhilarating scenes with Spidey swinging from building to building. Heck, if I was 12 I might have a crush on the wonderful Tobey Maguire (you have to see him in Seabiscuit, if you haven’t). For a moment there during the film they even had me wondering just how much more of that Spidey suit was going to get ripped.

And whaddaya know! Spiderman 2’s success means — at least according to Frank Rich — that

If voting at a multiplex box-office constitutes any kind of straw poll, then Mr. Bush has already won re-election. By a landslide.

Rich believes that S2’s an escapist movie. I disagree. By setting S2 in Manhattan, the movie deals with terrorism right where it struck, and, when the Empire State Building was lit in the night, it reminded me of the Twin Towers and how their ghosts are a scar in the sky for many of us. That’s not my idea of escapism. Rich does say that ” Its characters live in a real world that is recognizably America, not the landscape of a video game”, “it gives us a selfless wartime hero unlike any on the national stage, and it promotes a credo of justice without vindictiveness”, and that Peter Parker

. . . wouldn’t mind throwing off his Spider-Man identity entirely to go back to being just Peter Parker, lonely Columbia undergrad. But of course he can’t. This is 2004, and there is always evil bearing down on his New York.

Like Peter, we can’t go back to the days before we changed. But we can certainly fight the good fight.