And I need a word that's the opposite of schadenfreude. Something about the way some people get hateful when other people are happy, when they try to make everyone as miserable as they themselves are.

Spite?

Steph is me. Mayun! I was so disenchanted with S3...and I have zero expectations. James Franco was much better than the movie deserved.

At the end, all I could say was, "I never thought I'd be missing Doc Ock."

Note: I'm not whitefonting anything that appeared in trailers.

Okay. Here's what I liked about Spidey 3:

James Franco. Damn, does he have a killer smile. *Almost* as good as Scola's (but not quite). And I thought his acting was far better than the material he had to work with. As both a bad guy AND a good guy/amnesia guy. And he's pretty.

Despite how radically it diverged from the comics, I loved Pete and Harry teaming up to fight Sandman and Venom. (It just occurred to me -- the movie never gave a villain name to the symbiote, or to Eddie Brock+symbiote, right? Huh.) Anyway, I would have loved to see more of Pete and Harry working together. It was pretty much the only time in all 3 movies that there was any of the lighthearted quippiness that is S.O.P. for comic!Spidey. And the lighthearted quippiness while fighting is one of the things I always loved most about comic!Spidey (and it's why I took so well to Buffy).

Aunt May. She's lovely.

J. Jonah Jameson. Perfection.

Betty Brant (Jameson's secretary). Yeah, her part is small in all the movies, but -- RRRROWR!!!

Bruce Campbell's standard cameo. Heh.

I loved the *look* of Sandman. I also liked that he was given some depth and not just a 1-dimensional baddie. Unfortunately, Thomas Hayden Church has only one facial expression, which translated to "I am SO constipated."

I pretty much liked Topher Grace as Eddie Brock. It struck me how WELL he could have played Peter Parker, actually.

What I disliked:

It had too much in it. I get why there were three villains -- Harry had to be bad so that he could have the big reconciliation/sacrifical death thing, and there had to be both Sandman AND Venom (symbiote+Eddie Brock) so that Pete had to ask Harry for help. It was still just too much for one movie.

All. The. Freaking. ANVILS. As well as Deus ex Butler, which seriously almost made me get up and leave. It was so utterly, utterly contrived and clunky I wanted to scream. As was the foreshadowing when amnesia!Harry in the hospital said "I'd die for my friends." Uh, yeah. He might as well have said "I'm GOING to die for my friends!"

In the comics, the symbiote didn't turn Pete into a raging asshole OR into a swinging casanova. However, I don't mind divergences from comics canon IF it's done well. But this wasn't. It was so heavy-handed and buffoon-ish. Which pretty much negates the point they were trying to establish, which was that symbiote = bad. It came across more as symbiote = Two Wild and Crazy Guys!

Oddly, I *would* have been okay with the hey-I'm-cool-and-hip thing if it was limited just to Pete walking down the street, acting all cool, giving girls the eye, and even his goony little dance. I can live with a little bit of self-mockery, and that part did make me giggle. It's like, Peter Parker is meant to be Everyman. We identify with him b/c he's just a nerdly little guy. And so even with a magic symbiote costume, he can't overcome his nerdiness. That little bit would have been okay, EXCEPT....

Let us not even SPEAK of the dance scene. I have literally never seen anything that was more painfully watch-from-the-hall than that scene, starting with Pete playing the piano ("Double time!" WTF? The symbiote plays piano, too???), all the way through him inadvertently decking MJ. That scene is pretty much where the movie jumped the shark for me.

Mary Jane needed to brush her hair throughout the ENTIRE movie. Seriously, girl, if you're going to have hair that long, you HAVE to brush it, or else woodland creatures will build a nest in it.

Peter's "evil"/emo look -- was pretty much just Little Nicky. Sad and lame. Greasy, lanky hair and eyeliner do NOT make a person look evil/dark/menacing.

Ugh. It was just....a scattershot, bloaty, embarassing mess of a movie.

Pretty much what Steph said. (Although I did like the Bruce Campbell cameo.)

Even though I agree with some of Steph's criticisms, I really liked the movie. I don't think it reached the heights of the first two, mainly because there wasn't as much complexity/depth to the major theme of the movie. I think that all the plotlines were interwoven pretty well, and I like that they continued the ongoing plotlines from the last two movies.

So, overall, I found it very enjoyable and a good time.

I agree with pretty much everything Steph said, as stated above, but I think I enjoyed the bloaty mess less.

It was a very bad sign when the times that Peter Parker cried, the audience burst out in gaffaws...really long gaffaws . I'm thinking, not what the filmmakers had in mind. The multiple incidence of a. single. tear. breaking free and coursing down his cheek were just cheese on a stick.

I agree totally with the little Nicky hairstyle analysis. Though my first thought was Peter!Patrelli!

There was just too much going on. Too many contrived 'jeepers!' moments and far, far too little depth.

And, as with the first two, I kept thinking to myself jeez, this is the worst cgi I've ever seen. Saturday morning cartoons look more realistic.

There were very few emotional notes in Spiderman 3 that worked for me. The ones where the acting and writing didn't make me want to scream had been so foreshadowed that there was still pain there.

I'm guessing that I'm supposed to think well of Pete and Harry's rekindled friendship, but I found it insanely creepy and Pollyannaish. I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel for Dark Petey, because although some people in the film recoiled at the fragrant cheese, it also fucking WORKED from time to time. Which? Hell the fuck no.

I agree with all of Steph's kudos, except with a James Franco caveat for the scenes mentioned in my preceding paragraph. Bruce Campbell, who has an ability to annoy me (no matter how much I like him in some stuff, he seems in love with his cool theses days) was freaking MAGIC. I did love him to pieces.

Oh, and I hate Ted Raimi. Never seen him play a character I didn't want taken outside and pistol-whipped.

I had a similar recoil to PetenHarry together again... considering it was based on a pretty self-serving lie.

And then! When the butler finally, and oh so conveniently turns Harry's seething rage of a thousand stubborn bulls into gosh! he really IS my bud. Couldn't he have maybe mentioned that before?

I enjoyed dark!Peter, but mostly because Maguire seemed to be having great fun with it. It made it fun to watch for me.

The whole butler thing made me roll my eyes forever. LAME.

Basically, the movie had too much dudes crying. and not enough snarky dialogue.

What trailers did you guys see before Spiderman 3? We got an extremely emo one about some guy called Jude starring Marilyn Manson's new GF (Rachel Evan Wood? I worry I mess one of her names up), PotC3, Shrek3, HPIV, and some one about surfing penguins. The room couldn't have been flatter after the Jude one, and this is a group that was fired up playing some weird video game onscreen instead of watching ads. Well, the game wasn't weird--it was that standard one with the bat at the bottom of the screen and the blocks at the top with point values. It was just weird to play it as an audience.