Spider-Man II

I’d like to tell you that I enjoyed seeing Spider-Man II, but that would mean I would have had to have actually *seen* it, and I only saw about half of it.

Usually the half that was playing in the middle third of the screen, but sometimes, suddenly and without warning, it would be the half playing on the left third of the screen, or, equally without warning, on the right third of the screen.

After about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes of the infuriating focus changes, I went out to find a manager. The girl behind the counter said, “Theatre three?” to me before I spoke. I nodded, and she said,”We’re working on it.” Apparently the other twenty people who had already left the theatre had gone to complain, too.

Now, if someone is working on fixing a focus problem in a film, I would expect one of several things to happen: 1. the film gets shut off. 2. the film goes through some really *wild* focus fluxuations while they try to fix it. 3. the theatre manager comes in, apologizes, and hands out refunds or free tickets because they’re not going to be able to fix the problem in a timely fashion.

None of these things happened. Throughout the course of the film, people kept getting up and going to talk to the manager. No one actually left, because god damn it, we all wanted to find out what happened in the story. But every climactic moment was blurred. We could not see reactions. And the theatre did nothing about it.

I was almost certain that most, if not all, of the paintings during the credits were Alex Ross paintings. I wanted to stay through the credits to see for sure. But the credits were literally unreadable. It was like trying to read them from sixty feet away without my glasses on, except I was wearing my contacts.

Ted and a couple of others were the first people out of the theatre, and they found the first theatre employee they could and asked to see a manager. This poor girl was about 18 and it was her first day at work. She led them over to an employees only door, which she opened and leaned in, trying to get a manager’s attention. When she turned to look at the two or three people who’d followed her, she discovered they’d turned into a mob of forty or sixty pissed-off theatre goers. The poor kid blanched in horror. One guy said, “Damn, I forgot the torches.”

The manager, who didn’t look like he was more than about twelve himself, came out, turned around, went right back into the employee room, and came back out with emergency tickets (I kid you not, that’s what they say on them) and started handing them out in 2s to everybody who was standing there. He didn’t say anything, just handed them out.

Which is mildly satisfactory, but dammit, they should have fixed the goddamned problem and avoided the pissed-off mob.

So while I more or less enjoyed the film, and there were some moments of grace in it that I really truly loved, it was somewhat overwhelmed by the infuriating presentation. I thought, like the first movie, that this one was too long. It seems somewhat absurd to complain about too much character development, but when they *finally* finished Doc Ock’s origin story I was like, “Thank GOD, we can get on with the STORY now.”

The fight scenes were wonderful. Kirsten Dunst, for all that I don’t like her MJ much, had some very good moments, and I was relieved she was cast as the correct character in the stage show she was doing within the movie (I shall put who she was behind a cut tag, so that in case anybody thinks that’s a spoiler, they don’t have to be spoiled), and Aunt May was terrific. Better by far in this movie than in the first one. Doc Ock was, in fact, very good. And Jameson was perfectly wonderful all over again, but overall I thought the movie was too long. (Shaun, not surprisingly, was bored out of his mind and walked out before the end of the film. I don’t know why he does this to himself. :))

So anyway, I’ll go see it again, probably this weekend, on Regal Theatres’ dime, because I want to see what happened. :P

The play MJ was in was The Importance of Being Ernest, and when I found out that was the play she was in, I had a few horrified moments while I waited to find out if she was playing Cecily or Gwen, because it would have been *all* *wrong* for her to be playing Gwen. Fortunately, she’d been cast as Cecily, and I was very pleased about that. Emily agreed; Ted, Shaun and Coby thought we were nuts.