Blog of Jeffrey Stuart Martin: May 2007

Spider-Man 3

Spider-man 3 has three villains, or 4 if you count Spider-man's own dark side. I thought this would be confusing, and doubted that a 2-hour movie could give any of the villains enough time to be more than cookie-cutter bad guys. I was wrong. The script cleverly draws on important themes from the previous two films to flesh out the 3 villains and give them arcs that span not only the whole film, but even connect with the first two Spider-man films, creating a sort of trilogy.

I read a quote from Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane) saying that it would be hard to have a Spider-man movie without her and Tobey MacGuire (Spider-man/Peter Parker). Whether or not this is true, both actors turned in excellent performances in this film. Aided by strong supporting players, including James DeFranco, and Rosemary Thomas, this summer blockbuster, comic-book action film actually had a number of strong emotional moments!

Spider-man is a fun action hero who we enjoy watching because he kicks bad-guy butt. He has also been very morally upright from the very beginning, a characteristic that is of unprecedented significance in this third film. As I said, one of Spider-man's enemies is himself, skewed towards evil by an alien substance he encounters. This film takes the time to thoroughly explore "dark Spider-man", but it never celebrates the depths to which he has fallen, (in spite of some funny moments). At his lowest point, Spider-man's behavior is almost sickening. It is therefore a huge relief when the film turns around and thoroughly redeems our fallen hero. We not only admire Spider-man for doing good, but hope that we too can have the strength of character to reject evil in our lives.

Packaged around the emotional moments and redemptive themes, Spider-man is still a piece of mass-market entertainment. I was a little frustrated that they had to spell out ev-er-y plot con-nec-tion in 4th-grade level detail. The film made excellent use of flashbacks, incorporating footage from the first two films, as well as new scenes of back-story, but it was too heavy-handed, as though the filmmakers didn't believe we were capable of remembering the first two films or understanding a complex plot.

Spider-man 3 is a strong film that takes everything (good and bad) from the first two films and does it bigger, better and more meaningfully.

Needed: paradigm adjustments, Part 2

I've been a fan of space ships my entire life. When I was younger, my family had back issues of National Geographic from the '60s through the '80s. I used to browse through the table of contents and read every article I could find on space exploration. More recently, I've been watching lots of Star Trek, in which people live on largely self-sustaining spaceships for months or years at a time.

With the knowledge looming over me that we humans are in the process of destroying the earth's self-sustaining ecosystem, I realized that as huge and stable as the Earth seems when we are living on it, it is really nothing more than a large spaceship, and as such is not any more inherently stable than any other well-designed ecosystem. If a space-ship relies on a certain kind of plant to produce oxygen, and that plant dies, the ship is rendered unlivable. The Earth has a lot of redundancies built in, but tip it far enough off balance, and we too could lose a vital system.

I realize that this is not original thinking by any means. But if we're going to undue the damage we've done to the Earth already, a good place to start would be for the general public (and governments in particular) to adopt more of this spaceship mind-set. We need to maintain our environmental systems or we're going to be nothing but a dead hunk of rock floating in space.

Needed: paradigm adjustments, Part 1

I have been eagerly following the hybrid/electric car economy ever since watching the excellent film "Who killed the electric car." I firmly believe that global climate change is a real threat, and that getting gasoline cars off the road is one of the best ways to fight it.

I am disgusted, therefore, at the prevalence of car makers, both garage tinkerers and major manufacturers, who are focusing on expensive luxury hybrid/electrics instead of on basic, affordable, non-polluting transportation. Creating hybrid/electric cars isn't going to have much effect on global climate change if only a few rich people can afford them. We need to get zero-emissions cars into the garages of everyday, working-class people--the people that make up the majority of the country's population.

In order for zero-emissions vehicles to make a difference, auto makers need to shift their thinking from making expensive luxury cars to making cars that people like me can afford!