"Less chat, more splat"

Boy, Mike said it. Tonight Kristin and I went out on a double date (like in high school) with Mike and Steph. We took in Spiderman 3. Well, if you refer to the title of this post, you may notice that the movie needed a higher splat to chat ratio. The movie was about 2 1/2 hours long, and in all that maybe, maybe 15 collective minutes were dedicated to action. Granted, the production team managed to extract an astonishing amount of high quality visual effects out of those 15 minutes, but there really wasn't enough of it. I am not the type that just likes action sequences as I understand the value of a good story, but the story at hand really did not need to take 2 hours and 15 minutes of talking to get across.

Oh, but there was a gem in all the talking. I don't want to ruin anything, but I will just say that, though hokey, the black "venom" suit makes Peter Parker very funny.

Here are the elements That made the movie enjoyable:

The action sequences
The antics of "dark side" Peter
The emergence of Venom. The actual Venom. Big mouth and everything. THe CGI dudes really paid attention to detail with him. Also the fact that Eric freakin' Foreman pulled the Brock/Venom character of with unprecedented precision. The only issue I have is that far too little time was given to Venom. Hopefully, if they make another movie, Venom will be the main villain. It was almost as depressing as Star Wars episode 3 where you get to see Vader in the suit, but no Vader fights after the suit is applied.

Oh yeah, and Lloyd from Wings was Sandman. A special effects wonder, but otherwise not important.

Anyway, I digress. My critique is this: Spiderman is worth seeing in the theaters, but don't pay full price. See it as a matinee or something. If you have kids, wait until it comes out on DVD so they can skip the sometimes 20 minutes of solid talking and get right to the parts we all know they want to see.

Tomorrow is Mother's day, and I will be spending time with my family and my in-laws. Afterwards, Kristin and I will watch our weekly movie. Not sure what that will be yet. I also plan to post individual tributes to both my mother and Kristin. Tributes they likely won't read. Not because they wouldn't want to, but more because Kristin vaguely knows I post the occasional blog, and my Mom, though she has heard about this and has vistied at least once does not frequent here often. Although, maybe she does. We never really talk about it. This is mostly for me anyway.