Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Tonight Ian and I went up to see Spider-Man 2, since these days there’s very little to do around the house. I was waiting to see if Nikki wanted to go this weekend, but since she didn’t, we just went up today. It’s good. I don’t think it’s as much better than X-Men 1 as X-Men 2 was, but it’s pretty high up there. At least the equal of Spider-Man 1. My main problem with it was that the part in which (spoilers ahead) he has quit being spider-man lasts just a little too long. It’s not like it was going to last. The start is fantastic, and the ending is also great, even if I did have trouble holding back the nausea during the “new york solidarity” scene which occurs at the end of probably the best action sequence in any marvel film so far, when Spider-Man is fighting Octavius on a moving train. My predictions for Spider-Man 3 involve the bringing in some underlings for the main villain (it’s pretty obvious who that’ll be, given the end of this film) in the form of the Rhino or Lizard, perhaps. I don’t expect they’ll go with Venom for a while. I liked the increased roles for JJJ, Betty Brant and the like, but I don’t have a clue what Peter’s landlord’s daughter was supposed to be doing there. I thought it might be Gwen Stacy, somehow, but it doesn’t appear so. Biggest nitpick of the film? I’m no physicist, but can you really stop a fusion reaction by dumping it underwater? I dunno. Either that, or just why was he losing his powers anyway? Psychosomatic short sightedness? That’s a pretty strange explanation. All good besides those two things, though. The script and action were both improved. That Raimi is one funny guy. I worry for who might take over actually. If it’s someone like Spielberg, I might just have to go on a killing spree. Also, can someone fire Danny Elfman? It’s bad enough that he made the Batman and Spider-Man theme tunes practically identical (damn hack) but I swear to god, the music for Spider-man 2 was all taken from Spider-Man 1. His music really irritated me, especially throughout the otherwise excellent credits sequence.

Anyway, just to keep the leaderboard updated:

Spider-Man
X-Men 2
Spider-Man 2
X-Men
Daredevil

At some point I’ll update that list with Hulk (which I didn’t see at the time because no-one wanted to go) and The Punisher (which I don’t actually intend to see, but from the trailer, you can just tell it blows goats.) Let’s be fair. Spider-Man 2 was nothing new, and I didn’t come out of it with the same “Wow, that was great” factor of X-Men 2. Maybe it was because Spider-Man 1 was much better than X-Men 1 and my expectations for improvements were unmeetable. It’s a hard choice, since there was a lot of decent story in Spider-Man 2. I’ll maybe revise this when I can watch Spider-Man 2 a few more times. I’d also like to state for the record that I really liked Daredevil, and it’s just that the other films are such good quality which makes me place Daredevil at the bottom.

On a similar note, we saw the trailer for Catwoman. By god, it looks dire. I mean really, really dire. The trailer didn’t actually give away any plot, and we have forumlated the theory that they don’t actually have a plot yet, just a bunch of actionshots and some dialogue which they have to rearrange to create a plot. There was also this one film… I was watching the trailer and thinking “hey, this looks just like that horrible Anaconda film I watched the other week.” I was about to lean over and say that to Ian, when the title popped up: ANACONDAS. Now there’s a masterpiece that was just crying out for a sequel. Some films just don’t need to be made.

We walked to town, given how our bus passes had just run out. We watched Spider-Man 1 with dinner, since Ian has never seen a decent quality version of it, and then we packed up and headed off. We took about 15-20 minutes to walk there, but bizarrely only 12 to get back. I think it’s because going there it’s slightly uphill. This was the second time I’d walked around St. Clements today, because earlier we went to get comics (Jim Mahfood and some other guys in a comic called “Bad Ideas” and this week’s Brian Bendis comic, “The Pulse”) and we walked into a local newsagents to see what sort of job magazines existed for the area. The local papers were no help, but we managed to find a Friday Ad (mentioned recently) and the fact it existed in Oxford proved my status as a crazy northerner, I guess. However, the job section was, er, not good. It was 3/4 of a page in size, and contain: about 19 “Advertise your job vacancies in the Friday-Ad!” adverts, 2 adverts to become Avon distributors, 2 work from home scams (and 2 advice boxes to tell you not to send money to work from home scams,) 1 to become a Friday Ad rep, and 1 actual “job” which wasn’t really a job so much as a “chat-line operator” Frankly, I don’t think the world is ready for me to be operating phone sex lines.