This flick made $300 million goddamned dollars in its first three goddamned weeks. Who knows how much it pulled in total, all over the goddamned world. Couldn’t you take a few minutes and make a decent DVD? Would it fucking kill you? You gotta know the DVD was gonna be huge. The two guys before me at Best Buy this afternoon were buying it. I bought it. The guy after me bought it.
Okay, the movie itself, I have no problem with it. I’m not a technical kind of guy. The transfer seems fine. But the menu interface is really bad. A small red light serves to indicate what selection you’ve made. Don’t worry, I figured it out, you pricks. After repeatedly selecting the chapter selection menu, I noticed that when I played with the direction arrows a little red light bounced around.
And then there’s this “pop up video” type thing. Christ on a crutch! You remember that show from VH 1? They do something just like it, but obviously didn’t pay the guys who came up with the idea. First off, the pop ups all suck ostrich eggs. Here’s one for ya “Kirsten Dunst plays Mary Jane Watson.” Thankfully, though, you actually get that one right, you godless prickhounds.
In the part where he’s saying those catch phrases while trying to make his web shoot, the pop up notes that, as a tribute to Superman, “Tobey MacGuire (my own spelling error) says Up, Up” That’s it. Exqueeze me, you left off a bit.
Some of the pop ups are in color and translucent, others are black and white. There are misspellings, extra spaces, letters left out of words. Font changes. Type size changes. One pop up mentions a “bandonded building”
I’m afraid to check out the commentary, and the second disc. I’m glad I didn’t buy the fancy version.
Aaaargh.
Well, see, there’s your problem. For correct spelling and proper syntax, ya gots to shell out the extra bucks.
I’m rather disappointed to hear this, actually. The ‘SE’ release of Mad Max had this same “pop-up” feature, and it was done fairly well. Noting on the packaging that the Spiderman disc contained the same thing, I was looking forward to seeing it.
I picked this up on Friday and the missus and I watched the movie that night; as a straight movie sans extras it’s fine.
I decided to listen to the commentary track tonight since there was nothing on the tube and the missus had to run out of town. Sam Raimi and the other production-team guys were fine, but good lord Kirsten Dunst was worthless! Most of her comments were along the lines of “oh yeah, right” and “oh yeah, I remember that” after one of her co-commentators made a statement. That, and giggling over Tobey McGuire (“this part is so cute – he’s such a little boy”). She really came across as being a total space cadet.
She’s still a hottie in my book, though.
I agree with you on the interface. And I was disappointed that there were no deleted scenes, particularly since the commentary talked about things they cut from the film – I’d have liked to have seen them! (The DVD has bloopers and screen tests, but not deleted scenes).
The second disc is OK – the chitchat piece where they talk to all the artists who have drawn/written Spidey over the years was interesting (apparently Kevin Smith has worked on the comic in some capacity – I didn’t realize that). But it’s definitely a weak lineup of extras.
Spider-man is an excellent film, and IMO, is the single best comic-to-film-adapation ever, which is a good thing because everything the OP said about the DVD is true. The menus on both discs look fuzzy and lack clear resolution, and the little red dots that indicate menu selection on the first disc are really hard to read. Moreover, as a copy editor, I found the misspellings, grammatical errors and other flaws in the pop-up band to be genuinely annoying (as did my boyfriend, since I kept pointing them out to him while he was trying to watch the movie). C’mon, “it’s” is used as a possessive pronoun instead of “its”?
And the extras are extremely weak, as my learned friend pointed out. There’s just a couple of media promotion pieces, lame screentests, a couple of profiles of the director and composer, and a lame “gag reel” in which all the colorful comments from the stars as they blow their lines are bleeped out! Why couldn’t there have been a documentary on the history of the adaptation of comics to movies? Deleted scenes? Or a selection of Spider-man TV shows and cartoons to show the evolution of how the character has been portrayed? Maybe a history of the creation of Spider-man and the enmity between Steve Ditko and Stan Lee over the credit for creating the Webhead?
The only good extra is the “hidden” cgi bloopers. Goto the commentaries menu and select the “back to extras” bit. Press right and you can select the picture of James Franco. Funny bloopers too; Green Goblin flying around and running into things, someone substituting a spiderman model for the spider that bites Peter so you see spiderman crawling down a web pulling it out of his butt :).
I didn’t like the movie though. The special effects blew (nice texturing on the beta-costume, it looked like the old Superman serials where he turned into a cartoon to fly) and the story was a fairly typical teenaged angst love-triangle. But that’s a rant for another thread :).
BWAHAHAH! I’m gonna have to figure out a way to fit this into a sentence.
Sucks about the Spiderman DVD though. Maybe I’ll check out the special edition.
The reason the popups are different colours and fonts is because some refer to comic book history, and some refer to the movie.
Yes, some popups are blazingly obvious, but most are fascinating insights not mentioned anywhere else.
The DVD is on par with the movie, which was entertaining, but obviously lacking in finesse. The sequel will have more cash spent on it, so it should turn out better. Hopefully.
I paid $15 for it. The transfer is very good, as is the audio. This alone makes the purchase worth the dough I shelled out for it.
The menus look fine to me, and had no problem with the selection indicator. I’m not sure what your problem was with this. Using the directional arrows to navigate the menus is the industry standard. I can’t think of a disk that doesn’t use this method.
Haven’t tried the extras yet, but even if they suck badly they don’t detract from the movie itself.
IMO, Ghost World is the best comic-to-film adaptation ever, and in the superhero genre, Superman. I would also put Ghost in the Shell ahead of Spiderman.
I’m buying the Spider-Man DVD later tonight, so this is a bit disconcerting to read. But buy it anyway I will, for I loved the movie so.
But it being the best superhero adaption ever: bah. Superman the Movie knocks it around the block. Twice if Superman flies around the world to go back in time to knock the webslinger about again.
I was trying to get some DVD playerless friends of mine to go for that deal. They’d get the videos, I’d get the DVD. Unfortunatly they wouldn’t go for it :(.
Nah. Lois’s wooden reading of “Can You Read My Mind” (reminiscent of a 6 year old reading “An Ode to a Tree”. From cue cards: “I think that. I shall never. See a poem lovely. As a tree.”) sent half the audience into a diabetic coma. It sent the other half into a bored coma. That alone kicks it down a peg. Trying to decipher Marlon “Don Vito Jor-El” Brando’s mumblings (“Myff smn. Ymu mrrr th’ lmst smmvivrm of Kr’ptin mff.”) didn’t much help either. Enunciate Marlon. Pear-shaped tones.*
Plus you’ve got the marvelously talented Ned Beatty and Gene Hackman’s skills completely unused: I suppose it’s ok to have one bumbling buffoon as a bad-guy, but why two?
And if you’re doing a Superman story you need a serious menace: doesn’t have to be Doomsday or something but at least a Lex Luthor with an IQ over about 70 would help. There was never any sense of threat from Luthor, Otis or Miss Tessmacher (who’s name was rarely pronuounced the same way twice).
Chris Reeves’ performance was stunning as Clark and damned fine as Superman and the effects were wonderful for the time, but there was almost no story, and what little story it has was incoherent. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Spider-Man was a far superior film, IMO.
Fenris
*Yes, I AM exaggerating. Lots. His performance was awful but not quite as incomprehensible as I suggested. It was funny writing the mmbly dialogue, though. So it was worth it.
The problem isn’t the use of directional arrows – you’re right, every DVD uses that. The problem is the menu is only highlighted by three small dots, and the change in state from “unlit dot” to “lit dot” can be hard to see, particularly on less-than-gargantuan TV sets. It can be hard to tell which menu item you’ve got selected sometimes.
And then I got really confused when Fellowship of the Ring came out - between Abba tunes running through my head, I’d mutter, “Welcome, Mr. Underhill… or should we call you ‘Frodo’.”
Now, now, I didn’t mean to highjack this thread into Hugo Weaving. Let’s get back on topic.
Since all comic book movie villian actors seem to have at least one drag-queen role in their past (or future), who should act the next Spider-man villian? Wesley Snipes? Guy Pierce?
