Last night, my brother and his girlfriend (also known as
Flashback: The year is 1989. Ijon the Young Role-player discovers that there's more to role-playing than AD&D. Specifically, there's the Marvel Super Heroes role-playing game. With a friend named Elad and later with another friend named Itamar, Ijon discovers the allure of spandex apparel. Um, of imaginary characters with spandex apparel, that is. Honest! Anyhow, Ijon never read any Marvel comic books (those being practically nonexistent in Israeli bookshops at the time), but like all kids knows Spiderman and The Incredible Hulk. He buys some official MSH accessories, and relishes the "biographies" of all kinds of things (being a noun general enough to include humans, mutants, aliens, gods, entities, vegetables, planets, and chemical compounds gone very, very wrong) in the Marvel Universe character encyclopedias. Ijon starts playing Marvel, alongside his continued interest in AD&D (that only stopped around 1993), and for a while it is his favorite game in the whole world. At some point he teaches his little brother,
Fast forward to 2002: Ijon realizes that although it's been at least six years since he's touched those game books, he still has a soft spot for those wacky superheroes. In fact, he finds himself lecturing to
Then he recalls Dotan's recent blog entry about Spiderman, and decides he wouldn't mind a stroll down memory lane in the form of a Marvel-inspired movie. Off they go to the movies.
Ijon will switch pronouns now, because I feel like it.
En route,
The movie is great fun. Tobey Maguire makes a very good Peter Parker, as Dotan pointed out. unsubliminal message: go watch The Cider House Rules if you haven't yet. Kirsten Dunst's face was much too reminiscent of plastic at some points, but it didn't spoil the movie for me. Willem Dafoe made a wonderful villain. But the casting that really made my day was J.K. Simmons playing J. Jonah Jameson. Ohh! He was perfect. Facial features, facial expressions, tone of voice -- perfect.
The plot was quite tolerable, and there was plenty of wholesome humor. I never thought I'd enjoy such a film so much. I guess it owes more to the emotional strata it taps into in me than to "objective" quality, but it pleased me so much that I actually felt an itch to return to the genre, in role-playing by default but perhaps from another angle instead or as well.