Thoughts on Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, ten years after its surprising and record-setting $100m+ debut.

Ten years ago, we had our first $100 million opening weekend.   Ten years ago, feeding off twenty years of anticipation, positive reviews, and a post-9/11 atmosphere that craved distinctly American heroism, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man pulled off the unthinkable.  And really, looking back on that fabled three-day weekend in May 2002, that's the thing that sticks out.  In these days of heavily-publicized box office tracking reports, with every blogger with a website playing box office pundit, with studios having mastered the art of saturation-level opening weekends down to a science, Spider-Man's record Fri-Sun debut was a complete surprise.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had just broken the three-day record six months ago with $92 million.  Spider-Man wasn't even supposed to be the biggest movie of summer 2002, with that honor theoretically going to Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones.  Spider-Man was supposed to be the warm-up play, the summer kick-off picture that wetted the appetite for the big guns coming down the pike.  It was The Mummy, the Deep Impact, or the Twister of the summer movie season.  But as I discussed four years ago, sometimes the summer kick-off films surprise you.  Even so, with buzz building and free press galore coming from mainstream entertainment sources, pundits like myself were optimistically predicting an $80 million debut, followed by a somewhat quick plunge once Attack of the Clones brought the thunder 1.5 weeks later.  But as we all know, something very different happened.

Review: The Hunter (2012) is a sober, quiet thriller with no clear answers.

The Hunter

2012
100 minutes
rated R

by Scott Mendelson

The Hunter is, at its core, a probing character study of a man sent on a mission to do something most of us would consider unthinkable.  At its best, it is an eerily quiet portrait and an occasionally haunting drama.  Alas, it gets tripped up in outside complications, adding melodrama and apparent corporate conspiracy to its plot when its frankly unneeded.  But Willem Dafoe delivers a fine star turn, arguably portraying the kind of rugged man-of-action he thought we would end up playing after Clear and Present Danger was released back in 1994 (as some may recall, most of John Clark's action beats ended up on the cutting room floor, and no spin-off ever materialized from Tom Clancy's Clark-centric novels).  The needless complications are what prevents a good film from being great, while an uncommonly powerful ending stirs the soul even while leaving crucial moral questions unanswered.