We <3 Spiderman

Over the Christmas holiday I downloaded "Spiderman 3", which I'd not yet seen but had long wanted to. I like the series, having collected Spiderman comics in high school. I thought Spiderman 2 was outstanding from both cinematographic as well as story perspectives: the fights with Doc Octopus were very exciting and well done.

So I'm watching Spiderman 3 on my laptop after Christmas and you know who crawls up in my lap to see what I'm doing. Spiderman isn't all that violent and so I let her watch it, explaining what was going on. For those that haven't seen it, it's rather complicated (which I realized as I was getting her up to speed). There are at least 4 plot lines running concurrently, two of which have roots in the earlier movies. I won't cover them here, but suffice to say that in spite of the complications, she got into it and understood. She recognized Peter's struggles with the identity, the lure of the symbiotic alien life form (Venom), the animosity between Harry and Peter (Harry wants to kill Spiderman based on the mistaken belief that Spiderman killed his father, but then he discovers that Spiderman is actually his best friend), and so on.

She ends up watching most of the movie with me and then the next day, she wants to watch it again. Once she understands a movie (be it "Over the Hedge" or "Spiderman"), she'll watch it by herself. Only after this viewing, she astutely observes that since this is Spiderman 3, she needs to watch Spiderman 1 and 2. I then downloaded these for her and we watched them together too. She really got into the whole series and character!

Of course, since they are downloads, they are only viewable on my computer, and I like using my computer for other things. So I had to order the trilogy (props to Amazon.co.jp, which not only had the trilogy for about $30, it delivered it next day for free, and each disk had extra commentaries to boot!). I let Miku click the "Order" button and then of course she was totally stoked when the doorbell rang the next day. (One side story: About an hour after we placed the order, a different Amazon order showed up. Of course Miku thought that the DVDs had arrived.)



So now Miku's favorite movie is Spiderman 2. She loves the first scene where Peter tries to deliver some pizzas but has to drop them on someone balcony for a second while he saves some kids. A resident finds them and takes a single piece out just as Spider takes off with the pies, so he yoinks! the piece out with a web. She laughs and laughs. Someone also witnesses Peter Parker run into an alley with a stack of pizzas followed a few second later by Spiderman swinging out with the same pies. "Whoa, he took that guy's pizza!" also makes her cackle.


The pictures I've included here are pictures she took with her camera of the movie. We've got Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Doc Octopus.

So that's that.