For the most part, I enjoyed Spider-Man (the first movie.) Toby Maguire, who I didn’t know before he was cast in it, played a great Peter Parker, Sam Raimi turned in a restrained performance as director, and while I didn’t thrill to the Green Goblin’s character, William Dafoe did a decent job playing him. My only real complaint had to do with the special effects. Once scene in particular (Pajama-man climbing his first wall) almost ruined the movie for me.

My biggest hope for the second movie was for them to make the effects more believable. I’d heard somewhere that Raimi liked the original’s “comic bookish” quality of effects, but that just doesn’t hold water with me. If you’re going to make a live-action movie out of a comic book character, do what you can to make it look realistic – if you want it to look like a cartoon, animate it. Sounds to me like they just ran out of money/time/talent.

I went into Spider-Man 2 having already heard some critical praise which bordered on hype. Normally, that’s a bad sign – when my expectations are high, movies have an annoying tendency of falling short of the mark. And it didn’t help any that I read my fair share of Spider-man comic books back in high school… If anything, they just made me harder to please.

Even so, I didn’t come away from the theater disappointed! In fact, I’ll say that Spider-man 2 is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Without giving away any spoilers (not already seen in the trailer), here’s why:

• The fight scenes were absolutely amazing. Frenetic, fluid, and very believable (as much as a radioactive-spider-infected man fighting a neuro-interfaced-man-robot-thing can be believable, anyway.) The visual effects were much improved.
• Tobey Maguire is Peter Parker. Even behind the mask, his voice comes across as that of a nerdy college kid (contrast this with the way actors typically voice Bruce Wayne differently than his alter ego, Batman.)
• Alfred Molina was perfectly cast as Doc Ock (awesome villain!), J.K. Simmons completely nails the role of J. Jonah Jamison, and James Franco is quite believable in his intentions as Harry Osborn.
• Aunt May being on Spider-man’s side was a nice twist on the comic book’s portrayal of her character. Peter Parker had enough to worry about in this movie without her unintentional guilt trip added in.
• Now that Sam Raimi has an honest-to-God blockbuster under his belt, it’s nice to see the big studios’ rein on him loosen up a bit. Witness the Evil Dead homage in the operating room!
• Raimi fans (like me) also have fun looking for cameos in his films. It was great to see Bruce Campbell, Ted Raimi, and even his… car in Spider-man 2 (not to mention Stan Lee!)

Despite all the good stuff, there were a few things that bothered me:

• I don’t know how the comic book versions went down, but Doc Ock’s and the Green Goblins’ origin stories were far too similar. Someone should really crack down on Oscorp.
• Kristen Dunst didn’t sell me on the Mary Jane character. She didn’t do a bad job, but she definitely wasn’t as perfectly matched to the roll as Tobey Maguire was to Peter Parker.
• Is it just me, or is Spider-man much more resilient in this movie? The subway scene in particular portrayed his human body as practically indestructible. Judging from my experience, spiders are not especially invulnerable – where did he gain those powers?
• Must every villain in the Spider-man movie franchise communicate their motivations through insane ramblings with themselves? I think it’s time we had a villain that’s not certifiably crazy, just, you know, motivated by evil!
• J. Jonah Jamison’s son was completely unnecessary. Boooooring.

All the bad things I listed above are just nit-picking. For what it’s worth, I only came up with most of them after the movie was over – they certainly didn’t detract from the film. Because I’ve already decided that I want to see it again (at $9 a pop!) Spider-man 2 is definitely going to the top of my list for summer movies.

Trivial Thought: One of the reasons I want to go back and see Spider-man 2 again was because I saw it the first time from the 3rd row. Maybe those special effects weren’t as good as I thought…
What did I find worthwhile about the movie? It’s another great sequel that continues the all-important character development right where it left off (see Shrek 2). We all know how easy it is for Hollywood to cash in and screw up movie franchises – fortunately, this movie is probably even better than the first one!
Would I recommend the movie? Even to people that have never owned over 4000 comic books!
Will I buy it on DVD? Yes, first day it’s out.

Overall Summer Movie Ranking
Spider-man 2
Shrek 2
The Day After Tomorrow
The Terminal
The Chronicles of Riddick
Troy
Van Helsing
The Stepford Wives

My 4-day 4th of July weekend has come and gone, and I spent most of it planted squarely in front of my computer monitor. Part of it was futzing with my cable modem and GCI’s tech support (only to have them tell me after a house call that “it must be network problems”), but most of it was playing computer games. Every once in awhile I rediscover the catharsis in casting aside my responsibilities and losing myself in frag-filled entertainment.

The weekend wasn’t a total creative loss, though. I pried myself away from the keyboard long enough to show up at a friend’s fireworks-watching party on the night of the 3rd. Years ago I admitted to myself that I didn’t find the festivities on the 4th very exciting. The parade, fireworks, street events and parties, I can take ‘em or leave ‘em, but I do enjoy hanging out with my friends. The house we were visiting was high up on a hill downtown, too, and it offered the perfect vantage point to try to capture the fireworks show.

I’ve been looking for years for a good place to rig up a time-lapse of the Juneau traffic after the fireworks display. Thousands upon thousands of people drive downtown for the show at midnight and before the last explosion finishes echoing off the mountainsides, the mass exodus along the only road out to the valley has already begun. For the next hour (at least!) you can see mile after mile of red taillights filling the north-bound lane contrasted with only the occasional pair of headlights going south. Seeing wave after wave of red running lights turning to redder brake lights at each stoplight’s intersection has always entranced me, and although I’ve recorded it to videotape twice, I’ve yet to do it from a really good spot.

Location, in photography as well as in real estate, is everything. I know that I should be scouting the best vantage point weeks in advance for pre-planned events like this. Photos and video could soar from good to great just by having the right foreground or background element. Why then do I rarely make the effort?

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There’s been a lot of hoopla in the news lately about NASA’s probe, Cassini-Huygens, and its visit to Saturn. I grew up reading science fiction novels and I’m fascinated that in our current exploration of Mars and Saturn we could be on the verge of discovering life (albeit of the single-celled variety) on other planets and moons in our solar system. If a discovery like that is verified, I can only hope that the public consciousness will then latch onto what might be out in the near infinity beyond.

Despite working in a department that actually rebroadcasts the NASA channel; I regrettably have very little time to pursue all the latest news of their findings. Still, the bits and pieces that I catch online and on the news are intriguing; what’s more, they sparked a memory I had of doing some research on the Cassini probe back in 1997 while I was still in college.

This is where being an amateur archivist pays off. I was able to dig up an old CD-ROM backup of the screamin’ 90Mhz Pentium (with 16MB of RAM, and an impossible-to-fill 730MB hard drive, baby!) I had throughout my college career. Written for Freshman Comp. (taken in, yes, my senior year), this is an unexciting, compare-and-contrast, research paper, but I thought I’d post it here for nostalgic purposes and for a look back at the NASA hoopla of seven years ago.

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Getting back into the groove at work and then faced with a busy 4th of July weekend hasn’t left me much time to write in my web log. I still want to do a write up on the family reunion, but that will have to wait. Today is July 1st, and it’s time to take a look at my Photoblog statistics again.

Here’s the quick lowdown:

June 2004: 83 visitors, 160 visits
May 2004: 37 visitors, 116 visits
April 2004: 21 visitors, 60 visits

On the surface it looks as though I’ve yet again doubled the number of unique hits on the site, but the straight numbers are a little misleading. About 18 to 20 of those 83 hits are probably from ‘blog indices verifying my site when I initially signed up with them at the beginning of the month. Still, even taking that into account, it looks as though registering was worth the effort as the indices do seem to help boost the overall number of unique visits.

As you can see from the image to the left, most of the incoming visits are still coming from my web log. That makes sense, considering I do these write ups each month (not to mention the link on this page directly to the photoblog.) The big surprise, though, came in the last couple days of the month when I logged almost as many visits from http://www.le-cam.org. I visited their site, but I still have no idea why they linked to me! If you can make heads or tails of that particular French rowing fan site (or more importantly, if you can find the link back to my photoblog), please clue me in!

Interestingly, it doesn’t appear as if anyone arrived at my site this month via the results of a web search query. After last month, I expected to see quite a few more Google hits on the site, but I guess those “Sally Lightfoot Crab” keywords were just a fluke.

For July, I know I should be exploring a new tactic, but I think I’m going to continue as is. Rather than try to rationalize a reason why, I’m just going to admit that I’m feeling lazy. I still want to submit the site to search engines, but I think that should be further down the line. I also have at least three other plans, but they’re going to involve a lot of motivation I don’t currently have. (I want to research and implement automated RSS feeds, create html metatags for each entry, and submit every picture to Photo.net.) All those sound like too much work too soon after my vacation, so I think I’ll just let it ride for another month.

Hey, you know what? Even a falloff in the number of hits would tell me something… Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t going to rationalize. Never mind.

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Two P.S.’s: First: Yes, I know it’s not July 1st anymore (despite what the first paragraph above says). I’m having terrible cable modem troubles and haven’t been able to reliably connect to the web. The good news is that tech support will be here “sometime within 24 to 72 hours.” Second: Props to Mike for helping me figure out why the last three entries are showing up on the front page of my blog — I completely spaced the fact that Greymatter operates by date rather than by entry. (I posted the last three entries on the same day — just before going on vacation — before immediately closing them. When it came time to update the photoblog, I could simply hop online and open each entry again.) Fear not… the photoblog should fix itself with the next update.