Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Directed by Sam Raimi
The seemingly invincible Spider-Man goes up against an all-new crop of villains—including the shape-shifting Sandman. While Spider-Man’s superpowers are altered by an alien organism, his alter ego, Peter Parker, deals with nemesis Eddie Brock and also gets caught up in a love triangle.
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What critics say influenced Spider-Man 3
Instead of his red-torsoed spider suit, Parker soon wears a black-chested one, and the space goop turns the human Parker into a jerk in a dramatically primitive sequence that has him strutting down the avenue Saturday Night Fever style, snapping his fingers at the babes and combing his hair forward in a downbeat emo mode.
Even more significantly, these impulses spill over into his life as Peter, and he adopts a disco strut, as if he's been invaded by the spirit of the young John Travolta and infected with a heavy dose of Saturday Night Fever.
Raimi shows us how evil Parker’s gotten by having him strut down the street, Saturday Night Fever style, and performing a wacky dance number.
Faithful readers will recall that I found " Spider-Man 2 " (2004) the best superhero movie since " Superman " (1978).
But "Spidey 3" definitely suffers the waning of inspiration that so frequently infects the third installments of great series ("The Godfather III," "Superman III," "Return of the Jedi").
Superman III, X Men: The Last Stand, Batman Forever—three number threes in superhero franchises that paled in comparison to the films that preceded them.
Director Sam Raimi cited Expressionist horror films like The Golem as his inspiration for the scene, and he fills it with a sense of dark wonder as Marko slowly realizes just what he has become.
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It felt like some sort of sideways homage to 1994’s The Mask .
While 2002's "Spider-man" was a gleefully innocent origin story, the astounding "Spider-man 2", like "Empire Strikes Back", is the crowning jewel of the trilogy, striking that perfect combination of action and character.
The problem is that they probably should have done an Empire Strikes Back sort of ending where the big confrontation would be in Spider-Man 4. Instead, this felt like a typical Sci-Fi TV show episode where a huge problem has been created during the first 55 minutes of the show, you think “Wow, this must be a two-parter”, and it ends up being resolved in the final five minutes of the episode.
Harkening back to the liquid metal creation in "Terminator 2" (that stunned viewers with what were then groundbreaking special effects), the earlier scenes of the character turning to dust and then back are visually amazing to behold.
There's little doubt that Oz the Great and Powerful fares best in its lengthy black-and-white prologue, as filmmaker Sam Raimi has infused this stretch, which revolves around Oscar's swindling antics as a traveling magician, with an old-fashioned feel that proves impossible to resist and certainly establishes the film as an ideal companion piece to 1939's The Wizard of Oz.
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The charcoal-black Spider-Man is pretty cool-looking, and the black-clad Peter (with a lock over his forehead) brings off some snazzy moves in a jazz club when he tries to make Mary Jane jealous with his blonde arm candy (Bryce Dallas Howard)?he’s like Jerry Lewis’s Buddy Love in The Nutty Professor.
The first "Spider-Man" movie they did was pretty good, except for some herky-jerky CGI, and the second movie was terrific, for me entering the pantheon of all-time great superhero flicks like "Superman: The Movie" (1978), "Batman" (1989), and "Batman Begins" (2005).