Spider-Man 3 ** out of ****

Time for some tough love, Spidey.


Death. Taxes. The rise, and inevitable fall, of a movie franchise.

Finally, the actuaries caught up with Peter Parker and his friendly neighborhood alter-ego.

After two terrific installments that ranked among the best comic book movies ever made, “Spider-Man 3” tumbles back to earth with sound, fury and an oil tanker full of special f/x and money. It’s loud, occasionally spectacular and, like a lot of other comic book movies, tedious and full of itself. That warm, grin-inducing cinematic melody that filled in every crack and polished every blemish of the original “Spider-Man” and “Spider-Man 2” is gone.

Now, as viewers, we see the contrivances, the forced couplings, the lurching plot. We see, for the first time, Kirsten Dunst straining to nail her scenes. We see Bryce Dallas Howard, a pretty girl, and can’t stop looking at her ridiculous eyebrows. We wonder why the movie turns into “Anchorman” for about ten minutes. Watching the gluttony, you understand this intangible, mercurial thing called movie magic, clichéd and unsophisticated as that sounds in today’s hyper analytic arena of film criticism, is actually quite real.

Because “Spider-Man 3” doesn’t have it.

Instead of giving Spidey bigger, tougher challenges and pushing his talents and sacrificial instincts to the limit, director Sam Raimi and his screenwriting team (Ivan Raimi and Alvin Sargent) put him through yet another psychological evaluation. They have crafted a blowout sale on emotional closure, where every deep-seated issue - there from practically the opening frame of the original movie - must again be explored, rationalized, and questioned, including Peter Parker’s love affair with Mary Jane Watson.

At the close of the second film, we found Mary Jane (Dunst) telling Parker/Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) to “go get em.” Don’t expect such encouragement in “Spider-Man 3” - Mary Jane literally throws that line back in Peter’s face.

Once again she falls back into the mildly depressed, indecisive, self-conscious performing artist. Once again, their relationship is on the blink. Once again, they engage in phone tag, knocks on the door late in the night, mixed messages, childish secrets and mournful gazes from the street to an occupied window sill, and mournful gazes from said sill to a now deserted street. There’s even a surprising, poorly handled moment where Peter humiliates Mary Jane in front of Gwen Stacy (Howard), Peter’s college lab partner.

After an hour with Bummy Mary, I was rooting for Peter’s cheery, alien-eyed neighbor, Ursula, to slip into Peter’s heart. At least she smiles.

Raimi and Co. seem bent on demanding viewers face the tragedies of these characters’ lives, insisting on taking a dramatist’s approach to popcorn entertainment. Other than Peter, who, like most mover goers, seems pretty content move forward with the saga, the rest of the cast is dragging its knuckles over the past. “Ben” is every third word out of Aunt May’s (Rosemary Harris) mouth.

As for Mary Jane, “It’s like my Dad wrote those words,” she says after reading a poor newspaper review of her performance. We’re going back over that again? If we’re playing that close to emotional reality, shall we have her reliving the trauma of her nearly dying three times? What’s next - fevered dreams of collapsing balconies and metal chompers?

So much of the plot is tied up in Dunst’s lip-trembling, tired-eyed, monotone performance, that villains Sandman and Venom - impressive as they look - never have time for a proper introduction to one another. Nor are their stories particularly well-defined.

Instead, there’s another round with Harry Osborn (James Franco), still vowing to avenge the death of his father, Norman (Willem Dafoe) by murdering Spidey. He and Parker engage in an impressive, aerial fight at the outset of “Spider-Man 3” - probably the movie’s best until the climax - that ends with a development so patently absurd (and is reversed even more absurdly) - that you have to see the movie to fully appreciate the groan you’ll find rising from your voice box.

Poor Franco. He’s a decent looking chap, and he’s got some talent. He needs better roles than leads in “Annapolis” and “Flyboys” and this hilariously tortured Harry.

Which leaves Sandman/Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) and Venom/Eddie Brock (Topher Grace) fourth and fifth in the character development line. A big chunk of the movie’s $260 million budget was clearly spent creating Sandman, and it shows: He can morph into a force of many shapes and sizes, is susceptible to water and fire (with great-looking consequences) and is, essentially, invincible. Church, his face and voice perfectly suited for a comic book character, is surprisingly sympathetic.

Taking one sentence to describe Venom’s eventual arrival in the movie would be harder than solving gridlock in Seattle, so just know this: It’s clear the filmmakers resented Sony/Columbia Studios request to fit him into “Spider-Man 3” based on the way his appearance is delayed and handled in general. Raimi invests more in the black Spidey suit, and Maguire doing his best John Travolta impression, than he does in Venom. He’s Darth Maul from “Star Wars: Episode I,” if you will. Little kids with come up with better story arcs in comfort of their own bedrooms with Venom figurines.

We’re given, essentially, a bridge movie, one that cuts The Green Goblin’s lingering tentacles from the series, resolves Uncle Ben’s death (again), and finally - for the love of God, please - stills Mary Jane’s wandering, bruised heart. “Spider-Man 4” is more or less a go, and Maguire has expressed interest, which is good: His work as Peter is still goofy, unassuming and effective. Right guy in 2002. Still is.

But everything else - Dunst especially - should be considered for the chopping block. With Mary Jane, either Raimi shits, gets off the pot, or lets somebody else take a stab at her. Enough of her as a low-rent Billie Holiday. Bryce Dallas Howard looks perfectly fine in her natural hair color, so let Gwen chuck the blonde wig. Mainly, it’s time to inject a little James Cameron into the proceedings. Get a super villain. Involve the water somehow. Blow something up. Hell, go to the Statue of Liberty.

Just consider the consequences of investing too much in the psychology of the comic books. That’s how you end up debating whether Joel Schumacher intended for the equipment sequence in “Batman and Robin” to be homoerotic or not. “Spider-Man 3” fixates too much. It dawdles. It wipes its own ass. It ruminates like an Oprah panel. It’s the priciest shrink in uptown, that’s for sure.

Zodiac **** out of ****

A masterpiece

A smart, engrossing, exhaustive trip through the investigation of a serial killer, "Zodiac" gets first-ballot election to the hall of definitive crime pictures.

It's a movie of shadows, noise and gunfire. It's about those nights when each grain of sand on a gravel road makes its own sound under the weight of a black Mustang. The movie embodies the intoxicating, bewildering, constant threat of murder, a phenomenon unique to a community invaded by a serial predator.

Even Nebraskans have been touched by it: If you were a 6-year-old living in Omaha in 1983, you knew the artist's composite of the man who killed those two boys before you ever heard the name John Joubert. Yesterday I looked up Joubert's sketch online and saw those doe-like, alien eyes more than twice the size of his mouth, all under a blue ribbed stocking cap. I had nightmares about that drawing, about being snatched off the sidewalk and dumped in a ditch. Safety stickers went on windows. The FBI rolled into town and invaded our milk cartons. Kids stopped walking to school.

That's the mood of "Zodiac." Its fuse may burn for almost three hours, but it must. James Vanderbilt's screenplay, based on Robert Graysmith's book, spans 15 years, and it ends with no one behind bars. Yet Graysmith's writing and director David Fincher's dreamy, elegant visuals, tightly grasp the moment and the obsession of the men hunting for San Francisco's most famous serial killer.

Fincher opens the movie with the Zodiac's third and fourth known victims: a married woman and one of her misters parked on a lover's lane in Vallejo, Calif. Not long after this murder, he starts writing letters to the local newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, where columnist Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) spearheads the coverage, while cartoonist Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) lurks around the editorial conversations on how to cover the murders and how to help catch the murderer.

Graysmith - divorced, nerdy and awkward - slowly evolves into the movie's key catalyst. He observes as the Zodiac leaves cryptograms concealing messages, courts the media, inspires false confessions and floods the two homicide cops assigned to his case, Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards), with phony claims and leads. By the movie's final hour, Graysmith alone is pursuing the case with a zeal that costs him his family.

The investigation, carried out over several years and split into three acts, is too dense and rich to explain in a review. What Fincher conveys is the pleasurable enormity of it.

Like a novel, "Zodiac" sprawls out and revels in tiny details. It loves the names of places. It cares about whether the Zodiac killer wrote his "k" with two strokes or three. It's fascinated with the guy who knows a guy. It appreciates the trickiness of warrants. And it has the right - because it's unsolved - and the guts to sincerely invest in red herrings. It's about the pursuit of truth, not the revelation of it.

The ensemble cast snugly fits into this story. Gyllenhaal may not be the ideal actor to play Graysmith - he's almost too wide-eyed - but he finds the right notes in the movie's final hour, when it's Graysmith's show. As Toschi, Ruffalo creates a man who inspired Steve McQueen's "Bullitt:" thick, tough, clever and clearly fond of haberdasheries. Edwards does a nice turn as the forthright partner. Downey, in one of his better recent performances, makes the writer Avery into a smart, cocky reporter chasing Hunter S. Thompson's lifestyle a little too passionately. When he crosses the line, he does it for the right reasons but gets burned by his ego and addictions. Dermot Mulroney, Philip Baker Hall, Brian Cox, Donal Logue and other actors play it completely straight in their supporting roles and play straight very well.

And then there's John Carroll Lynch, who plays a prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen. He has only a few scenes, but they count. If you want to see a creep, watch this performance.

"Zodiac" is Fincher's most polished, mature work. "Se7en" might be a centerpiece of any 30-something's movie collection and "Fight Club" is, for all its absurdity, memorable pop culture. But "Zodiac" mixes Hitchcock and 1970s paranoia dramas without gunning the gas pedal, like Spike Lee's overwrought, unhinged "Summer of Sam." Fincher subtracts the flash of previous works to add cohesive professionalism.

The movie has a certain, almost plastic sheen on it. The murders seem surreal and stage-like, cribbing from Errol Morris' famous documentary "A Thin Blue Line" and feeling like a Flannery O'Connor short story, when dread, violence and the Almighty converge for blood judgment. "Zodiac" is ordinary enough to be unsettling and twisted enough to be compelling. It will be long forgotten for the 2008 Oscar season, but it's the craftiest, best film of the early year.

300 * out of ****

A homophobic, blood-loving, race-hating piece of Nazi propaganda

By this point, every man, woman, frat guy, dorm dweller, athlete, pothead, goofball, wordsmith, dancer, cook, dog-catcher, comic book collector, aspiring heart surgeon, sous chef, Greaser, Soc, sailor, sandman, action junkie and sneaky 13-year-old who really wanted to see "300" has seen it.

So there's no point in rehashing it or even specifically reviewing it. The movie, directed by Zack Snyder and employing a visual look inspired by Peter Jackson and graphic artist Frank Miller, is a phenomenon. Like "The Matrix" - which is far superior - it recalibrates Hollywood.

Sure, comic book movies have scored since the original "Superman." But "300" doesn't have a minted pedigree. No iconic heroes. And no titanic actors in it. The cloth from which it's cut might be absurd and remarkably unaware, but it's immensely attractive. Snyder and Co. splash every color of blood puddin' they could find on the screen, and the result, to me, is nothing less than right-wing propaganda. Maybe even Nazi propaganda. It's certainly Ayn Rand's wet dream.

Hyperbole? Nope. Just "300."

It opens on a piles of skulls beneath a cliff. A narrator tells us those are the miniature skulls of babies tossed to their death for any physical imperfection. Fortunately for baby Leonidas, who will one day be king of Sparta, he is without flaw, and is spared from murder. His physical perfection especially helps when he is trained to kill and thrown into the wilderness at 7. Later, when Leonidas leads his titular men against the giant Persian army in the name of freedom, we must remember the "liberty" for which he fights is really the tyranny of the pure. It's the Spartan, who embraces a beautiful death, against the defiled, deranged Persian, who toils as a slave. The leader of the Persian army is Xerxes, an eight-foot cross of Gandhi and belly dancer.

Most of his soldiers resemble Orcs. Some are magicians. A couple are deformed monsters At one point, frustrated, they simply use their lone rhinoceros against this band of sculpted, sepia-toned Greek gods. It's arrogant and faithless to presume audiences will set aside the substance of the Spartans -they're unlikable, smarmy, racist and homophobic and firmly reject the idea of diplomacy - to embrace the movie's dramatic images.

Breathtaking as they might be, they remain in celebration of something our conscience rejects. To demand the film remains in the vacuum of entertainment reduces the viewer to Alex in "A Clockwork Orange." And the final act of "300" feels like a cross between an MTV video and a high schooler's poorly penned allegory that he turns into the creative writing teacher after sealing the document with a tear of integrity, solemnly closed eyes and a symbolic kiss. It's total cheese and out of character with what we know of Leonidas throughout the movie.

It amounts to a beefcake weepie. Goofy, Harlequin-style idolatry. Of course it's absurd, but it doesn't mean it's not a little irresponsible when it eventually reduces every female character to a set of breasts and flowing locks. It doesn't mean we have to let it off the hook.

We may want to disassociate meaning from images, to turn them into a mechanical series of ones of zeroes, but we can't, and we don't, so embracing "300" for being cool is akin to embracing "Birth of a Nation" for its revolutionary filmmaking while it tacitly supported the Ku Klux Klan. Fanboys need to get a brain. Zack Snyder needs to get a clue.