Spider-Man - - - - Stan Lee's one complaint about the 2002 movie, in an NPR interview, was that the Green Goblin's mask was immobile. He thought the Goblin should somehow have been given animated features. Roger Ebert said the same thing. They're certainly right, and furthermore this is also a problem for the masked Spider-Man. The live-action Spider-Man is actually less emotive than the comic-book version, because in the comic books Spider-Man can express a bit of emotion by changing the size and shape of his big white eyes. The live-action Spider-Man has fixed lenses, and it's just plain hard to act and have dialogue when you have no moving facial features. An hour after the movie was over, I realized the problem was exacerbated because Spider-Man never sounded as if he were wearing a mask. Darth Vader and the Stormtroopers had a similar facial-expressiveness problem, but at least they sounded as if they were talking from inside a metal suit. Spider-Man doesn't sound as if he's talking through a ski mask. (Obviously, the problem of how to make a voice appear to emanate from a mask, while keeping the words intelligible, is no problem at all for printed speech balloons, but more difficult in a movie.) In consequence, when Spider-Man and the Green Goblin are speaking to each other, there are no visual or audio cues to anchor the voices in the figures on screen. They might as well be delivering voice-overs, or communicating telepathically. Their conversations are sometimes powerfully reminiscent of scenes from the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. It's a hard problem, and I'm not sure what the right solution is. But some things they could experiment with before the next movie: Give the Green Goblin a mask with mobile features. Give Spider-Man some kind of stretchy super-lenses that change shape when his expression changes. I'm not sure how they would work, but fortunately Peter Parker is a brilliant science student. Tell the Spider-Man actor to make very exaggerated expressions and facial motions under the mask, with or without the stretchy lenses. If the audience can just see the mask twitch a bit when he talks, that's something. Experiment with muffling Spider-Man's lines a little bit. They shouldn't go too far with this, obviously. I liked Kirsten Dunst. She does "happy" and "flirty/playful" very well. She also does "upset" reasonably well. I don't care for her "misty-eyed/emotional" though. She takes on a sort of drugged expression then, and one of her eyelids droops a little bit, like Willem Dafoe having a Goblin flashback in the elevator. [Update: She looks the same way in the billboards for Spider-Man 2.]

Richard Mason

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