Spiderman 2

Painful. That is, perhaps the easiets way to describe two-thirds of this movie. Maybe it's just because right now, in my personal life, I feel very much like Peter Parker, torn between a variety of different choices, none of which seem to work properly. Irregardless, for the first two-thirds of the movie we watch Peter Parker get slammed and downtrodden step after step. His life is out of balance, Spiderman interferes with every aspect. For the first hour of the film, we watch Peter walk around with bloodshot eyes, deep purple bags, and a slouch in his walk. It is amazingly painful to watch our superhero struggle with his humanity. But, without all this suffering, the final act would not be nearly so liberating. For those who havn't seen the movie yet, I'm not going to tell you what happens, as it's a little unexpected, but what it yields is very fulfilling.
While I've heard alot of praise for the fight on the train, I'm going to have to say that the section on the clocktower is my favorite. Partially because I decided that long ago when I first saw the trailers. Additionally because of the technology. It isn't that we lack the technology to seamlessly integrate actors into CG environments, it's that actors, in those environments, lack a tactility to make their acting blend in seamlessly. Standing on top of a speeding train puts you in a very intense situation in regards to the laws of physics. Not only are you dealing with gravity, but also inerita, friction, and wind resistance, a scenario very hard to replicate in front of a blue screen. This leads to something that should have it's own name, where actors don't appear to belong to the same world as the CG background. Typically lighting is a major culprit in these situation, but so are texture, camera focus, and the laws of physics. The scene on the side of the clocktower, all they have to replicate is gravity, and because the clocktower isn't moving, you have a static, real-life background to use for close-ups, reducing the problems of texture and focus.

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