Perfect Moments in "Bad" Movies

We'll return to our regularly scheduled existential dread with the next video. For now, check out my companion piece to this on Nebula, on a movie somehow even bigger and even more absurd than either of these two: nebula.app/videos/jacob-geller-pirates-3-forever-d…

The sandman scene just tells you that Raimi actually wanted Spider-Man 3 to be about sandman and not the venom/symbiote story

"Because with art, the opposite of good is just uninteresting" Thank you for this line, it's something I've been thinking of for a while now but couldn't put it into words

The symbolism in the Sandman scene is simple, but it hits hard. He's falling apart, until he remembers his daughter, and that figuratively and literally helps him pull himself together. All for her

honestly the sandman scene is easily the best single scene out of spiderman 3. its not just him pulling himself together, its a visual metaphor for his entire motivation. pulling himself up he feels dread, believing he's now a forever changed monster. then he sees the locket, the one thing that survived the machine. everything but that one connection he had turned to sand, he reaches for it but cant get it, needing to try again to grasp it. that one thing, as small as it seems, gives him the strength to pull himself back together and escape the sand pit. even pummeled to his lowest point he finds the strength to keep going in his family

"From unconscious unknowing, to horrified sentience, to determination and ultimately self-actualization." Dude that's me waking up every morning.

Fun fact: Flint Marcos clothes and body turned into sand, but the locket stayed the same because it protected the photo in actual metal. Which is just a smooth mineral. A big grain of sand.

I really like "reachy" analysis. I love the fact that little things that weren't supposed to mean anything can mean so much in the end anyways.

I cant explain it. But when he said "A SURREAL reminder that sand... is actually just tiny little rocks" I could not stop laughing.

I found the sandman clip without having ever seen the movie. I immediately liked the visuals, the gradual formation of the human figure was thrilling. Thought it must be one of those cool blender demos or something. Then scrolled down to the title and went "Wait, Spiderman!?"

I haven't seen the Matrix sequels but I noticed that Jacob mentioned the hovercraft lacking recognizable physics. That makes the cloud scene even better because the hovercraft has that little bit of hang time, reminiscent of a breaching whale. It drives home the feeling that there is a real world left, that we get to see for just a second before going back to robot squid nightmare land. We even get the relief of real physics for a second before going back to floating, zooming explosions.

I will tell you why the Birth of Sandman was so moving. The musical score, the direction the camera moves and focuses, the character - the person - we know to be emerging from that pile of previously inanimate sand. That was a hero's origin scene. It isn't until the very last seconds that the score turns, the determination becomes cold and menacing and the camera moves down to show the character looming over it, that we finally get our villain.

What I noticed about the shot of the locket was how strikingly it looked like a scallop shell on a beach. A beach, the place life first made its way onto land. A beach, made of wholly abiotic material with a reminder of life, a shell, in it.

As a VFX artist, I appreciate this video so much. I am beyond tired of the "CGI bad practical good" bandwagon online, and I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to point out that no, we do not simply click the "make CGI" button and high-five each other while waiting for the computer to do everything. Visual effects are as much an art as any other part of a movie, and I think that if people were more open to seeing them as such, they'd realize just how much thought and effort goes into them. I also think they'd be surprised at how many invisible effects there are in modern movies, and that it'd help put in perspective the scope of the work we actually do. That being said, I'll be the first to agree that CG can quickly become boring visual noise in the wrong hands. VFX are a tool to enhance the story, same as the cinematography or score, but a lot of modern big budget movies tend to use them to cover up the fact that they lack an interesting story to begin with. The Sandman scene could have easily been a huge bombastic CGI transformation with the character yelling in pain and everything turned up to 11, but there was a conscious choice to revel in a quiet, real moment, which, like Jacob mentioned, grounds the VFX more than any photoreal texture could.

"Let me get this straight. You think Spider Man 3 was a perfectly fine movie?" "I do, and I'm tired of pretending it's not."

It was always my opinion that sandman should have been the sole villain of the film. His disposition as a criminal yet sympathetic character matches with that of the first two movies, and I think it would have made for a much more emotional film. The center around family, and parents and children would have fit in with not just peter and the sandman, but also Harry and the loss of his father. Bring Peter back to his roots on why he does what he does, saving people. And it would have been fantastic to have more focus on a more overlooked antagonist- and it could have been visually stunning in its choreography, and acting. They had an opportunity to pull on an Audience’s heartstrings in a very beautiful way, and I think it was missed in favor of trying to do too much at once and include character conflict and action that wasn’t necessary or was approached the wrong way.

I've struggled for a few minutes to find the words to express how this video makes me feel. As someone who has only been seriously critically analyzing film for a few years, I have had an entire childhood and some adulthood spent just...enjoying film. Watching movies, and falling in love with the art form. So when I started to take film analysis courses in college, for no other reason than to enhance my current hobby, I found myself stunned by how many of my favorite films were considered "bad". So many beautiful moments, incredible scenes, perfect casting choices, so many things that had cemented in my mind a love for cinema, reduced to mediocrity. "it doesn't accomplish anything" "it's mindless blockbuster fodder", "it does not succeed in saying something meaningful". I heard these things said about movies I had adored for years, films I had held in the highest regard because of what they meant to me not as a critic but as a person. And as I read theories and discussed academic filim analysis with my peers, and was continuously met with pushback for my philosophies on what makes movies "good" or "bad", and experienced paranoid reading after paranoid reading of beloved franchises and classics of the medium, I began to form my own theories, come to terms with my own feelings on the art form; There are no "bad" movies. There are no "good" movies. Are there objective markers of quality, effort, and talent that CAN be analyzed, picked apart, and critiqued at an academic level? Yes, certainly. But to perform such a dissection on a piece of art is to lose something, to miss some key part of its value. Films are not zero-sum games; to find 5 "good" scenes and 95 "bad" ones does not make a movie 5% "good". It is precisely in the 5 good scenes that you have just discounted as "not enough to make up for the rest" in which the film's value can be found. Movies are a collection of scenes, but they are more than the sum of their parts. anything you can cling to , anything you can find, any moment no matter how small and insignificant it may feel, has value, and has meaning. A film does not have to break new grounds or showcase some new perspective or break some mold or be reminiscent of "true cinema". It CAN, of course, do any number of those things. But what a film HAS to do is make you feel something. Anything. The value of a movie is about how it makes you feel, why it makes you feel those things. This video captured something deep within me that I thought I had forgotten, something quashed by years of canned, same-day film reviews for every major blockbuster. In a world of paranoid readings, I had always found the most truth and value in the reparative readings of media. In a world where cynicism and contrarian opinions are bold and exciting, I had yet to meet another who understood that a single scene CAN make a movie, a single scene can and does deserve our recognition. Perfection comes not from fulfilling some arbitrary set of requirements that we insist upon our media; it comes from making us feel something...cathartic. Something poignant, and yet something we could not place with the words of human language. To be perfect is to resonate, resonate with anything, with something. Thank you for this wonderful experience

Somehow, hearing that Trinity was the only human alive who'd seen natural sunlight just... instantly broke my heart. It's so... overwhelmingly sad.

I've watched Spider-Man 3 so many times (never the first two, until recently) because it'll just be playing on tv, and I can remember virtually nothing about the movie except this scene. It's just so desperately sad, and is easily the second best part of the entire movie (after the bit where a girl scams JJJ out of a camera). I'm glad to see a video about it; the movie gets memed so hard that it sometimes gets sidelined how genuinely and unironically incredible this specific scene is

I love seeing the small hints of Raimi's horror expertise in the sandman scene, especially as the more ominous music comes when he starts walking. This isn't the Flint Marco we saw before, this is the Sandman. a new being who just learned how to take its/his first steps with a body made of sand.