'Spider-Man 3' Flubs the Drama

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In "Spider-Man 3," an upstanding franchise gets its comedownance. After two epic successes that deserved their success, the latest installment swings between intense action sequences and unaccountably flat dramatic interludes.

(They're truly unaccountable in a production that, by another accounting, may have cost more than any other in movie history.) The film also suffers from a surfeit of villains. Poor Spidey must contend with three bad guys -- though one of them has amnesia-related mood swings between nasty and nice -- plus the u ber-villain of a script fixated on the settling of old accounts, and the recycling of old themes.

While it's too harsh to suggest that what was fresh has gone completely stale, the truth lies in between, as with day-old bread.
Saying this brings no pleasure. Of all the recent comic-book transplants to the big screen, Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker has been the most likable, quirky and reliably human, even when he's squirting web-juice from his hands as the semi-superhuman Spider-Man.

And the series has gained in grace from Peter's fraught love for Kirsten Dunst's winsome and endearing Mary Jane Watson. Yet the third go-round conventionalizes its hero by throwing him into repetitive struggles with his dark side. (Clothes and the man make each other here, since the black symbiotic substance that's responsible for his darkness and alarming arrogance turns his costume from red and blue to jet black.

) And the script traps him and M.J. in a domestic struggle that's straight out of "A Star Is Born.

"
The borrowing is not the problem: "Disturbia" borrowed an entire plot from "Rear Window," but added value that young audiences responded to. The problem is that this particular borrowing in its comic-book context casts an emotional pall. Audiences will, of course, turn out in staggering numbers for "Spider-Man 3," which, like its two predecessors, was directed by Sam Raimi, and find plenty of special effects to keep them pop-eyed.

But they'll find that Mary Jane, who realized Spidey's identity by the end of the last film, has become a killjoy -- unpleasantly envious of his celebrity, and sexually jealous in the bargain. (M.J.

's singing career on Broadway is going badly, which shouldn't be a surprise, because she doesn't sing very well.)
She and Peter go back and forth. She rejects him, he rejects her, and that symbiotic substance briefly turns him into a not-so-funny stud who might have strayed from the set of "Saturday Night Fever.

" But the whole movie keeps going back and forth -- between his domestic distress and his troika of adversaries, none of whom musters a scintilla of the evil allure exuded by Alfred Molina's Doc Ock, the tentacled cyborg who enlivened "Spider-Man 2."
One of them, the veteran Marvel comics villain Sandman, is an impressive digital creation who looks like a cross between a beige "Hulk" and the silicon swirler in "The Mummy." (His solid-state incarnation, Flint Marko, is played, flintily, by Thomas Haden Church.

) A second Marvel staple, the toothsome, fearsome Venom, is another ritualized manifestation of the bad black stuff: He's played in human form by Topher Grace, who has some fun with the role of a sleazy photographer. As if those two weren't enough, Spidey must further contend with the on-again-off-again rage of his erstwhile friend Harry Osborn (James Franco), who holds our hero responsible for the death of Harry's father, the extravagantly crazed Green Goblin, and seeks revenge by transforming himself into the much less extravagant New Goblin.
Will the extremely extravagant special effects prove sufficient to sustain the picture?

Surely they will, this time. Still, there's a sense of fatigue in the scenes that don't involve high-tensile webs and high-tension suspense. At one point Peter's landlord, noting his tenant's erratic behavior, says: "He's a good boy.

He must be in some kind of trouble." He is.
Instead of the frying pan and the fire, "Away From Her," a beautiful debut feature written and directed by the young Canadian actress Sarah Polley, gives us the frying pan and the freezer.

That's where Julie Christie's Fiona puts her trusty skillet after washing it in the kitchen sink -- it's a first sign that something is wrong. In fact, something is terribly wrong. This vivid, handsome woman in the fullness of her life has already been beset by the early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

Worse still, she knows it, or at least suspects it. With a chilling combination of clarity and detachment, she tells her husband, Grant: "I think I may be beginning to disappear."
Youth has trouble imagining age in the best of circumstances.

When it comes to connecting with Alzheimer's, the imaginative leap becomes a huge one, and not just for young people: Who can really fathom what it must be like when the core of your being comes undone, memory by memory? To judge from what's on screen, the twenty-something Ms. Polley can.

She has turned Alice Munro's lapidary short story, "The Bear Went Over the Mountain," into a feature film that's often astringent on the surface, yet deeply and memorably stirring.
Part of its appeal is inevitably generational. Movie lovers who delighted in the young Julie Christie's airy spirit and physical beauty will be moved by what she does here.

Not because she looks old -- in Fiona's circumstances she looks poignantly fine -- but because she's such a fluent actress that she plays the flow of her character's moment-to-moment mental state, rather than the stages of her disease. (It's the sort of quicksilver quality that was captured on stage by "Wings," Arthur Kopit's play about a stroke victim.) Fiona does say, when she realizes her husband can no longer care for her at home, "We are at that stage, Grant, we are at that stage.

" As things progress, however, or regress, she remains capable of disarming self-irony, eerie coquettishness and flashes of perspicacity. (In a flash of black humor that's wickedly pointed, if less than plausible, the script has her glancing at televised images of combat in Iraq and saying, "How could they forget Vietnam?")
Age shouldn't be the only measure of this movie's appeal.

"Away From Her" is leavened by plenty of humor, and set in a slightly surreal landscape where the damnedest things take place. (Keep an eye out for an Alzheimer's patient who used to be a play-by-play announcer.) As is often the case with short stories expanded to feature-film length, Ms.

Polley's adaptation is most successful when it stays close to its source material. The tone changes, and the style broadens, in scenes that extend Grant's encounters with a woman, Marian (Olympia Dukakis), whose husband has been a patient in Fiona's care facility. But that's a minor matter in a powerful drama.

And, far from being a solo turn by Julie Christie, Sarah Polley's film is a duet that includes -- indeed, depends equally on -- Gordon Pinsent's superb performance as a loving, grieving husband who gives new meaning to the notion of letting go.
DVD TIP: Julie Christie burst upon the scene playing Liz, the so-called "free girl" (free as in uninhibited) in "Billy Liar" (1963). She wasn't the star, though she attracted much of the attention: Tom Courtenay played Billy, an English Walter Mitty living in his own world of complicated fantasies.

John Schlesinger directed from a screenplay by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. The Netflix Web site says "Billy Liar" isn't available on DVD, but that's a -- well, untruth. The title is part of the Criterion Collection -- in an excellent transfer -- and can be found in some video stores as a rental.