Imagine that like me, you pretended to be Wolverine while your best friend pretended to be Spider-Man as you battled all of the foes you could remember from reading Marvel encyclopedias and from playing a couple of Playstation and Sega games here and there. That was 4th through 6th grade for me, and it was awesome. We both wanted to be heroes and be someone who others looked up to and could count on, and no one but the toughest villains could stand up to in defending those we loved. My friend had a pretty stable home, but I didn't and I daydreamed quite often about being strong enough to defend my otherwise all female household from all the dangers that kept knocking or coming through the door.

Years passed and I still wasn't allowed to watch anything rated above G, but I realized by late 2005 that if I went to the library I could get things my mom wouldn't find out about if I hid them properly. I started to hide movies behind my books on my book shelf, in my chess set, anything I could think of that she wouldn't ever use because I knew she didn't have time to check up on my borrowing history. I watched all of the Lord of the Rings and became enamored with the extended editions, and I watched Spider-Man and Spider-man 2 for the first time around this point, finally getting to see a fleshed out version of these characters I had tried so hard to paint with my imagination.

Feeling as completely helpless with girls, with my body, my social ineptitude, and having all of that just find it's groove in some ways in the film for Parker just gave me so much hope and something to fantasize about as things around me got tougher. I leaned into these two movies to get through some rough patches, and so I find it a little insulting when people try to make out super hero films like they aren't film. It's just one of the oldest stories on record, that of good triumphing over evil through moral fiber, a huge basis for many of our religions. The whole idea that we should live higher than our baser natures that suit us because there is a higher calling in being destitute and a good person may have fallen out of style now, but it is part of what gives those of us with little so much hope. We know that we can help to change the world even with limited funds and even if it's only within a small sphere of influence because we see it daily when we deal justly with our fellow man. Our poverty does not make us weak, and that is a mindset that has left the modern generation, something I think we really need to get back.

Spiderman does what other films in the Marvel canon have failed to do in that these two Raimi films reach out to the audience and connects with individuals to the hero that resides inside of them, and in so doing asks of them to take on a higher calling. I can't think of any other comic book movie that has really done that. Spiderman is and always will be one of my favorite movies and a movie that everyone should watch because every scene is perfect, the dialogue sucks me in no matter how many times I see it, and the violent clashing together of the forces within the film just feel so much more visceral and real than most of the modern action movies you might get suckered by ads into seeing. Raimi films are the bomb!