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…that’ll be the Next Big Thing.

Friendly Neighborhood Larryman January 18, 2001

So, I was paging through the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly , snack ing on a little pepperoni and smoked Gouda while the missus watched Croc Files on The Discovery Channel, and there it was.

Sandwiched in between a compelling ad for L’Oreal and “Jim Mullen’s Hot Seat” was the picture of the week.

The new Spider-Man costume Tobey Maguire will be wearing in the large ly-anticipated Spidey flick.

“At least he doesn’t look like Nicholas Hammond,” I thought.

Now, I read all the funny books I could get my hands on when I was a kid. Spider-Man was even a favorite. There’s just something compellingly pri mal to a sixth-grader’s imagination to think of yourself able to swing on a webline of your own devising through the man-made canyons of New York City. And, I have to admit, I’m surprisingly in touch with that little ten-year old Larry that still lives in my psyche, and I’ll probably get a big charge out of the film when it comes out. Director Sam Raimi’s work is always profes sional yet unassumingly twisted, and what I’ve seen of Maguire’s acting ( The Cider House Rule s and some thing I caught late at night on HBO with Reese Witherspoon) makes me think he’ll bring a sense of earnestness to it, at least. And pretty soon we’ll have a big orgy of comic book-related consumerism and we won’t be able to escape Kirsten Dunst and Willem DaFoe on the talk shows and old guys in Bermuda shorts and black dress socks will be walking the beach with their metal detectors and Spider-Man Underoos and Marvel will be throwing big sacks of Scrooge McDuck gold coins in the air, cackling wildly about how they finally have a decent film made of one of their characters and basically it’ll be 1989 all over again except it’ll be spiders instead of bats, this time.

And, you know, that’s just aces.

If you’re Columbia Pictures.

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