Spider-Man lives, but not to the hype
Note: If you couldn’t care less about what I spent my 2.5 hours after school doing, skip to the last two paragraphs. If you couldn’t care less about what I thought about those 2.5 hours, skip to the last two sentences.
Today marks the end of a reasonably busy week for me, with tests and papers and such. So, intrigued by the daily-updated countdown someone scribbled across my desk in chemistry (“3 2 DAYS!!”), I decided to purchase a ticket in advance Thursday night to see “Spider-Man 3” at 12:30 p.m. today — right after school. It was the first series of moving images I would view on the big screen since I last set foot in a Savoy 16 theater all the way back in September of last year.
It was also the first of the “Spider-Man” movies I’d see (in its entirety, at least).
Strangely enough, the first thing that came to my mind as I noticed that this particular theater room featured stadium seating was an incredibly nerdy word problem I came across a while ago in our calculus textbook: “Where to Sit at the Movies” (Warning: PDF link).
“Suppose you decide that the best place to sit is the row where the angle θ subtended by the screen at your eyes is a maximum,” the question asked. Further details given in the question (how much the seating area is inclined, how many rows there are, etc.) would allow one to solve the big question: “In which row should you sit?”
For a second I actually attempted to mathematically calculate the best seat, but then I realized that I didn’t know the dimensions of Savoy 16’s theaters (and probably wouldn’t be able to solve the problem anyway). So a couple minutes before the movie started, I just picked an unoccupied seat toward the front row, fired up my phone, set it to vibrate, and as only a geek would do, promptly Twittered (disregarding the fact that nobody would care):
And the next thing I knew, the lights dimmed.
Two and a half hours later, I walked out of the theater, trying to organize my thoughts about the movie as a whole. As critics had said, the quality of the storyline isn’t much to write home about compared to the serious awesomeness of the eye candy, but I still thought it was quite enjoyable.
“Spider-Man 3” is, in the “overall” department at least, far from the best movie I’ve ever seen. But given its extreme popularity, I’d say it’s worth seeing. Don’t take my word for it, though; check out Ben Hyman’s formal review of the film. (There may also be other reviews as well, so keep an eye out for them.)
— Jason He