Word: goblins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...original--faithful to a fault. Spidey, a.k.a. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), is still the teen dweeb from Queens with a crush on the girl next door (Kirsten Dunst), a dose of genetically altered spider DNA in his veins and a compulsion to save the world from the gaudy Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe). Sure, he can leap tall buildings with several sticky bounds, but he's also nearly grounded by a load of unresolved guilt. Plenty of classic heroes--Oedipus, Hamlet, Luke Skywalker--are obliged to kill a father figure; by the time this movie is over, Peter is responsible...
...makes this Spider-Man a nest of conflicting ambitions. Every Hollywood marketing impulse screams for the movie to be zippily cartoonish. Yet the story is also Rebel Without a Cause: an agitated boy, the girl he loves, his best friend (James Franco as the Goblin's son) and some adults who never quite get it. Will Spider-Man be Ghostbusters or Ghost World...
There's a new axis of evil threatening the world's security - Dr. Octopus, Magneto, the Kingpin of Crime, and the Green Goblin (among others). Fortunately, the forces of light are mobilizing too - Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil, the X-Men. Battles between good and evil are poised to commence in cinemas around the world, starting soon...
There was plenty of room for humor in his work, and none for deadly seriousness or pretension. The little personages of Klee's imagination are now absurd and bathetic, now goblin-like, now intrusive, but never really menacing; they interact beautifully with their titles. (One of many possible favorites was Hero with a Wing, a deliciously self-deflating proposition, since no such hero could be expected to fly as heroes should.) Klee found authority absurd; he didn't viscerally hate it, like the Dadaists, but he poked fun at it, as in The Great Emperor Rides...
...popularity of board games has spanned generations, and includes familiar classics and hot newcomers. The best-selling 67-year-old Monopoly can now be played in 34 editions, including I Love Lucy and Spiderman (featuring such properties as Green Goblin, a notorious Spidey foe). A Scooby-Doo edition of Clue was released last month. "Some of the resurgence is post-9/11 and some is part of an overall retro trend," says Maria Weiskott, editor of Playthings magazine. "But particularly during a soft economy, it's important to have something fun and affordable that families can do together. People...