SPIDER-MAN 3: Where Do All These Guys Come From?

Special Note: The paperback version of ATOMIC REACTIONS: MARVEL COMICS ON FILM is now available for purchase at Amazon. Taken from my reviews here, MARVEL COMICS ON FILM contains every single one of my Marvel reviews, and covers every single instance of Marvel Comics on film.

 

 

Spider-Man 3 (2007) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard, James Cromwell, Rosemary Harris, J. K. Simmons, Bill Nunn, Elizabeth Banks, Dylan Baker, Cliff Robertson, Stan Lee, Bruce Campbell, and Willem Dafoe.

After creating one of the very best superhero movies of all time with SPIDER-MAN 2, Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Company come back to deliver one of the all-time stinkers.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment where SPIDER-MAN 3 turns to crud because there’s no one singular moment. The film starts off perfectly fine for a few scenes and then … then Harry shows up as the Goblin in Black to kill Spidey, gets amnesia, and … well, before the film is over, we’ve got Assh*le Peter dancing at a club with Gwen Stacy to rub it in Mary Jane’s face and …

How does this crap make it onto the screen?

It’s amazing to me that this film franchise could go so amazingly off track in one film’s time. Almost as amazing as the fact that Topher Grace is no more than the fifth or sixth dumbest thing in the film. As the saying goes, you have to work godd*amn hard to be this awful.

It’s the slow, gradual fall that makes SPIDER-MAN 3 stand out. When the film opens, we’ve got Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) on Broadway, Harry Osborn (James Franco) plotting his revenge against Peter/Spidey (Tobey Maguire), and Peter thinking of asking MJ for her hand in marriage. Of course, things can’t stay good because we need some dramatic conflict to justify all that popcorn and Diet Coke we’ve shelled out for, and so Sam Raimi decides to dump all manner of nonsense into Peter’s life.

First, we’ve got the Harry Osborn/The New Goblin (honestly, that’s what the credits call him – the New Goblin …) subplot coming down on Peter. They have a rather lame fight across the city. Harry’s changed the Goblin Glider from something that looks bad-ass into something that looks like the X Games’ ugliest snowboard. Pete ends up knocking Harry for a loop and his best friend goes crashing to the Earth. He ends up in the hospital where he gets a Plot Contrivance in the form of short term amnesia. I know, right? It’s a total convenience the film comes up with so it doesn’t have to deal with Harry being mad at Peter for the first hour of the film. It’s lame and it’s terrible but we’re still barely 20 minutes in, and SPIDER-MAN 2 is still ringing in my head, so I’m willing to give the film this bit of hack in the hopes it improves.

Astonishingly, it doesn’t.

Without knowing what else to do with Mary Jane, Raimi knocks her back down to square one. She gets fired from her Broadway gig because all the critics hate her, and the only job she can get is a singer-slash-waitress at a jazz club. Of course, she doesn’t tell Peter about this because he’s all, “Don’t let critics get you down, MJ. I know what that’s like, because the papers hate Spider-Man and blah blah blah.” The real reason MJ doesn’t tell Peter, of course, is that no one ever tells anyone anything in these Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies until after all possible damage has been done.

With Harry’s revenge quest sidelined, we’ve got room for the other two villainous subplots: the Sandman (Thomas Haden Church) and the Venom symbiote.

Well, kinda. The Venom symbiote crashes to Earth, hitches a ride home with Peter and MJ, and then waits around for half the freaking movie to make its move. I almost forget about him but then there’s some weird shot of the symbiote lurking around Peter’s crummy apartment. Speaking of which – if Peter is all about making responsible choices, why didn’t he move back in with Aunt May and put his rent towards her keeping her house?

The Sandman plot is more promising as Flint Marko is a crook trying to raise money so his daughter can have surgery. It’s a strong angle. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t do anything with it. It’s almost like they picked this back story because they don’t think Church can act without a blank look of dumbness on his face. Which is not true because I’ve seen Wings. Yup, a Wings reference because they asked Church to provide more acting there than they do here.

It’s a shame because Church is a good actor and the Sandman angle is a good one. But all we get is a touching scene where his wife (Theresa Russell) kicks him out of their apartment when he comes to visit after he busts out of jail. Then he gets turned into the Sandman. Then he robs bank trucks and fights with Spider-Man.

The fight scenes are all rather lame, especially compared to the fantastic fight scenes in SPIDER-MAN 2. Part of it is the choice of villain – the Sandman is made of sand so Peter keeps fighting blowing rocks. Sometimes the rocks are really tall. Sometimes the rocks are really small. Sometimes the rocks make Spider-Man fall. Sometimes the rocks are like punching a wall. And almost always the rocks just don’t work.

There’s even another villainous subplot with Peter’s new rival photographer at the Bugle, Eddie Brock (Topher Grace). Grace was perfectly fine on That ’70s Show, playing a likable dweeb who gets the hot girl who’s way out of his league to go out with him, but he’s awful as the total jerk. Every scene he’s in until Peter busts him for being a photography fraud is full of, “Hey guys, I’m ACTING!”

When Venom finally makes his move and turns Spidey’s suit black, it’s done just to make Peter transform into Assh*le Peter, and it’s painful and tedious to watch.

It does, however, lead to the one of the two genuinely nice scenes in the movie. Peter is still living in the same apartment, and he’s got the same landlord, Mr. Ditkovitch (Elya Baskin). Mr. Ditkovitch is always giving Peter a hard time about being late with his rent, and when he starts in again this time around, Peter explodes at him, telling him he’ll get his rent money after he fixes the gosh darn door. Peter storms into his apartment and Ditkovitch’s daughter Ursula (Mageina Tovah) says that wasn’t a nice thing for him to do, but Ditkovitch actually stands up for Peter. “He’s a nice boy,” he says. “There must be something bothering him.” It’s a really nice moment to see that the landlord has genuine affection for Peter and is willing to cut him some slack.

Of course, it makes Peter’s decision to use Ursula later in the movie for milk and cookies seem all the more scummy. Which is maybe the point. Well, great, I still don’t want to watch it.

The other genuinely nice moment in the film comes from Bernard, the Osborn butler (played by John Paxton, father of Bill). He’s been lurking in the background, but now, after Peter comes to Harry for help and Harry tells him to go pound sand (get it?), Bernard steps in and plays Alfred, telling Harry he loved his father and he loves him and he’s seen lots of stuff in this house and that Peter definitely did not kill Norman.

This leads to Harry donning the New Goblin costume and going to help Peter fight the Sandman/Venom duo. It’s another silly fight and as thanks for doing the right thing and helping Peter, Harry dies.

Shoulda stayed home, Harry.

Peter ends up reconciling with MJ, though he never comes out and says, “Sorry for smacking you in the face,” but it’s a quiet, dour end to the film. We go through all this nonsense and all this melodrama, and this is how Raimi chooses to end his trilogy? With a funeral for Harry and a limp hug in a jazz bar?

Ugh, ugh, a thousand ughs. SPIDER-MAN 3 starts off strong and becomes nearly unbearable to watch. It’s painful and tedious, full of dumb moments and forced melodrama. There’s too many villains and not enough time devoted to them. There’s Peter acting like a dick (even before the symbiote latches onto him), and MJ regressing, and Harry with amnesia. It’s all so … so tough to watch. There’s no sense of fun or real dramatic conflict. Everything feels forced and lame.

And until Avengers came along, it was the highest grossing Marvel movie.

Go figure. It’s a terrible movie but it brought in the big cake, so … congratulations? It’s the one Spider-Man movie I’ve never bought and the one Spider-Man movie I have no intention of buying.

SPIDER-MAN 2: I Believe There’s a Hero in All of Us

Spider-Man 2 (2004) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Alfred Molina, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons, Donna Murphy, Dylan Baker, Bill Nunn, Elizabeth Banks, Daniel Gillies, Cliff Robertson, Stan Lee, Emily Deschanel, Bruce Campbell, Aasif Mandvi, John Landis, Joel McHale, and Willem Dafoe.

SPIDER-MAN 2 is as good as superhero movies get.

I’m not a big fan of lists so you’re not going to hear me argue about the merits of SPIDER-MAN 2 vs. Avengers vs. The Dark Knight and finding the poorest parts of excellent movies to justify claiming one is better than the others. For me, I’ll take the fun of Avengers over the other two movies, but I don’t think that’s a matter of being better as much as it is simply being different. There’s enough room at the Round Table for superhero films that do different things and SPIDER-MAN 2 deserves a seat at that exclusive sit down.

Of all the superhero movies that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen just about all of them), none of them creates a more honest emotional reaction in me that SPIDER-MAN 2. There are multiple moments in this film that make me weepy, and there’s no film that better displays the downside of being a superhero than Sam Raimi’s masterpiece.

Of course, I really don’t want to watch movies or read stories about superheroes who don’t want to be superheroes, so it’s interesting that both SPIDER-MAN 2 and The Dark Knight cover this same ground. I’ll get around to Dark Knight later this month, but when it comes to SPIDER-MAN 2, what I like about the movie is that Raimi uses Peter’s woe-is-me attitude to eventually reaffirm the importance of what he’s doing. It’s crushing when, near the mid-point of the film, Peter fantasizes a conversation with Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) in which he rejects his uncle’s plea to “take my hand.” Symbolically, this is Peter rejecting the “with great power comes great responsibility” philosophy. It’s a gut-wrenching moment, but it does reaffirm that Peter’s a kid, and kids sometimes have to learn about things like duty and responsibility.

Much of SPIDER-MAN 2 is about people trying to find their place in the world. For Peter, it’s balancing being a superhero with being a bright college kid who’s in love with the girl of his dreams, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). He’s understandably bummed about having to give up both his intellectual and social development, and when you factor in the loss of his best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), the constant drubbing Spidey gets in the press from J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) and The Daily Bugle, and the lingering guilt over his role in Ben’s death … it’s not hard to understand that when his powers start flaking, Peter doesn’t mind so much.

Mary Jane is having a successful go at being a working actress, but she still partly defines herself by the men in her life. She’s clearly in love with Peter but isn’t willing to wait for him (despite Harry’s assertions) as she’s fallen into a relationship with John Jameson (Daniel Gillies), son of J. Jonah and national astronaut hero.

It’s easy to bag on MJ, of course, for jumping from relationship to relationship (in two films, she’s dated Flash Thompson, Harry, and now John, all the while falling in love with Peter and Spider-Man), but for me it this need to validate herself in the arms of others speaks to the truly tragic nature of her character. MJ has been blessed with looks and cursed with a bad family situation, and I’m sure her looks helped fuel her popularity at school. When things get tough at home, her looks and personality have long provided an oasis for MJ, and now that she’s growing up (the film notes that it’s been two years since Ben’s death, so we’re talking about 20 year olds, here) and is having a bit of success, it’s not surprising that she wants to share that with someone. Blessedly, the film does not make John Jameson a jerk, so when MJ decides to leave him at the altar, it’s a conflicted moment. Yes, her heart belongs to Peter, but yes, it’s also a dick thing to do to wait until your wedding day to run to the man you’d rather be with.

Harry is having struggles of a different kind. After his father’s death, he’s somehow gained a position of power at Oscorp. He’s determined to outstrip his father’s accomplishments, and he’s relying on Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) to elevate the company to new heights. Harry still hates Spider-Man (blaming him for his father’s death) and a wedge has grown between him and Peter on the matter. Harry wants Peter’s help to track Spidey down, but Peter refuses.

SPIDER-MAN 2 does an outstanding job at showing the weight of a secret identity. Peter refuses to tell anyone he’s Spider-Man and that leads to all of his problems growing unchecked. During a fantastic conversation between Peter and Octavius, Otto tells him that he can’t keep something as powerful as love bottled up inside of him. It’s a really nice, heartfelt moment, and the film uses this speech as the symbolic stand-in for every emotion that we keep trapped inside of ourselves. It’s no surprise that by the end of the film, when Peter has embraced his role as Spider-Man, that his identity has been revealed to Mary Jane, Doc Ock, Harry, a train full of New Yorkers, and while it’s not outright stated, it’s pretty clear that Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) knows it, too.

Much like Cliff Robertson was the quiet MVP of SPIDER-MAN, Rosemary Harris is the rock on which SPIDER-MAN 2 is built. She’s phenomenal all over this film, gently offering praise for Harry, subtly pulling MJ into the kitchen so Peter and Harry can talk, refusing to let Peter get down about her house being foreclosed, and smashing Doc Ock upside the head after he’s kidnapped her to use against Spider-Man (a random act, not a personal one).

It’s Aunt May who delivers the film’s signature line: “I believe there’s a hero in all of us.” It comes when Peter has turned his back on Spider-Man and is finding a bit of happiness being a regular college kid. He’s even starting to make his move on MJ, even though she’s already engaged to John. Aunt May is having none of it, though, but she’s not the kind of woman who will confront Peter directly, so instead she plays along with the idea that Pete knows Spider-Man personally. She uses a neighborhood kid as the launching point for her monologue. With the bank foreclosure coming, May is already packing her things up to move into a small apartment. She’s got a local kid to help her out, and this kid just so happens to idolize Spider-Man, and tells Peter that he wants to see Spidey come back. When Peter wonders why, May tells him that kids need heroes to look up to. She adds that she believes there’s “a hero in all of us,” but she really means, “in you, Peter,” and this whole, wonderfully touching scene is May’s way of giving Peter her blessing to be Spider-Man, and quietly admonishing him for ever giving it up.

So Peter jumps back in. His first stop is to hit The Daily Bugle, where he steals back his Spider-Man outfit. When he’d decided to stop being Spidey, he tossed it in the garbage, and every comic book fan everywhere thrilled to see Amazing Spider-Man 50 recreated on the big screen.

SPIDER-MAN 2 has a lot going on, and the various subplots and quick sequences help to offset the rather dreary nature of the narrative. Peter, Harry, and MJ are taking their first steps into adulthood and all of them are experiencing some level of success, but they’ve also got stumbles to deal with, and how they deal with them speaks to how they bounce back.

The adults have to do a fair amount of bouncing back, too, as everyone sees their world slightly upturned. For May, it’s the double whammy of having her house foreclosed and Peter admitting that he was responsible for Ben’s death. For Octavius, it’s his failed experiment and the death of his wife when Otto’s experiment goes all wonky. For JJJ, it’s the realization that Spider-Man was a positive force in the city.

Alfred Molina’s performance as Doctor Octopus is every bit as good as any other actor’s turn in the villain’s chair. While not as flashy or memorable as Heath Ledger’s Joker or as coolly manipulative as Tom Hiddleston’s Loki, Molina’s Otto Octavius is a completely realized and unique character, the most human feeling of all villains. Where villains often feel like they’re in the film just to give the good guys something to punch, I feel as if this is every bit as much Otto’s movie as it is Peter’s from the moment Molina appears on the screen. Molina makes Octavius a brilliant, well-meaning scientist. He meets Peter when Harry forces him to give Peter some time to conduct an interview for a school project. Reluctant as he is, Otto is clearly taken by Peter’s intellect and interest in his project, and Peter’s brief stay is extended to him sharing a dinner with Otto and his wife. I can feel the love Otto and his wife (Donna Murphy) have for one another, and his enthusiasm for his work. He also clearly enjoys sharing his time with Peter, and after a day spent talking science, the conversation turns personal.

When Otto’s experiment fails and his four “octopus arms” become a permanent part of him, Otto slowly succumbs to their influence and sets about setting up his experiment for a second try. This leads him to a life of crime, and eventually back to Harry to get some precious tridium. Harry makes a deal – bring me Spider-Man and you can have all the tridium you want.

The action sequences in SPIDER-MAN 2 are a huge improvement over the first movie, and represent some of the best superhero action committed to the screen. The battles between Spider-Man and Doc Ock up and down buildings across New York are just awesome to watch. If anything, they move so fast that you need to watch them a couple times just to see how much is going on between Spidey, Ock, and his four snapping tendrils. It’s good stuff.

The general realization – from Peter, from May, from Jameson, from the riders of the elevated train he saves – that Spider-Man is worth having around really makes all the woe-is-me melodrama pay off. Every time I’ve had it with Peter’s whining, the film delivers a counter punch that lifts the spirits of the film. If sitting through a bit of melodrama is the price we have to pay for May’s wonderful speech, or MJ’s wonderful “let me save you” monologue at the end, it’s well worth it.

There’s plenty of cameos all over SPIDER-MAN 2, as well: Bruce Campbell, Elizabeth Banks, Emily Deschanel, John Landis, Aasif Mandvi, Joel McHale, Dylan Baker, and, right at the end, the return of Willem Dafoe to haunt Harry one final time, and trick his son into finding the hidden Goblin materials, beautifully setting up the third film.

SPIDER-MAN 2 stands as one of the finest achievements of the cinematic superhero genre. It’s an outstanding film from start to finish, and it’s nice to see Raimi interject more of his personality into this film than the first film, where he seemed to play everything straight. Throughout SPIDER-MAN 2, there’s all sorts of nods to Raimi’s horror roots and dynamic camera work. Thankfully, the film even ends on a high note, as MJ chooses Peter and tells him, “Go get ‘em, Tiger,” when they hear police sirens in the distance. Peter’s webslinging becomes joyous at this point, and it is made clear that this was a movie about a boy becoming a man. Peter’s life might not turn out to be the one he dreamed of having, but he’s realizing that the life he will have has all sorts of opportunities, too.

Entertaining, engaging, satisfying, and emotional, SPIDER-MAN 2 is superhero cinema at its best.

SPIDER-MAN: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Spider-Man (2002) – Directed by Sam Raimi – Starring Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Cliff Robertson, Rosemary Harris, J.K. Simmons, Elizabeth Banks, Macho Man Randy Savage, Joe Manganiello, Bill Nunn, Bruce Campbell, and Stan Lee.

There is not a better made superhero movie that I enjoy watching less than Sam Raimi’s wonderful SPIDER-MAN. I would almost go so far as to say that there is nothing I would change about the film, except of course, there’s that awful (minus the mask) Green Goblin costume. Beyond that, however, SPIDER-MAN is an earnest, honest, well-meaning superhero film about good people put into extraordinary circumstances. When it came out in 2002, I broke my rule about seeing movies on opening weekend to sneak out for the 11 AM showing and absolutely loved it. As I told anyone who would listen at the time, SPIDER-MAN thrilled the kid in me without offending the adult. Even now, when Peter walks away from MJ at the end of the movie and we hear him say in narration, “With great power comes great responsibility,” I get choked up.

So why don’t I enjoy watching it more?

In large part, it’s because SPIDER-MAN did it’s job so well that superhero films have grown beyond it’s two hours of cinematic goodness. For me, Spider-Man has the single greatest origin in all of supeherodom and Raimi’s film wonderfully lays it out for us in live action. The problem is that I’ve read and re-read and re-read Spidey’s origin so many times that tuning in to a movie to watch it all again …

I don’t get a whole lot out of it anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled it exists, and if I ever have kids, I’ll gladly pop them down in front of the big screen TV top watch it over and over again. But for now, watching the film once every five years or so is enough.

Raimi’s film is the perfect superhero movie to transition the genre out of Batman’s darkness and into the light. The influence of Burton and Schumacher’s franchise is all over Raimi’s film, of course, and if there’s one quibble I have with Raimi’s direction is that Raimi chameleons himself inside the Schumacher mold to such a degree that he loses himself. Raimi delivers a very professional directing job in SPIDER-MAN, but like Chris Colombus in the first Harry Potter film, Raimi’s approach has seemingly been designed to not mess things up more than deliver a unique, powerful vision.

More Schumacher than Burton though it may be, Raimi’s approach absolutely works. SPIDER-MAN raked in over $800 mil at the international box office back in 2002, and it’s completely deserving of every dollar. You can see strains of where Raimi overplays his hand – he sometimes mistakes melodrama for real emotion, and most damningly, he just won’t let Peter have a moment’s rest, won’t let life give him a break. I understand that bad luck and hard times are part of the Peter Parker stock and trade, but Spidey is a jokester, too, always ready with the quip while inside his suit, but there’s not a whole lot of that in SPIDER-MAN.

A pre-9/11 SPIDER-MAN teaser poster featuring the Twin Towers reflected on Spidey’s goggles.

In fact, the best one-liners come during his wrestling match with Bonesaw McGraw (Macho Man Randy Savage Oooh Yeah), because in the rest of the film there’s not a whole lot of room to joke around. Post-wrestling match, of course, after Peter gets stiffed on his payment, he lets a burglar run past him that ends up killing Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson).

Cliff Robertson’s Uncle Ben and Rosemary Harris’ Aunt May are the emotional backbone of the film, and both veteran actors deliver pitch-perfect performances. Robertson has one of the toughest jobs in all of superhero films; he’s got to deliver an absolutely spot-on performance in limited screen time and he hits every single scene with the right mix of fight and emotion. When he’s worried enough about what’s going on in Peter’s life that he forces Pete to ride with him into the city, he gives May a little flash of victory behind Peter’s back. Then when they get to the library, he tries to have a heart-to-heart with Peter about what he’s going through and Pete rejects him, tells him to back off, and slams Ben for not being his father. It’s a brutal scene, totally undeserved, and Maguire and Robertson deliver it as well as any scene in any superhero film.

As for the structure of the film, the first half concentrates on the origin story and the second half delivers the Spidey vs. Goblin. SPIDER-MAN does a very solid job weaving all of its characters through both halves of the film and making each of them feel like real people. Whenever Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) comes back into the narrative, there’s a genuine sense of the life she’s lived in between these moments. I’m not a huge fan of Dunst, but she’s really good here at playing the suburban version of white trash. She’s had a hard childhood and can’t wait to get out of her house and into the city post-high school graduation. It’s not an easy life as she tries to make it as an actress, but she’s not afraid to work menial jobs to make ends meet.

There’s a tragic feeling to everything MJ does; life has been hard on her and that sadness comes through around Peter, who gets to see the private MJ (and not just when he’s peeping into her bedroom window) while others get the public, happy-go-lucky Mary Jane. The famous “upside down Spidey” kissing scene, when paired with the funeral kissing scene, brings these two halves of both Mary and Peter’s personas together in a really touching way.

Tobey Maguire is very good at playing the sheepish Peter Parker, even if he does go the wide-eyed, stand and stare dumbly route a bit too often, just as Willem Dafoe is very good at playing the mentally unhinged Norman Osborn, even if he does go the bug-eyed, cackle maniacally route a bit too often. James Franco is solid as Harry Osborn, J.K. Simmons is outstanding as J. Jonah Jameson (even drawn incredibly cartoonishly), and Elizabeth Banks has a “is that who I think it is?” cameo as Betty Brant.

The action is very good and very bright, which the film needs to balance of the dark emotion of Ben getting murdered and Peter being partly responsible, of the Goblin kidnapping both Aunt May and Mary Jane, and then accidentally killing himself.

It’s all professionally done and SPIDER-MAN was exactly the right film at the right time for the superhero genre. While Bryan Singer’s X-Men beat Spidey to the screen by two years and deserves credit for being the post-Burton/Schumacher Batman opening act, SPIDER-MAN’s $800 mil rake at the international box office (compared to X-Men‘s $300 mil), Sam Raimi’s SPIDER-MAN felt like the start of something new. Did they play it safe? Absolutely, but in playing it safe, Raimi and Maguire also didn’t screw it up and simply let Spidey and the Goblin go at it over the course of two hours. The film definitively put “with great power comes great responsibility” into the mainstream lexicon and it finally put the core of the Marvel Universe onto the big screens in a way that the X-Men could not, given the whole “hated and feared” thing. Spidey is Marvel’s most important and popular character and its box office performance broke new ground for superhero films (at the international box office, SPIDER-MAN bested Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman and Robin COMBINED).

SPIDER-MAN is an excellent movie, both for what it puts on the screen and how it helped to get the ball rolling on all sorts of superhero movies, but I don’t find it a highly re-watchable movie. I know that makes me a bit of a jerk because why wouldn’t you want to watch something done this well, but I’m kinda burned out on origin stories.

Once every five years or so, however, SPIDER-MAN can still bring me along for a heck of a ride.