What percentage of bloggers do daily blogs from the beginning and never look back? What percentage blog only sporadically? (Although I reckon “sporadic blog” is probably an oxymoron.) Is blogging a discipline, a compulsion, or both? (Neither for me, yet, but it’s early in the game.)

Now, Spiderman 2. Run, don’t walk, to go see this movie. Sam Raimi has made one of the gutsiest popcorn movies I have seen in a long time. The camera and the script linger to great and sometimes overwhelming effect on small details of character interaction that add up to action payoffs that matter. The movie is full of loving and witty homages to everything from Tobe Hooper to The War of the Worlds to Raiders of the Lost Ark to Young Frankenstein. For all the in-jokes, though, the movie never descends into camp. It’s almost never predictable. It’s almost always smart and honest. It’s not flawless, but it is always satisfying and regularly breathtaking. Most of all, Raimi and his team have the courage to tell a story and tell it well–not only in dialogue, but in pictures and sound. (The sound work on this film is exquisite.) From an opening credit sequence that pays loving tribute to Saul Bass to a conclusion that put a lump in my throat, this movie elated me as few popcorn movies do (though all promise to).

Go see it.