I don’t know when it was decided that comic book movie blockbusters were required to have multiple villains in them; I’m guessing it was during pre-production of Batman Returns when someone realized that more people would pay to see Michelle Pfeiffer in a leather catsuit than would be willing to see Danny DeVito dressed like a penguin. Good call there, but it set a bad precedent, and they really need to cut that shit out.

The biggest problem with Spider-Man 3 — there are way more characters than the movie can handle — is so obvious I can’t believe that they just didn’t realize it during the production. It’s more likely that somebody at Sony-Columbia or Marvel (or maybe it was even Sam Raimi himself) decided that there was so much money riding on the movie, they’d better cram as much as they could into it. Of course, the end result is a muddled mess that’s getting pummeled in the reviews.

It’s actually kind of a shame the movie’s getting such bad word of mouth, because it’s really not that bad. Or at least, for every bad thing it does (emo Peter Parker, hyperactive pacing, and it’s about an hour too long); it does something else well (disco Peter Parker, Bruce Campbell and Stan Lee’s cameos, and insistence on keeping the goofy character-development stuff). The action scenes are really well thought out and choreographed and are suitably over the top. But the editing is confusing and the effects seem rushed, so it all cancels out. I actually liked the big team-up scenes during the finale, but it took such a long time to set them up, it robbed them of any emotional value. Everything seems like it was better in concept than it is in execution.

For all the big movie franchise bloat, it definitely still feels like a Sam Raimi movie, and a Marvel comic (for better or worse). I don’t want to contradict Kirsten Dunst or anything, but the person keeping these things from being total flops is Sam Raimi. I don’t buy into the whole auteur theory, but the scenes that really work in the Spider-Man franchise are the ones that have the mark of Raimi’s style. In Spider-Man 2, it was Doc Octopus’s awakening in the hospital, filmed in full-on Evil Dead-style.

And in this one, it’s the insistence that Peter Parker is, above everything else, a total nerd. I know enough about Marvel comics to know the story about the black suit and the alien symbiote, and I’d read reports that Spider-Man 3 has a subplot (one of 1000, as it turns out) where Parker starts acting like a total dick while under the influence of the suit. I was fearing the worst, but as it turns out, those are some of the best moments of the movie. Simply because Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire are completely unafraid of looking stupid. So he takes advantage of women by insisting they make him milk and cookies, he sasses back to his professor, he struts down New York streets to a funk soundtrack only he can hear, and the worst offense of all — he steals the spotlight from Mary Jane by using his spider powers for an elaborate jazz dance routine. I’m sure if I were a 12-year-old who’d been looking forward to a big action movie, I would’ve thought it was “lame” or even “gay,” but I was loving it.

Clearly, there was a force fighting to keep the good, goofy fun in the movie. So why couldn’t they have fought to save Venom for part 4, and keep this movie down to a manageable cast? If you need to sell cool black-suit action figures, one of my friends had the perfect suggestion — introduce that stuff for the final showdown against Sandman, and then save the full story for the (inevitable) sequel.

Ah well, maybe the sequel will just focus on the Lizard, since they’ve had the guy sitting around for two movies now. If they’ve got to add somebody else, I vote for Kraven the Hunter, just because of the costume. Who wouldn’t want to see somebody having to wear that in a live action movie? I respectfully suggest Bruce Campbell to play him.

And my favorite line of Spider-Man 3: when the cops first spot Thomas Hayden Church as Sandman, and one of them says, “Hey, that’s that guy from the prison break.” Just because it sets up the obvious response: “No, that’s that guy from the ‘Wings.’ ‘Prison Break’ is a different show.”

You’d have to be pretty cynical, or have already given up on the series altogether, not to think that this week’s episode of “Lost” was pretty damn cool. The guys behind the show have admitted to being big fans of Stephen King, which probably explains why this couldn’t have been a better TV adaptation of a Stephen King story unless it’d actually been based on a Stephen King story.

Jacob’s cabin was hella creepy, the kind of potential for surreal scares the show has been hinting at ever since the pilot episode. (But rarely delivering on). I could tell that this season has made me gunshy — when Ben was standing at the door and saying, “once you go through here, you can never go back,” I knew the ending credits were about to start. But hey, we were only 40 minutes into the show! They actually set something up and delivered on it!

More than that, though, is the fact that they’re finally showing signs they understand the balance between creeps and revelations you have to maintain to live up to the potential of the series. It feels less like a lot of hand-waving and “Ooh, look, isn’t that spooky?!? Really cool stuff is coming up later, we promise!” and more like they’ve finally got the balls to put their cards on the table and start coming to conclusions.

Of course, despite everything we were shown, there wasn’t actually a lot of brand-new stuff revealed tonight. Most of it just confirmed what we’d already seen or already suspected. The trick is in the presentation; seeing it from a different perspective made everything seem new and more significant. It’s easy to assume that Ben’s visions of his mother are from the same source as Eko’s visions of his brother (or Jack’s visions of his dad, and Kate’s horse). We finally get some confirmation that the Dharma Initiative is a different group than “the Others,” and we see what form the fight between them took. The whole business with the van and Roger Workman was too pat and contrived, but at least they snipped off another loose end.

Which hints at something clever, but frustrating, about what they did with this episode — by repeating some of the stuff that we already knew, they’re saying that these are the questions they want you to be thinking about. They’ve built up a ton of dangling plot threads over the years, and I suspect they’ve realized it’s going to be impossible to tie up every single detail the internets have speculated about. So they’re repeating the questions they have answers to, and telling us to just forget about the rest. The episode is called “The Man Behind the Curtain,” after all.

There were only two big new things in the episode: meeting Jacob, and meeting Nestor Carbonell’s character 40 years ago. (The cliffhanger was new too, of course, and I thought it was pretty well done). Again, the trick was in the presentation. The scene in the cabin was given a big build-up and made the focus, and it paid off.

The other meeting was just as significant for the questions it raised — obviously, why hasn’t he aged, but also, why isn’t he the leader since he’s been on the island for longer — but was treated a lot more casually. To me, that’s the surest sign the show’s getting back on track, when you can have a conversation that’s significant, but it doesn’t spend the entire time giving you music cues letting you know that it’s significant. It’s a sign that they’re confident they have enough story to tell, and they’re not forced to drag out every new minor plot element to make it last an entire hour.

And of course, the castaways are talking to each other again, for whatever good it does. Having them share what they know only solves half the problem; they’ve got to actually do something about it. And I tell you that Jack and Juliet better have one hell of a master plan cooking to warrant all the nonsense they’ve been doing for the past four episodes. The only time you see a couple of people being more annoyingly coy and smugly withholding information is when you listen to the “Lost” podcasts with the exec producers.