Spiderman (2002)
I decided to start this page off with a classic. A slam dunk. What movie would most thoroughly qualify?
Spiderman (2002) starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, a nerdy middle-school student, and his friend/mentor named James Franco, a pretty cool dude in his late 20’s.
Then, Franco’s dad, William Dafoe, comes in. He makes a real mess because he drank some juice that was spiked, but it actually just makes him angrier, kind of like a Dr. Jekyll type situation.
It’s never made exactly clear why Peter Parker and William Dafoe feel destined to duke it out. Personally, I think the most logical explanation is that James Franco’s mother had a secret affair with Peter Parker. When William Dafoe found out, he got upset (understandably) and wanted revenge for having been cuckolded by middle school student Peter Parker.
Luckily for Peter Parker, he got bitten by a spider when he snuck into the Bronx Zoo late one night to steal MJ, his love-interest, an Emperor Penguin. Ultimately, the spider bite turned him into a massive spider the next morning. If Stephen King’s It taught us anything about giant spiders, it’s that it takes a group of mentally scarred adults to kill such a beast. Unfortunately for William Dafoe, he murdered his fellow board members, so he was forced to face Peter Parker on his own.
On Roosevelt Island, located in the East River of NYC, where the story’s plot culminates, Peter Parker pulls a switchblade from his ankle holster and stabs William Dafoe in the chest, delivering the famous line, “Aunt May sends her regards,” obviously retribution for William Dafoe having stuck his finger in her casserole (or maybe it was a fruitcake) at Thanksgiving dinner earlier in the film.
Overall, I’d give this a 5/5 stars, with no hesitation.
Holes (2003)
Holes. It’s a great film we’ve undoubtedly all seen multiple times. It’s one of those movies that, when you’re scrolling through the channels and happen to see it on, you always flip to it to check what part it’s at.
Holes follows the childhood of Shia Yelnats and his adopted brother, Zero.
When Zero’s grandmother (yes- Zero knows his birth-grandmother even though he was adopted) throws a pair of sneakers at Shia Yelnats for having butchered her fattest pig prematurely, Shia hits her in the head with a shovel, yelling the word “dig” for no apparent reason. She dies instantly, but because Zero isn’t close with his grandmother, he gets over it pretty quickly.
Shia tells Zero to wait in the car while he buries the body somewhere in the desert.
After the burial, the pair flees to the mountains. There, they start a farm, growing peaches and onions (what a weird combo!). It’s also during this time that Shia Yelnats teaches Zero to read, write, and speak fluent Mandarin in case the pair ever decides to liquidate their peach and onion-selling business and sell it to Shia’s old business partners in Beijing.
The pair’s game of cat and mouse with law enforcement leads to their successful lives as conmen. They use their peach/onion farm money to buy airline uniforms, conning their way into a job for PanAm, all the while being chased by CIA Agent Carl Handraggies and his wife, Kissin’ Kate Mare-ya-loos.
In the end, the two are forced to kill CIA Agent Carl Handraggies by pushing his police cruiser off a 4-story parking garage using a pick-up truck, all the while blasting Queen’s “Brighton Rock.”
After this action-packed sequence, Shia Yelnats kisses his adopted brother, Zero, on the forehead, saying “you don’t belong in this world,” before turning himself in to the police.
A few months later, Zero visits Shia in prison, asking where Shia buried his grandmother’s corpse specifically, so as to give her a proper burial. Behind the glass prison-visitation wall, Shia puts his phone back on the hook without answering the question. Zero watches silently, the phone still held up to his own face, as Shia then pulls a 15-foot long King Cobra out of his orange prison jumpsuit, which he lets bite his arm. He then quietly utters, “start diggin’ Trout.” Because Shia isn’t holding his phone when he mutters this, Zero knocks on the glass and motions Shia to pick up his phone line and repeat what he’s just said. He couldn’t hear him. Shia realizes his blooper, picks up the phone, and says again, “start diggin’ Trout,” before dying on the spot from the venom.
Becoming increasingly agitated, Zero begins pounding on the glass, yelling “who’s Trout?! Where’s the body?! How’d you get a snake?” Unfortunately, he never gets any answers to his questions because Shia has already died. The guards begin apprehending Zero, who seemed to make a hairline crack in the glass with his punches, and once the crack becomes noticeable, the guards will have to bring someone in to replace it after visiting hours, and that means unpaid overtime.
I guess we’ll have to wait until Holes 2, Revenge of the Hole, to see what happens with Zero and find out who “Trout” is, or if “Trout” was just a figment of Shia’s imagination, which wouldn’t be crazy considering King Cobra venom causes extreme hallucinations just prior to death.
