For a down-on-his-luck loser type, Peter Parker has always had more than his fair share of ladies in his life. As the new movie not only deals with his ongoing relationship with Mary Jane, but also the introduction of Gwen Stacy, the actresses who play them have found themselves in the news as of late.

Comic Book Resources has an interview up with Kirsten Dunst, aka Mary Jane, on her role in the new film and how the film Mary Jane compares to the comic character:

You’ve said before that if you were more like the comic book Mary Jane, you’d be laying around in lingerie in these movies.

[laughs] Mary Jane’s a little bit more sexed up in the comics, you know what I mean? I do wear a padded bra in the film. We wanted to develop Mary Jane and make her a woman that all the girls could look up to. But yeah, the action figures… and somebody mentioned the video game being pretty misogynistic. I haven’t checked it out, though.

Gwen Stacy, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, gets some press via the Vancouver Sun:

Howard was astonished to discover the amount of serious research now available into Gwen’s character. “It’s almost like thesis papers that have been written about her, so I wasn’t only reading the comic books.” But she also says that, for the movie, Gwen was a character who was “tricky to navigate.”

“In the comic books, she’s known as Peter Parker’s first love but, in the film franchise, she’s coming in while Peter Parker was still in a very intense important relationship with Mary Jane. So I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t acting like some kind of man-stealing tart!”

And the third (and maybe most important) woman in Spidey’s life, Aunt May, played by Rosemary Harris, talks about her now younger fan base:

“My fan base now is very, very young,” she said. She recounted an incident about two years ago in London when she was recognized by a little girl barely 4 years old as “the lady in Spider-Man.”

“It took me aback, I must say,” Harris said. “It’s amazing to me that children aren’t scared with all the excitement that goes on (in the movies). In my generation, children were scared of the queen in Snow White.”

(If you’ve ever ridden the Snow White ride at Disneyland, you’ll really understand that last sentence).

–Meanwhile, the reviews are in … I think I waded through about 10 of them before I remembered I could just link to Metacritic and cover most of the big ones. The film currently comes in at a 59 out of 100 points on the review site, but it’s still early yet. If you’d rather see words than numbers, you can always check out the Miami Herald, USA Today, Pop Candy or Newsarama, among others.

–And the question is still out there … will there be a Spider-Man 4? Didn’t the actors say they wouldn’t come back for a fourth? Are they changing their tune as we get closer to SM3’s release date? Will we have an answer before seeing how much money SM3 brings in? Probably not …

–And finally, this opinion piece from the Arizona Republic was clever, almost too clever, as it compared Spider-Man 3 to the “big release” of Arizona House and Senate versions of the state budget.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Marvel, Movies, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.