OK, I promised my thoughts on Spider-Man: While I’m not as over-the-top, blown-away, dazzled, bursting with excitement about the new Spider-Man film as James Lileks is, I will I say I liked it one helluva lot more than Rex Reed (which admittedly, isn’t saying much).

The more I think about the film, the more I think that Lileks’ comparison to Casablanca is an apt one. They’re both run-of-the-mill, studio assembly line product but with one difference: they have soul, both via their scripts, and via their actors.

Here’s my comparison: Spider-Man is like the first Star Wars movie. (No, not the Phantom Menace, Episode I, from three years ago, dummkopf, the original 1977, Mark Hammill/Carrie Fisher/Harrison Ford Star Wars.) While the original Star Wars cost 10 million dollars, and Spider-Man cost $139 million, both are examples of fairly big budget films of their respective times. What they both feel like however, are hip b-pictures made good, because you can tell that the (mostly) young actors in it are having a lot of fun, and want you to have fun too. And in both films, they’re propelled by a script that’s very different from the typical cynical, morally bankrupt product that Hollywood generates.

And they both have a religious core to them. With Star Wars, it was the new age-y “The Force”, but at least they weren’t the typical existential characters living out their lives believing they’re going to be just so much dust when they die, and that therefore their lives don’t matter, that seemed to populate many of Hollywood’s films both then and now.

In Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s Aunt May actually wants Grace said before Thanksgiving dinner, and prays before going to sleep soon after. Think about this triple play: Grace, the Lord’s Prayer and Thanksgiving—and nobody’s poking fun at them! For Hollywood, this is a major step forward (or backward, to when movies had more respect for the audiences watching them).

And Spider-Man’s Manhattan isn’t the Fritz Lang/Leni Riefenstahl/Albert Speer Gotham City that Tim Burton’s Batman operates out of—as Lileks notes, this is a very real, very human feeling New York (and yes, the Flatiron Building for the Daily Bugle’s HQ was a great touch—and a flatiron is what J. Jonah Jameson’s hair looks like it’s combed with), filled with New Yorkers with a “you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us!” attitude.

And yes, I have quibbles—the Green Goblin’s mask looks especially silly, and Spider-Man moves too digitally, too jerkily. And why is The Front Page still, after over 70 years, the role model whenever a director wants clichéd newsroom scenes?

But these are very minor quibbles. Spider-Man ends with Spidey swinging off an American flagpole, high above the damaged, bloodied, but still dazzling New York skyline. And the whole film feels so American, without rubbing the audience’s collective nose in its patriotism. This is a very right feeling film (and no, I don’t mean that in a political sense). All the big pieces work. Almost all of the little touches are right. And Cliff Robertson gets to deliver the film’s tagline, which is the only proper tagline it could have, since it’s been Spider-Man’s tagline for almost forty years now:

By all means, go see Spider-Man, if you’re one of the two or three Americans left who hasn’t seen it yet.