Thanks, John. My problem with the widely accepted "He's supposed to be a nerd", hence all the (self-perceived) nerds really like him, is that I (and if you listen to Stan Lee he seems to concur) always thought Peter Parker was supposed to be an Everyman.
He has real problems like everybody else that he's constantly dealing with even though he has these special powers (and brains--once seemingly enhanced by the spider-bite) that allow him to be a super hero. So, we all should identify with him, not just the nerdiest of nerds. The original cartoons anyway went way overboard with the "I'm Spider-Man!!" machismo. It had become nicely refined over the years, yet we got pretty much none of it in the movie. SM is Parker's chance to be someone cooler than he is. We all like to think we have this really cool person in us waiting to show his stuff and when Maguire failed to bring that to the role it really hurt the franchise in my eyes. They should have made him watch a little Chrisopher Reeve to learn some duality if Parker was going to be a total dweeb.
I get bashed a lot for my criticisms of SM and Maguire (mostly way back when on Superherohype in the SM movie thread, man that was intense), but I feel like I speak from the right place since I was considered the "smart kid" in high school, and thus a nerd, but I never looked particularly nerdy. I was lousy at most sports, but not altogether unfit. Spider-Man had been my favorite super-hero my whole life probably because I identified with him so well (and maybe because they started drawing the character closer and closer to a cartoon of me--I honestly look quite a bit like the Fox version). Hence, when I saw Maguire in it, it put a bad taste in my mouth. I just told someone yesterday. "You know how the prequels ruined Star Wars for some people. Well, the Spider-Man movie pretty much did that to Spider-Man for me." Don't even get me started on MJ.
James Bond on the other hand was never an Everyman character, and it seems to have slanted more that way in recent years and it sounds like he'll be retrofitted altogether soon.
As much as I liked DAD over the previous Brosnan Bond entries I had some problems right away (though the surprise did make the film have impact and edge it otherwise wouldn't have.) Right off the bat, Bond gets caught. WTF?! Bond doesn't get caught in the beginning of the film on a routine mission. At least nothing he can't get out of. I had a bit of trouble believing the ultimate super-spy spent 2 years in a prison. 2 years?! The guy's gotten out of more impossible scenarios in how many movies and he couldn't escape from that place? Because there was a tratior? Gee, like he never ran into that before. He shouldn't have been caught in the first place. All he had to do was jump off the waterfall. Bond tends to have all his escape routes covered. No parchute in his jacket this time? He's not going to just take a chance and jump like many have in films before? (Hell, the villain lived.) Oh, I get it; he can get caught, tortured and imprisoned just like everybody else. Somehow, the first reel or so of the film was more like Alias, and then it went back to the super-unbelievable stuff of yesteryear. I guess the writers figured it all averaged out. Too bad it doesn't work that way. I imagine a lot of it is trying not to repeat what's already been done, but when that's the character what are you going to do? If I wrote a Superman comic and decided, "Hey, this week Superman's not going to care if someone falls off a building, and regular bullets will hurt him because that's the way I perceive the character this week, not because of any plot device, but just because that's how I think he should be today." that wouldn't fly very well.
That actually reminds me of the first time Lois and Clark really turned me off, but I won't go into that since I've gone OT enough.