In a statement already sending outraged bloggers to their keyboards, George Lucas has called Spider-Man 3 silly. Lucas met up with fawning gossip columnist Roger Friedman of Fox News at the Time Magazine 100 most influential people dinner and made the assessment in between talking about the fourth Indiana Jones movie and some possible Star Wars universe television projects. He said, " It's silly. It's a silly movie. There just isn't much there. Once you take it all apart, there's not much story, is there?"

Of course, after directing such horrible and, dare I say it, silly movies like The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, Lucas seems like the last person who should be slamming a movie for not having any there, there. After all, Spider-Man 3 does have some pretty ridiculous aspects (most of Mary Jane’s behavior, the whole jazz bar dance scene), but the core story of internal struggle by Peter Parker and his relationship with Harry Osborne was actually pretty good. It was certainly better than anything Lucas has directed in the last, oh, 30 years.

But to be fair, Lucas is certainly right that director Sam Raimi tried to pack a little too much into this installment and the story suffered. The movie is not perfect and deserves a bit of criticism about the story, if nothing else. Still, I don’t remember reading about Raimi calling Lucas’ recent efforts “silly,” and it would have been warranted. This seems to solidify the feeling that the guy who put the Skywalker family saga in motion in the 1970’s is a real douchebag. Glass houses, George.