The new Amazing Spider-Man trailer is out...

everyone should basically not listen to anything I've said about Spider-Man ever since I pretty much cannot rationally or soberly assess anything about Spider-Man since it's my favorite superhero ever

I'm going to like this movie pretty much no matter what transpires during the 2 hours it shows on a flickering screen in front of me
 
everyone should basically not listen to anything I've said about Spider-Man ever since I pretty much cannot rationally or soberly assess anything about Spider-Man since it's my favorite superhero ever

I'm going to like this movie pretty much no matter what transpires during the 2 hours it shows on a flickering screen in front of me
like if a hobo bursts in and stabs me in the foot with a knife I will be like "okay that's probably in my top 3 experiences ever, right behind the part where he fought the Lizard and when he kissed Gwen Stacy"
 

ElJuski

Staff member
I think 500 Days of Summer blew. NOBODY MAKES THE PIXIES SEEM LIKE A CUTE HIPSTER THING TO KARAOKE BUT ME, GODDAMNIT.

Also, to borrow an AVC phrase, cautiously optimistic. If anything, its an excuse to go see a movie with my niece. She lovers her some Spydermange
 
everyone should basically not listen to anything I've said about Spider-Man ever since I pretty much cannot rationally or soberly assess anything about Spider-Man since it's my favorite superhero ever

I'm going to like this movie pretty much no matter what transpires during the 2 hours it shows on a flickering screen in front of me
In this moment in time, it's like you and I are one. Charlie Don't Poe.
 

BananaHands

Staff member
I think 500 Days of Summer blew. NOBODY MAKES THE PIXIES SEEM LIKE A CUTE HIPSTER THING TO KARAOKE BUT ME, GODDAMNIT.

Also, to borrow an AVC phrase, cautiously optimistic. If anything, its an excuse to go see a movie with my niece. She lovers her some Spydermange
Are you referring to yourself as a hipster?
 
Loved the scene, though he does seem a bit overly mean spirited to the car thief, I mean the guy didn't even want to fight and spidey spent a minute pelting him with webbing. I want him to wise crack a lot in the movie, but not in a mean way unless it's the main villain.

Also, and this is going to sound silly, but he sounds almost TOO New Yorker.
 

BananaHands

Staff member
Loved the scene, though he does seem a bit overly mean spirited to the car thief, I mean the guy didn't even want to fight and spidey spent a minute pelting him with webbing. I want him to wise crack a lot in the movie, but not in a mean way unless it's the main villain.

Also, and this is going to sound silly, but he sounds almost TOO New Yorker.
I think Spider-Man would be a little more of a dick to car thieves considering Uncle Ben's fate.
 
Assuming they went with the car jacking. I think in at least one of the iterations, it was a home invasion, if I recall correctly.

But that's a fair point I hadn't considered.
There could very well be some context in the movie that justifies him having that little bit of venom to his wise cracks. It does appear he's looking for someone in particular, after all, checking the guy's wrist for tattoos and then saying it could could have gone a lot worse for him.
 

BananaHands

Staff member
Assuming they went with the car jacking. I think in at least one of the iterations, it was a home invasion, if I recall correctly.

But that's a fair point I hadn't considered.
There could very well be some context in the movie that justifies him having that little bit of venom to his wise cracks. It does appear he's looking for someone in particular, after all, checking the guy's wrist for tattoos and then saying it could could have gone a lot worse for him.
Yeah, I figure the guy who killed Uncle Ben was wearing a mask and had a wrist tattoo.
 
I think Spider-Man would be a little more of a dick to car thieves considering Uncle Ben's fate.
Good point, though we will have to see what they even do with Uncle Ben. Every trailer I watch kind of glosses over the tragedy of Uncle Ben, and instead seem to focus on his character drive being based on finding his parents that left him long ago. I am kind of worried they are going to gloss over the Uncle Ben stuff to separate it further from the last trilogy, but what you say about him checking the wrist gives me hope.

I guess I just didn't like the whole part where he covered his nose and mouth with webbing, which is pretty sadistic as it could suffocate him. Like when he killed the guy in the first movie of the last trilogy, it was mostly on accident after beating up the guy, as he tripped out a window. That seems more in line with him, but putting the webbing over his air-holes just felt like attempted murder.
 
The mouth and nose shot he undid, didn't want to kill the guy. The perfectly-aimed ball shot, on the other hand, is pure sadism.
 
The mouth and nose shot he undid, didn't want to kill the guy. The perfectly-aimed ball shot, on the other hand, is pure sadism.
He only did it after he realized it was not the person he was looking for. Who knows what he would have done if that guy had the tattoo. That is not even counting the fact he did it before even checking, it's like someone putting a pillow over my face while checking my wallet, you can't just take the pillow off and say "My bad..."
 
A high school aged kid who suddenly gets super powers, and has recently suffered a major trauma? I think I'd be a dick in that situation. But that's just me.
 
Here's a review:
Didn’t We Just Do This? The Amazing Spider-Man, Reviewed.

by Will Leitch


1. The Amazing Spider-Man is less a reboot than a recital. It's professionally made and competent and sincere and well-acted, but it never quite overcomes the nagging sense that there's no reason for it to exist. Well, actually, there is a reason: Sony, to keep the rights to the character, needed to rush a movie into production before those rights expired. (It's an odd copyright issue; they basically have to make a movie so the rights renew. Rights law is strange. This is also the reason there's a Superman movie coming out next year.) The movie can't shake that ultimate pointlessness, that sense that we've not only seen all this before, we've seen it all recently. Honestly, how many times can we watch Uncle Ben die and still feel something?

2. The movie has a big heart, though, so you keep trying to cut it every break. The primary reason for this is the casting of Andrew Garfield, best-known as Zuckerberg Prey in The Social Network, as Peter Parker. Garfield is a terrific actor—he was nominated for a Tony in the recent Philip Seymour Hoffman-led Death of a Salesman—and he keeps finding new ways to approach a nearly ancient character. Garfield attacks Parker at odd, jutting little angles, making him less brooding and more intellectually curious, a teenager in number only, basically an endlessly optimistic nerd scientist who can't figure out girls but who happens also to have super spider powers. He's fascinating to watch; it's rare you see an actor of this quality in this sort of role. It's sort of the flip side of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. Whereas that high-level actor blew up the part with his charisma, Garfield turns it inward. You keep getting sad when he puts the mask on.

3. Other than Garfield, though: This is pretty much the same shit. It's a bit exhausting to realize, very early on, that this isn't going to be a continuation of the previous Spider-Man movies (the last of which, after all, came out only five years ago) but in fact a complete restart. This means we have to sit through the whole damn story again, with the spider bite and the discovery of powers and the making of the costume and Uncle Ben dying and all of it. This takes up the first hour of the film, and it's extremely difficult not to lose one's patience: Yes, yes, we know he becomes Spider-Man, so just start spidering already. To give us yet another origin story, you need to blow up the whole enterprise and do something dramatic, like what Christopher Nolan did with Batman Begins—recreate a whole world from the ground up. Director Marc Webb—he made (500) Days of Summer—either lacks the chops or the inclination to do that; he seems either too reverent of the enterprise or too scared that he might kill the golden goose to try anything all that new or daring, so we end up with just another Spider-Man movie it feels like we've already seen.

4. It also doesn't help this movie's fortunes that the first two Spider-Man movies are actually pretty great. (Let's ignore the third one and its campy, we've-lost-the-thread-here-haven't-we dance sequences.) You can't help but compare scenes in this movie to their counterparts in those, and the comparison does this film no favors. The memory of Spider-Man kissing Kirsten Dunst while upside down was so instantly iconic that it's still being parodied more than a decade later; here, you just get Parker shooting Gwen Stacy (a mostly wasted Emma Stone) with a web and spinning her toward him. There's nothing close to the surprisingly moving scene in Spider-Man 2 when Parker stops the runaway subway train and, unconscious and unmasked, is carried by grateful commuters to safety. The primary effect of this movie to keep conjuring up better movies.

5. Listen, this isn't a bad movie. Garfield and Stone have real chemistry, Denis Leary has some nice moments in a Commissioner Gordon-type role and the climactic action sequence has some real kick, as does a rescue scene on the Williamsburg Bridge. (Even if that just reminds you how good the rescue from the Roosevelt Island Tram was in the first Spider-Man.) The villain, The Lizard, a scientist-gone-wrong genetic mutation played by Rhys Ifans, is kind of lame, though, with extremely murky motivations. (I never quite understand what he was always going on about.) It's probably not fair, really, to The Amazing Spider-Man to find it so meandering and redundant; it is only its own movie, not anybody else's, and a bunch of people worked very hard with very good intentions to make it, and to make it well. It's not necessarily Marc Webb's or Andrew Garfield's fault that this movie mostly just feels like a rerun. But it does. It feels like we just did this.

Grade: C+.
 
(It's an odd copyright issue; they basically have to make a movie so the rights renew. Rights law is strange. This is also the reason there's a Superman movie coming out next year.)
Pretty sure that's not a copyright issue, just a clause in a contract they have with Marvel...
 
It would be their lisencing contract more than actual copywrite law itself. Most movie property contracts have a set period of time that they can maintain the rights before it reverts back to the orgiginal copywrite holder. It's funny what's happening with all these studios that bought comic book properties years ago and never did anything with them. I think they started snatching them up after the original Superman movie.

Most movie studios just sat on them for decades because super-hero movies weren't very popular, but with the titanically huge numbers coming from the Marvel movies and the Sony "Marvel" movies, along with the Dark Knight series, now the studios have had the lisencing for so long that they need to pretty much crank out movies every other year to retain the rights to them or they revert back to marvel/DC.
 
It's starting to look more and more like that review I posted (the first one I saw) is more of an outlier; many other critics seemed to really like it.
 
It's starting to look more and more like that review I posted (the first one I saw) is more of an outlier; many other critics seemed to really like it.
I haven't seen the movie yet, so this is me talking out of my ass, but even if the movie is really good (and it looks good, I want to see it) the review you posted would still be accurate. That reviewer seemed to think the movie had a lot of heart, and some great acting by Garfield, but overall suffered from the fact that we've already seen spider-man's origin, which is true.

Won't stop me from seeing it, though.
 
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