Saturday, May 10, 2014

Amazing Spider-Man 2: Yes, You Can Reasonably Make an Electric Boogaloo Joke


But TL;DR? ASM2 wasn't very good. Looked pretty, though.


And that Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are so good on screen together? They should hook up in real life, or something. And that's all the good, right there.


Seriously, this is an unerringly dank and depressingly film. And in the moments where it's not? It's just wrong. Having Peter bound up to the stage, with all this attitude and swagger, and then kiss Gwen in front of everyone? You can call that guy Peter Parker, but that's not Peter Parker.


I mean, it's also about responsibility and doing the right thing because you're screwed either way. Or, at least, that's what it's about when Peter Parker is recognizably Peter Parker. Which he wasn't. So it really wasn't about those things. It was about "hope". Except, like I said in that tweet, it wasn't really about that, either. Even though it claimed to be.


Arrgh. Sooooo miserable. Who did they make this for? People who thought that The Dark Knight was too much fun? Who wished that Spider-Man's battles should probably be as needlessly destructive as Superman's in Man of Steel?



Electro is up there with Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face for Absolute Worst Super-Villain in a Film. Remember this?:


Electro is a clownish, unbelievable character (is he some kind of thinly veiled shot at Spider-man fanboys? could it actually be any more mean-spirited?) with an equally unlikely transformation into Spider-man's biggest enemy.

And Harry? The less said, the better. There's just nothing there. He gets an intro, a meeting, a conversation with Peter, a conversation with Spider-man, and then he turns evil. And that sounds like a lot, but it's pretty much 5 minutes in total. And do we even have the chance to care? No, no we don't. Because the Peter and Harry relationship is built on their memories of stuff that we never saw and comes as a complete surprise. But we're still supposed to feel something when Peter refuses to help him and Harry gets really, really, unreasonably angry?


Who's the real star of this franchise? Sally Field. I mean, Garfield and Stone are good when they're given very little to work with - the story is awful, and Peter is just awful, so it works best when they aren't trying to advance the story - but Sally Field is great and Aunt May is great.


Sigh.

Tuesday, May 06, 2014

Why Rob Ford's rehab - if it's even occurring - will fail

I've recently decided to embrace the uncommonly-used genre of the tweet-essay. Here's an effort from earlier today. It may work as something that I can translate to the blog, it may not. (The latter would be unfortunate, though, since I otherwise can't find time to work on my blog.)

Anyway, the context here is that Rob Ford took leave from his job as Mayor of Toronto and hopped on a plane, ostensibly to report to rehab. But then he was turned back at the border. His lawyer and brother claim that he's in rehab, somewhere, but we really don't know. And have no reason to believe them, frankly.

Where's Rob Ford? Find him!