I don't know why I wanted to watch The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). I didn't particularly care for the first ASM. I kind of thought Andrew Garfield looked like the old Mike Ditko Peter Parker in the first one, but now he looks more like a young Sean Penn or not-so-smarmy Seth Green - not very Parkerish, in my opinion.
Also, the focus is on Spidey-Girlfriend Gwen Stacey. Emma Stone does a great job playing her, but her part as written is to be cute, then spunky, then dead. We know she's going to get dead, that's what Gwen does. No point in getting attached.
Oh well, when you come right down to it, I'm not much of a fan of Spider-man. I realize that it was the first strip with emotional depth for the teen set (based on Stan Lee's experience with romance strips, in one telling). But I always thought he was a little too whiny when he wasn't webslinging.
BUT! In this movie, like the Raimi trilogy, the webslinging experience, swinging from skyscaper to skyscraper, diving though the steel canyons of New York, swooping into intersections to save somebody from a runaway truck, that's pretty sweet. This movie totally gets it, including Spidey's wise-ass cracks. That part is a joy to watch. Now I want to re-watch the Raimi movies to see how he handles it.
Which is weird, because I don't even like Spider-man.
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I shouldn't read these the moment I roll out of bed -- I read "Raimi" as "Raimu," a early 1930s French actor, and thought "wow, these new Spiderman movies reminded Beveridge D. Spenser of Marcel Pagnol's Fanny trilogy. Got to see this!"
Then I realized you'd said "Raimi," the guy who directed the first Spiderman trilogy and thought, "oh, no, never mind ..."
I've never watched Pagnol's trilogy, although I've been tempted a few times. Never seen Enfants du Paradis, either. And yet I want to watch Sam Raimi's mediocre trilogy of Spider-man movies a second time.
I blame society and a coarsening of public morals.
I liked the Dr. Octopus Spider-Man of the first go round. Spider-Man 3 was a victim of society and a coarsening of public morals.
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