AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

SciFi Japan's international page has updated with the official production notes for Columbia Pictures’ THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, opening July 3rd. The notes ran more than 50 pages, and we’ve added the trailer and over 50 photos and images.

http://www.scifijapan.com/articles/2012/06...oduction-notes/

No one has seen this or has felt strongly about it to post?

Yeah, I don't blame you. This movie is a tremendous waste of time and occasionally a chore to get through. The idea to remake a ten-year-old movie that everybody has seen is a really dumb one. There's nothing original or inspiring about this film. Spider-Man doesn't even appear until at least an hour into the picture (I resisted the urge to pull out my phone and check the time). Everything up to that point is completely rote. If you're a Spider-Man fan, you know this story by heart. If you're not, you probably still know it. The makers try to make the plot a more personal one for Peter Parker by throwing in a zillion wild coincidences, but it's basically the same exact story Sam Raimi filmed three times. Garfield is too handsome to play Parker (and too old), Sally Field is too healthy to play Aunt May. I loved Martin Sheen though and Emma Stone too. It's weird to see C. Thomas Howell in this and imagine he probably would have played Parker if this movie had been made thirty years ago.

Am I to believe Rodrigo Guevara doesn't carry a wallet or any form of ID?

I saw it and was pretty ambivalent. I liked it a little more than Marty did, which is not to imply that I think it's all that good. It's perfectly acceptable, but it's utterly forgettable and nothing I'll watch a second time.

I didn't think the film gave Stone's innate charm a chance to shine, but I second Marty's thoughts on Sheen. He's the best thing in the film, and it loses whatever warmth and humanity it had when Uncle Ben exits. As he's gotten older (probably starting with his years on THE WEST WING), he's become very adept at conveying a sense of fatherly, parental wisdom and understanding. If Betty White is the ideal grandmother, then Sheen's on his way to becoming the Betty White of grandfathers. He's very quietly one of the best things in Scorsese's THE DEPARTED, and his fatherly concern over DiCaprio's character as the film goes on (just in the way he says to DiCaprio, "Come on out to the kitchen and have some supper..we'll talk...") carries much emotional weight. Sheen does this as well as, if not better, than any actor in his age bracket, very much in the way Robert Duvall's found that late career niche as the Grizzled Old Coot.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

Sheen also projects these qualities in sections of THE WAY. I found it to be a terrible and even downright embarrassing movie at times, but the early scenes between Sheen and Emilio Estevez (also playing his son onscreen) are pretty fascinating to watch.

This post has been edited by John Charles on Jul 9 2012, 04:24 PM

Okay, I saw this in IMAX 3D and enjoyed the hell out of it. In fact (prepares for backlash), I thought when it came down to the action scenes that this was better than the Raimi ones. You could follow everything that was going on, unlike Raimi's stuff which tended to get chaotic. Plus, the effects in this are stellar. It was the first time I ever felt vertigo from a film. I actually liked Garfield better as Peter Parker too. I didn't agree with the reboot idea (why not just do a fourth win a new actor a la the James Bond series?) but they far exceeded anything I thought they could do.

No backlash here, William, I'm in total agreement.

I actually preferred this to the Raimi films. Garfield is excellent as Parker.

Local conservative pundit and bestselling SF author Orson Scott Card raves about the movie here, while chastising "consensus elitists" (he doesn't actually use that phrase here, but has elsewhere) like Mary McKee.

Orson Scott Card on The Amazing Spider-Man.

Note to Card: The X-MEN movie (00) was fairly serious in tone. SPIDER-MAN is flippant in comparison.

No consensus from Marty on that one!

Hah! Sorry about that, Marty!

I should note that I've not see THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN and don't have an opinion about it, and have found various people making intelligent-sounding cases for it being unnecessary while others make just as intelligent-sounding cases for it being, you know, good. I posted the link to OSC's review because I find it, erm, interesting in the Armond White sense. Card usually says some very bizarre things in his reviews, and he likes to rail against the "elites" with a weird paranoia that suggests that he has some major feelings of inadequacy.

This is also a man who regularly decries Tarantino and Tim Burton movies for being "repulsive," a term that seems particularly odd in Burton's case -- I mean, sure, they're usually badly written and directed, at least in recent years, but while I can see calling Burton's candy-cane gothicism "trite," the "repulsive" epithet is a bit over the top. What makes it particularly odd is that Card's own fiction is rife with torture, mutilation, child rape and child murder (he wrote a whole novel, WYRMS, about tentacle rape), and that there are quite a few SF fans (particularly female ones) who don't like his stuff because they find it just as "repulsive" as he finds KILL BILL and BEETLEJUICE. The man can't seem to abide actually seeing on screen the kind of stuff his own novels and short stories are full of.

He's also gone on record as saying things like the original KING KONG and various films about WW1 aerial combat are "unwatchable" because of their crude special effects, and that, while there's a good movie at the heart of HUGO, the stuff about Méliès severely damages it, due to the "boring" emphasis on that director's "outdated" work. He also thinks that SILVERADO is one of the few worthwhile Westerns, and that it's better acted than anything Ford, Hawkes or Leone ever made (despite being a columnist for a conservative Republican publication, he has no use for either John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, just as, politically, he despises Reagan while being a staunch defender of Nixon).

Plus, he gets really creepy when talking about pre-teen actors, or at least the male ones. He's the only critic I know who devoted more space to the kid who played Jim Gordon's son in THE DARK KNIGHT than to Heath Ledger, and he's always enthusing about the "beauty" and "truth" (a term I really hate in criticism) of some kid's unremarkable performance, even if the boy only gets a few moments of screen time. And despite being notoriously homophobic (Card has repeatedly said any government that legitimizes gay marriage needs to be overthrown by violence), I can't recall a single instance of him describing an actress in terms that suggests he might find her sexually attractive (the most sexualized descriptions in his fiction are of the titular boy prostitute in the novel SONGBIRD).

He's a Card...and a homophobe hung up on beautiful young men likely has, as they say, issues.

Card makes the pedantic argument that "all films are unnecessary," which is stupid and childish. Sure, I guess technically I'd have to agree that everything that exists outside of food, water, and air are "unnecessary," but that sounds like an argument you would make if you didn't have a better one.

I just thought ASM is pointless. I've seen this story--in print, on TV, in films--dozens of times. Going beyond the Spider-Man origin, ASM has the exact same plot as all three Raimi's films. Plus, it's called THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, but it takes over an hour for Spider-Man to show up. Like we were way more interested in watching a puny teenager fumble through high school (again!) than a super-hero battling crime.

This post has been edited by Marty McKee on Jul 16 2012, 08:42 PM

While Card, personally sounds like a complete tool, I agree with his review.

I'm with William and Patrick on this one.

Unlike Marty, I was perfectly fine with the pre-Spider-Man section of the film, and was actually disappointed when it was clear that part was about to end. As soon as Uncle Ben ran outside after Peter, I mentally yelled "boo!" as I was enjoying Martin Sheen's Uncle Ben and his interplay with Peter so much.

This post has been edited by Darren Gross on Jul 17 2012, 06:29 PM