Here’s Richard in a CTV National News report from Saturday July 19, 2014. “Hollywood relies on making huge profits from summer blockbusters,” they say, “but something’s gone wrong with this year’s script.”
Watch the whole report HERE!
At two-and-a-half hours the new Spider-Man movie is almost equal parts action and story. The first fifteen minutes contains not one, but two wild action sequences that’ll make your eyeballs dance. If you haven’t had your fill of special effects for the week your thirst will be quenched early on. Then the onslaught of story begins. Jammed packed with plot, bad guys and lots and lots of moony-eyed love, it’s the busiest superhero movie in recent memory.
Fresh out of high school Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) is being pulled in two different directions. He loves Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) but is troubled by a promise he made to her late father (Dennis Leary) that he would never let anything bad happen to her.
Meanwhile, Peter’s old friend Harry Osborn (Dane De Haan), heir to the OsCorp fortune, is battling a hereditary genetic disease he thinks can be cured with a dose of Spider-Man’s blood and Max Dillon (Jamie Foxx), a low level OsCorp electrical engineer, has an accident that rewires him into Electro, a highly charged villain with the power to control electricity.
“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is this is a movie with several well-crafted dramatic moments. Too bad most of them feel like they’re lifted from another movie and dropped into this one as placeholders for the action sequences. Peter Parker is shedding tears over his love life one minute, swinging on webby vines through the streets the next. Both tones are well executed, but they often feel forced together.
Garfield works to distance himself from Tobey McGuire’s Spider-Man. First thing you notice is that he’s not as mopey as McGuire; as Parker Garfield is nerdy and angsty, not downcast and ennui ridden.
Secondly, he’s witty when playing the web slinger. The Sam Raimi “Spider-Man” movies didn’t use Spidey’s comic book sarcasm but Garfield’s Mach 2 version isn’t shy to let loose with some entertaining trash talking.
His portrayal is bright, punchy and more akin to the comic books than anything McGuire or Raimi put on film.
Emma Stone’s football-sized eyes and smart smile rescue Gwen from the simply fulfilling the girlfriend role. She brings some spark to the character and shares some good chemistry with (real life boyfriend) Garfield.
Speaking of sparks, Foxx could have used a few more as Electro. A bundle of neurosis before his electro charged accident, Max becomes one of the rare villains who was more interesting before he got his powers.
De Haan, who was so good in “Chronicle,” is interesting as Harry / Green Goblin. His obsession with finding a cure for his disease is a springboard for his transformation into the Goblin and Da Haan embraces a malevolence that makes the character memorable.
“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” has good actors—plus a fun cameo from Paul Giamatti—a love story and some good action—you will believe a man can swing above the streets of New York—so why does it feel somewhat unsatisfying?
Maybe it’s the two-and-a-half-hour running time, or the something-for-everyone mix of action, heartbreak and comedy, or perhaps it’s the fact that it feels like a well made copy of the first Garfield “Spider-Man” movie, which itself was a riff on the McGuire movies.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada In Focus
The Spider-Man movies don’t skimp on the stuff that puts the “super” into superhero movies. There’s web-slinging shenanigans and wild bad guys galore, but The Amazing Spider-Man 2 director Marc Webb calls the relationship between Spidey and girlfriend Gwen Stacy, “the engine of the movie.”
The chemistry the real-life couple brings to the screen is undeniable, but it almost didn’t get a chance to blossom. Before Emma Stone landed the role of the brainiac love interest, Mia Wasikowska, Imogen Poots, Emma Roberts and even Lindsay Lohan were considered.
Stone won some of the best reviews of her career playing Gwen in The Amazing Spider-Man — Peter Travers said she, “just jumps to life on screen” — in a role that gave her the biggest hit of her career to date.
Smaller roles in Superbad and Zombieland hinted at her ability to be funny and hold the screen, but in 2010’s Easy A she turned a corner into full-on Lucille Ball mode, mixing pratfalls with wit while pulling faces and cracking jokes. Smart and funny, she’s the film’s centrepiece.
The movie begins with the voice over, “The rumours of my promiscuity have been greatly exaggerated.” It’s the voice of Olive (Stone), a clean-cut high school senior who tells a little white lie about losing her virginity. As soon as the gossip mill gets a hold of the info, however, her life takes a parallel course to the heroine of the book she is studying in English class — The Scarlet Letter.
Stone is laugh-out-loud funny in Easy A, but her breakout film was a serious drama.
In The Help, she plays Jackson, Miss. native “Skeeter” Phelan who comes home from four years at school to discover the woman who raised her, a maid named Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is no longer employed by her family. Her mother says she quit, but Skeeter has doubts. With the help of a courageous group of housekeepers she tells the real story of the life of the maids, writing a book called The Help.
The Flick Filosopher called her performance, “on fire with indignation and rage,” and she moved from The Help to a variety of roles, including playing a femme fatale in Gangster Squad opposite Ryan Gosling and Josh Brolin, and lending her trademark raspy voice to cave girl Eep in the animated hit The Croods.
The 25-year-old actress is living her childhood dream of being an actress but says if performing hadn’t worked out, she would have been a journalist, “because (investigating people’s lives is) pretty much what an actor does.
“And imagine getting to interview people like me,” she laughs. ‘’It can’t get much better than that.”
I’m always wary of movies based on comic books. There have been good ones – Ghost World, Batman, Blade – but the track record is not good. Spider-man is one of the good ones, maybe even one of the great ones. Director Sam Raimi hit the right balance between action and story, between reality and fantasy. Raimi has a steady hand with story – just rent A Simple Plan if you’re not convinced – and knows about action and special effects from his Evil Dead days. He has crafted an old fashioned super-hero movie that made me nostalgic for the days of Christopher Reeves as Superman. I would quibble with the decision to put a Green Goblin mask on Willem Dafoe. Why cover up his expressive face with a cheesy looking mask? Dafoe could have been more effective and twice as scary had we been able to actually see his face. Tobey McGuire nails the socially inept Peter Parker, putting a human face on the superhero that is very charming. This one’s a winner that is sure to spawn a web-full of sequels.
Play it again, Sam. Hollywood has long been a fan of movie reboots. Spider-Man is the latest flick to get a an actor makeover.
The adage, “The only constant is change,” is only partially true in Hollywood. The list of recent movie reboots is as long as Lindsay Lohan’s arrest record, and there’s more on the way — we’ll soon see new versions of Death Wish, Fletch and Highlander — but while the titles stay the same, the faces change.
This weekend, Peter Parker swings back into theatres, but instead of Tobey Maguire behind the familiar red-and-black-webbed mask it’s Social Network star Andrew Garfield.
Not everyone is happy about the change. 1234zoomer commented on the new movie: “IS NOT GOING TO BE THE SAME WITHOUT TOBBY!!!,” (her uppercase and spelling, not mine), but Maguire has been gracious, saying, “I am excited to see the next chapter unfold in this incredible story.”
Whether the new Spidey acknowledges Maguire is yet to be seen, but at least one replacement had the manners to recognize their precursor on screen.
George Lazenby paid a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Sean Connery in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. After a wild battle to rescue Contessa Teresa (played by Diana Rigg) the new James Bond didn’t get the girl. “This never happened to the other fellow,” he says, looking dejectedly into the camera.
Former Bond Connery went on to co-star in The Hunt for Red October with Alec Baldwin playing Jack Ryan, a character later played by Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck.
It’s rumoured that Chris Pine (who took over the part of Captain Kirk in Star Trek from William Shatner) will soon reprise the role.
The Batman franchise has also had a revolving cast. Since 1943 seven actors have played the Caped Crusader, including Lewis G. Wilson, who at 23 remains the youngest actor to play the character, and George Clooney who admits he was “really bad” in Batman & Robin.
It’s not only the Caped Crusader who changes from time to time. Harvey Dent, the handsome district attorney who turns into villain Two Face has been played by Billy Dee Williams, Tommy Lee Jones and Aaron Eckhart and The Dark Knight’s Maggie Gyllenhaal took over the role of Rachel Dawes from Batman Begins star Katie Holmes.
Finally, Jodie Foster’s take on FBI agent Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs was ranked the sixth greatest protagonist in film history on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Heroes and Villains list, but when she declined to reprise the role in Hannibal, Julianne Moore stepped in.
