Take Two Tuesday: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) ... or, look out, here comes (another) Spider-Man

I haven’t done a lot of “Take Two Tuesdays,” but when I started back in May 2014, I set my sights on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and found that I liked it better than I thought. How appropriate, then, that I’m revisiting the “Take Two” premise with another Spider-Man film.

I’ve seen Spider-Man: No Way Home twice now on home video. With a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, nearly $2 billion in worldwide box office, and legions of fans declaring that it’s the best Marvel movie ever, Spider-Man: No Way Home isn’t actually very good. It’s entertaining enough, with flashes of brilliance, but it’s over-reliant on nostalgia with a story that doesn’t hang together. And were it not for the pure unadulterated charisma of its leading performers, No Way Home would be an unabashed flop. 

You’re going to need to have seen the film for me to talk about why it doesn’t work, so spoilers follow for No Way Home (and, really, every Spider-Man film that came before it). I compared No Way Home to Avengers: Endgame, in that “No Way Home finds itself as the unlikely apogee of the eight Spider-Man films that preceded it.” And I’ve thought about this idea a lot over the last five months, mulling the difference between Endgame (which was built as a climax) and No Way Home (which is merely masquerading as one). I think No Way Home tries very hard to be the next Endgame, especially if you’ve seen every Spider-Man movie in the last twenty years.

Silence (2016)

In thirteen years, I’ve not missed a single Scorsese theatrical release. In fact, most of them I’ve attended more than once. (The only other director who’s earned that degree of loyalty, you may be unsurprised to learn, is Christopher Nolan, who I’ve followed for twelve.) You should know – if you don’t already – that Martin Scorsese directed my all-time favorite film, The Departed, that I’ve never really been disappointed by him, and that I consider him easily one of the greatest and most reliable living film directors. Perhaps, then, I’m a little biased, but I contend that his latest, Silence, is an accomplished feat, a moody and mature contemplation of many of the themes that have dogged Scorsese throughout his oeuvre.

Based on the Shusaku Endo novel, Silence finds Jesuit missionaries Rodrigues and Garrpe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) journeying to seventeenth-century Japan to investigate reports that their predecessor and mentor Ferreira (Liam Neeson) has turned apostate and renounced the church. In the course of their investigation, they find a community of Kakure Kirishitan (“hidden Christians”) persecuted by a local inquisitor and his interpreter (Issei Ogata and Tadanobu Asano), testing their faith and demanding more of them than they may be prepared to give.

Two of Scorsese’s dominant themes have been the struggles of faith and the tensions of duty; in Goodfellas, Henry Hill labored under his obligations to his criminal friends, while Scorsese acquired some notoriety for the inquisitive The Last Temptation of Christ. And in The Departed, a film rife with Catholic guilt and misplaced paternalism, the blurred line between cops and criminals becomes too much for both protagonist Billy Costigan and antagonist Colin Sullivan. In Silence, our protagonists have their faiths tested in more severe ways, facing torture and death in a way that’s almost biblical. Silence has long been a passion project of Scorsese’s, and I mean that in several ways, as the Jesuit priests face their own Christ-like trials, compared alternately to Gethsemane and to the crucifixion.

At two hours and forty minutes, Silence will likely test moviegoers as well; Scorsese movies have always been something of an endurance test (his last, The Wolf of Wall Street, topped three hours), but usually they’re padded out with flashy editing, nonstop dialogue, and at least one Rolling Stones track. With Silence, none of those is on display; indeed, this is one of Scorsese’s least stylized, most subdued works – and it’s also among his most mature and most contemplative. At 74 years old, Scorsese has a clear and unapologetic reverence for the source material and the thematic content of Silence, and as Rodrigues undergoes his trials, we can sense something of Scorsese’s own wrestling with his faith amid the apparent silence of God.

As Scorsese seems to extract himself from the equation, directing in a subtle manner with only a few trademark quirks on display, Andrew Garfield is proving to have quite a year for himself. (And, strikingly enough, between this and Hacksaw Ridge, he’s not had much luck going to Japan.) His performance of Rodrigues as religiously challenged, horrorstruck by the conflict between his religious obligation and his sense of duty to the faithful, is sophisticated in a way that makes me worry he’ll split the Best Actor vote for himself with Hacksaw Ridge. The film’s Japanese cast – particularly Ogata, who’s been rightly compared to Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds – more than hold their own opposite their western counterparts, and in some ways with the harder job as their roles are largely silent. And Neeson, as ever, is brokenheartedly stoic as the alleged apostate, whose appearance in the third act layers the narrative with pathos of a surprisingly tragic dimension.

As a fan of the 1966 novel, I had wondered how the film would capture the multiplicity of narrators in the book, but I needn’t have worried. Scorsese pulls it off beautifully, opting for meditation over exposition. But where the novel ended somewhat optimistically, redemptive in a way that reaffirmed the reader’s faith, Scorsese continues the story for a few more minutes, allowing the audience to ask whether Silence is actually a tragedy, the despair of a man who wonders whether God has been silent all along. Or do we too hear the voice of God in the silences of Silence?

Silence is rated R for “some disturbing violent content.” Directed by Martin Scorsese. Screenplay by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese. Based on the novel by Shusaku Endo. Starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Issei Ogata, Yôsuke Kubozuka, Ciarán Hinds, and Liam Neeson.

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

I’m not sure how much cache a ten-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival has to the world at large, but to me it says that a film is worth a look. And while a ten-minute standing ovation is difficult to fathom for most anything (I put more stock in rewatches and DVD sales), Hacksaw Ridge is a compelling war film that seems primed for a place of prominence when the Oscar calendar closes in a few weeks.

Andrew Garfield stars in the true story of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who nevertheless enlists in World War II as a combat medic, refusing to carry a rifle and earning the ire of his commanding officers (Vince Vaughn and Sam Worthington). Throughout, Doss refuses to compromise his values, even amid the challenges of his Great War veteran father (Hugo Weaving) and new bride (Teresa Palmer).

What surprised me most about Hacksaw Ridge was the way that director Mel Gibson unites two very disparate tones in a way that’s surprisingly compelling and which makes the second half all the more effective. The film begins feelings very much at home in the 1940s, reminiscent of something like Sergeant York or The Best Years of Our Lives, with a very simple romantic plot arc that’s almost syrupy sweet. This nearly naïve worldview is thrown into stark contrast to the horrific fog of war in the film’s second half, in which Doss’s wide-eyed beliefs are tested in the most intense crucible imaginable. That the film doesn’t feel like two disparate halves is perhaps Gibson’s greatest achievement here.

When it comes to directing combat footage, Gibson’s no slouch, either. In this respect, the film has been compared to Saving Private Ryan (which, full confession, I still haven’t seen), and there’s a certain brutality to the war scenes that succeeds all the more because of the false sense of security into which the film’s first half lulls us. But even taken in isolation, Hacksaw Ridge has a grisly intensity in its war sequences that is both disconcerting for its gore and frightening in the number of jump moments Gibson manages to navigate. We truly feel, as Doss must have, that we are out of our element.

Garfield’s earnest portrayal of the peaceable country boy goes a long way toward selling the central conceit of the film, and I have to wonder if we’ll be looking at a Best Actor contender when the next Academy Awards roll around. (I also wonder if Gibson’s cactus-hugging days are behind him and if he’ll be up for Best Director, as well.) Garfield plays Doss as a man of conviction, a man for whom his decisions don’t come easily. When his father chastises him for wrestling with his conscience, it’s not a revelation for the character; we’ve already seen these conflicts play out on Garfield’s face and in the quaver of his voice. Even if he’ll always be a Spider-Man to me, Garfield proves himself capable of a range wider than my typecasting gives him credit.

It’s really a Gibson/Garfield show through and through, although the film wisely cedes the floor to the real Desmond Doss just before the credits roll, letting us see the real soldier on his own terms and revealing that the film doesn’t exaggerate much about his humility and his religious devotion. It’s these real-life clips which confirm the truth of the story that the film tells us, and in so doing it solidifies my belief that Hacksaw Ridge is one of the most powerful war films in recent memory. Uncompromising in both its wartime gore and its dedication to the true story of a remarkable hero, Hacksaw Ridge is a strong contender for early award buzz, and it’s entirely well-deserved.

Hacksaw Ridge is rated R for “intense prolonged realistically graphic sequences of war violence including grisly bloody images.” Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Robert Schenkkan and Andrew Knight. Based on a true story. Starring Andrew Garfield, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, and Hugo Weaving.

Monday at the Movies - February 9, 2015

Welcome to the first “Monday at the Movies” of the new year.  Just in time for Valentines Day, a movie about a love triangle, though I defy you to find anything romantic about it.

Never Let Me Go (2010) – I don’t know anything about the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, so I was instead drawn in by the impressive cast list – Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield as boarding school chums who fall in love and seek atonement for wronging each other as children. But Never Let Me Go is not Atonement, that lush and lusty heartbreaker; it is, on the one hand, absolutely heartbreaking, albeit with a relentlessness that Atonement (for all its hopefulness and aspirations for forgiveness) lacked.  I really can’t articulate thoroughly enough just how unceasingly bleak this film is, and if that’s the point, then well done.  The central trio are all very credible, as are the child performers who play them at age 10 or so.  If you want to go into the film completely unspoiled, stop reading now, because I need to talk about a few things. First, the central conceit of the film is that its protagonists, as revealed about thirty minutes in, are genetic clones being bred for their organs, and if that’s not uplifting enough for you the moral of the story is, “It doesn’t matter how much time you get with the people you love, because you’re all going to die anyway, and it wouldn’t have been enough time even if you had a hundred years.”  The film, though unindictably crafted in every way, leaves such a gaping void in the soul of the viewer without offering anything to fill said void. We can’t even take solace in the frankly gorgeous direction by Mark Romanek, because it’s in service of this desperately despondent narrative. It’s a punishing pace to get to a finish line at which point the narrator ruminates on how little she has left and reveals that that, too, shall pass.  I truly wanted to like this film – I wanted to weep with it when I heard the premise – but instead I found myself unable to feel anything other than a crushing, Werner Herzog-like nihilistic despair.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you here next week, almost certainly with a review of Kingsman! 

Take Two Tuesday: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) ...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love comic book movies that aren't Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Well, this is a first.  “Take Two Tuesdays” is a series that I hope I won’t have to use too much, because the goal of a “Take Two” review is to reevaluate a film I’ve already reviewed here – put another way, backpedal on a review.  I’m usually pretty consistent in terms of my opinions on movies, but every once in a while I’ve been egregiously wrong.  A few examples that come to mind are The Shining and Anchorman, both of which I appreciated much more the second time around; on the flip side, my recent excursion through the Star Wars prequel trilogy proved to be way less fun without my childhood lenses in place.  So in those rare moments when my current opinion contradicts a review I’ve already published, “Take Two Tuesdays” will be my chance to set the record straight.

In this installment, it’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  The headline here?  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is better than I gave it credit.

In my earlier review of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I bemoaned the overfull quality of the film, calling it “a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.”  The kindest word I had for the film was “serviceable,” but I lamented, “‘serviceable’ just isn’t good enough any more.”

I’ll be honest:  in the wake of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, my comic book movie radar needs some serious readjusting.  It’s probably my second favorite comic book movie of all time at this point (you know the first), but it’s making the others look bad.  I noticed this problem after seeing X-Men: Days of Future Past.  While I waited for the inevitable postcredits stinger, my first thought was, “Eh.”  Immediately, I checked my premises; aside from one or two very small bits, I hadn’t had an unkind thought during the film itself.  The only thought I could rally behind that lukewarm off-the-cuff reaction was, “It wasn’t Winter Soldier.”

And that’s no way to review a movie.  On its own merits, X-Men: Days of Future Past was a smash success for me, and that’s the review I wrote.  Reapproaching The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with a similar sensibility (and a clearer sense of how all the moving pieces fit together) yielded comparable results.  It is, perhaps, the sequel I was waiting for after The Amazing Spider-Man.

The positives I cited still stand – Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have extraordinary chemistry together, Jamie Foxx’s Electro is a vastly original and highly entertaining nemesis.  And I have better things to say about Dane DeHaan’s Harry Osborn; I love that the film takes him down a different path than James Franco’s, and his character arc is much more compelling the second time around.

I remain, however, disgruntled about two pieces, though in revisiting the film they loom less large than I had perceived.  On the subject of DeHaan, I’m still miffed that the film doesn’t spend as much time developing his third-act twist, and I’m still sore about the “I’ll be back” cliffhanger.  I would have much rather spent more time with him than on my second grievance:  I still maintain that the subplot surrounding Peter’s parents is mishandled in the film.  These scenes don’t contribute anything to the narrative, don’t bear logically on the plot at hand, and ultimately don’t even resolve themselves.  Either the film needs to foreground this subplot – it is, after all, the opening scene of two films now – or drop it in favor of something more closely connected to the central story.  If it doesn’t pay off in The Inevitable Amazing Spider-Man 3, I think we all know when to get our popcorn refill.

In hindsight/retrospect (not sure which one), these are much smaller issues than I had initially felt.  I had a blast with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, especially the first hour (I know, because I got my refill at the moment when Peter digs out his father’s briefcase).  But the rest of it didn’t disappoint; I found myself laughing, caught up in the entertaining parts of the film and asking myself, “When exactly did I space out the last time?”  I couldn’t find that moment.

I feel the same way now about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as I do about X-Men: Days of Future Past.  It doesn’t revolutionize the genre, and it isn’t The Winter Soldier.  But it doesn’t have to be.  I had forgotten that a film needs only to entertain and, time permitting, say something important.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 more than succeeds at the former.  And the bits about hope at the very end tickle the Dark Knight Rises enthusiast in me just fine.

In short, I’ve upgraded this one to “buy on DVD.”  (That’s high praise coming from someone who still doesn’t own The Amazing Spider-Man.)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

If I ever get accused of making up my mind about a movie before I see it, I’ll point to The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  I desperately wanted to love this film, even after and in spite of the disappointment I faced with the first film in the reboot franchise.  The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is not a catastrophe by any stretch of the imagination; there are things it does quite well, things that might have made the film an unqualified success, but the parts that don’t work did impede my enjoyment enough.

Fraught over his promise to her father, Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) doesn’t know where his relationship with Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) is going, nor does he know what to make of his former best friend Harry Osborn (Dane DeHaan) returning to New York to inherit his father’s company.  What’s more, Peter is still wrestling with the mysterious disappearance of his parents all those years ago.  As Spider-Man, though, he knows that the arrival of the demigodly Electro (Jamie Foxx) spells bad news for the city.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s greatest undoing is its obvious ambition; like an overeager patron of a fifty-year buffet, director Marc Webb and a quartet of screenwriters load up their plate with no fewer than seven running subplots, borrowing from wide stretches of Spidey’s comic book mythology.  And like at any buffet, there are entrees that taste great and other dishes that add only empty filler to the meal.

Let’s start with the bad news.  A lot of my complaints about the first film still stand, particularly about the subplot regarding Peter’s parents.  In a film that has so much going on, a subplot that has no direct link to the main plot should have been excised or made more relevant; it does serve to tie up a loose end from the first film, but it’s a conversation-closer rather than a motivator for the characters.  Furthermore, it’s the focus of much of the film’s middle, which means that the plot of the film screeches to a halt while Peter looks at computers until he finds the right file.

The Parkers subplot is the only thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 has too much of, and it certainly interferes with the pacing of the film because nearly everything else feels underrepresented and rushed.  While DeHaan is quite good as a Harry Osborn vastly different from James Franco’s interpretation, the script pushes him through one too many character transformations and then bails on him with the knowledge that he’ll be back for another film.  Similarly, Foxx is – pardon the pun – electrifying as Electro, an iconoclast whose hero worship collapses when Spider-Man forgets his name, but the film shuffles him offstage so that the aforementioned computer scenes can take precedence.

It bears comparison to Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, which juggled a healthy amount of subplots and struck a commendable balance between Peter Parker’s angst and his superheroic struggle against Doctor Octopus (played brilliantly by Alfred Molina).  Raimi knew where to draw the line between plots and came out with a fantastically tight narrative; Webb’s is a more sprawling narrative that feels inflated by the demands of producers who want to lay groundwork for future films rather than let those films develop organically.

I don’t, however, object to the brief treatment of Paul Giamatti as The Rhino.  His scenes are fun bookends that get us in and out of the film rather deftly, and they’re cleverly scripted to tell us exactly what we need to know about Spider-Man at those moments.  He might be back for future sequels, but if not this is a perfectly fine way for movies to acknowledge the wider comics mythology without getting bogged down.  (See also Batroc in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Scarecrow in The Dark Knight.)

One thing that Amazing Spider-Man 2 does especially well, though, is the relationship between Peter and Gwen.  Perhaps because of the real-life relationship between Garfield and Stone, these scenes are the most genuine and the most compelling in the entire film.  Garfield is pitch-perfect as the tormented teen, truly conflicted about the tension between his feelings and his dangerous lifestyle; he downright masters the chatty Web-Slinger persona, too, giving Spidey a New York edge to his wit that Tobey Maguire seemed to lack.  And Stone – well, you’ve probably read my blog long enough to know that I think she can do no wrong, and she continues to ace it here; we can feel her frustrations with Peter but also know from whence those feelings arise.

And I’ve spoken well of Foxx’s performance as Electro, and the scenes with him are honestly among the best in the film.  Webb, previously best known for his eloquently beautiful (500) Days of Summer, proves himself a solidly capable action director to boot.  I’m not sure quite what to make of Hans Zimmer’s dubstep-inflected score, but the action sequences in which the bass line drops and Electro pummels Spidey are probably the best such scenes in any Spider-Man film, realistic without a fanboy-tongue-in-cheek wink (as the Raimi films always seemed to do).  Or maybe it’s just that they’re set at night? 

Either way, in these moments Webb gives us the Spider-Man film we want.  And if the film had been a little more focused on these pieces instead of pushing toward too many finish lines, it might have even exceeded Spider-Man 2 in the realm of comic book films.  But your mileage, true believers, may vary.  Perhaps this is the future of the Spider-Man franchise, and I’m wrong about its misdirection.  Maybe I’m stubbornly clinging to a previous generation’s Spider-films, but I sense from the critical reception that the problem isn’t with me.  

I'm willing to be wrong - I want desperately to be wrong about this film, but the problem is that this Spider-Man just isn’t amazing enough.  It’s serviceable, but in a world where Captain America: The Winter Soldier is playing a few screens away, “serviceable” just isn’t good enough any more.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action/violence.”  We have a lot of zapping, kicking, and punching, with a little bit of burning and exploding; one character death might be traumatic and certainly ups the angst quota for the film.

Come back on Wednesday for the Double-Oh-Seventh of the month as Timothy Dalton makes his curtain call as James Bond in Licence to Kill!

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

The most unfortunate thing about The Amazing Spider-Man, Marc Webb’s reboot starring Andrew Garfield as the titular web-slinger, is that it wasn’t released in a different year.  In any other year, you might have been reading a very different review of this film, but as a superhero film released in 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man stands between The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises – easily two of the best superhero movies of all time – and the comparison makes The Amazing Spider-Man’s faults all the more apparent.

Not that it’s a bad film, by any stretch of the imagination.  We’re not looking at another Batman & Robin or even Superman III; in fact, it’s even better than the last two-thirds of Spider-Man 3.  There is much that The Amazing Spider-Man does right, but it’s bogged down by pulled punches and an overreliance on attempting to distance itself from the Raimi trilogy.

From frame one, the focus is on Peter Parker (Garfield) and not Spider-Man; we learn more about his parents, who died under mysterious circumstances, and he doesn’t don the costume for what feels like a very long time (more on that later).  He romances classmate and science intern Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) in what must be the most awkward courtship ever while Oscorp’s desperate herpetologist Curt Connors (Rhys Ifans) seeks to stabilize his reptilian vaccination against human weakness.

In a post-Dark Knight Rises world, remembering the value of hope, I’m going to close this review with a consideration of what succeeds in The Amazing Spider-Man, but first, the bad news.

First and foremost, the film feels overly long; at two hours and sixteen minutes, it’s the shortest of the Big Three this summer (The Avengers 2:23 and The Dark Knight Rises 2:47), but it doesn’t feel like it, mostly because the film takes a very long time to get started.  While there is much about the film that is original, a lot of it feels very familiar; it’s only been ten years since the first Spider-Man film, and though there are minor changes to the origin story it’s mostly intact from before.  You can even see the filmmakers trying to swim around the original when Uncle Ben (played with quiet graceful authority, as always, by Martin Sheen) talks in circuitous language in an attempt not to say the exact words “With great power comes great responsibility.”  While the film, as a remake, can’t rely on what went before, the attempts to distance itself focus too much on cosmetic details and not on retelling the story in a significant way.

As a consequence of this over-familiarity, the film feels as though nothing’s happening.  The interesting plotline of Richard and May Parker is abandoned early on, apparently on reserve for a sequel; while I understand the desire to build a franchise, this thread might have sufficiently distanced Webb’s interpretation from Raimi’s, as the Parkers were entirely absent from the earlier trilogy.  Instead we get an Uncle Ben who’s only in the film to die; Sheen, though as good a choice as Cliff Roberston, is an actor whose skill is squandered.  (As Aunt May, Sally Field is an expected disappointment; her teary performance feels stilted and a poor substitute for the moving Rosemary Harris.)  Similarly, the Curt Connors plotline is only interesting insofar as the audience knows he’s going to become The Lizard; audiences who aren’t aware of this plotbeat don’t have any foreshadowing to lean on and may wonder why we’re spending so much time with a one-armed scientist who knows less about the Parkers than Peter thinks he does.

It’s a quest narrative that is abandoned not only by its storytellers but by its protagonist.  The film is set up as the story of Peter’s attempts to understand his parents, but when the film stops looking for answers so does Peter.  In this respect it’s an even bigger cop-out than the ending of Prometheus – at least in that film someone was still interested in the questions that incited the plot in the first place.

In many ways, the comparison to Prometheus is apt because The Amazing Spider-Man, too, is a weak story told extremely well.  Aside from the disorienting POV shots that seem designed to sell videogames rather than put us in Spidey’s shoes, Andrew Garfield is pitch-perfect as Peter Parker and as Spider-Man, capturing the teenager’s innate awkwardness but eminent likeability while also mastering the graceful body language of the hero, in flight and fight; he puts the friendly back in "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man."  You won’t be surprised to hear that my opinion of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy is similarly high; it’s no wonder she’s Peter’s first great love, a connection fostered not by the script they’re given but by the chemistry they develop.  It’s perhaps too convenient that she’s an intern at the one place where a friend of Spider-Man is needed, but she ably executes her main function in the script – the love interest, the damsel sans distress (she saves Spidey’s keister at least twice in moments that mercifully don’t feel shoehorned in by the PC Police).

As for Ifans, he’s an oddball choice by virtue of being a master oddball.  His descent into schizophrenia – in which Webb finally masters a comic book’s use of internal dialogue by employing voiceover smartly – recalls his expertly creepy turn in Enduring Love, and his scenes as The Lizard (assisted, of course, by CGI) create a foe that is successfully unlike anything from the Raimi trilogy.  While The Lizard was teased by the appearance of Dylan Baker as Dr. Connors in the Raimi films, this Lizard is a foe worth fighting, with a bizarre plan that never feels out-of-place thanks to the film’s clear translation that the once-good doctor is losing his mind.

And Marc Webb, known for his directorial debut on (500) Days of Summer, demonstrates that he’s aptly named, since he gets inside of Spider-Man’s head and directs the action in an efficient manner.  He handles the romantic plot better in some ways, since the chemistry between Garfield and Stone is so tangible that it salvages a somewhat clumsy and unenthusiastic screenplay in that regard.  While it’s hard not to get a good movie out of one as well-performed as this one, it’s significant that Webb’s only apparent misstep is the odd and uneven use of POV shots when Spidey swings into action; perhaps these looked better in 3D, but that’s a remark a film reviewer should never have to make.

Ultimately, The Amazing Spider-Man is too many films for its own good; the Parkers’ past and the origin story are neglected and uninspiring, respectfully, while The Lizard’s arc is the best of the three but is introduced as a distraction before becoming the main plot.  But none of these films are told poorly; the actors are gifted, the effects dazzling.  What redeems this film is that it’s just good enough to suggest that a sequel might be truly great; now that the obligatory ground has been walked, the franchise can move in a new direction with a cast that embodies Stan Lee’s original stories perhaps better than Raimi’s crew ever did.

Who knows?  When all’s said and done, the sequel could even rival Spider-Man 2.

The Amazing Spider-Man is rated PG-13 “for sequences of action and violence.”  The action sequences are more personal here than before, with large slashes and cuts rendered in each combatant’s body in bloody but not graphic detail.  Some of The Lizard’s transformations might be frightening to younger folk, but overall the film is bloodier than Raimi’s work.

The Social Network (2010)

I think we can all agree on two things: David Fincher is a solid filmmaker (even though I'm probably the only person on the planet who isn't keen on Fight Club [long story], I'm considering giving it a second watch), and The Social Network is kind of a step out of bounds for Fincher, whose filmography - including Se7en, Zodiac, and The Game - reads more like a list of "creepiest movies of our generation" than an application to direct a biopic-of-sorts about the founders of Facebook. But Fincher's nothing if not dextrously versatile, and The Social Network adds another notch to Fincher's "here's what I'm capable of" belt.

The Social Network is a highly unflattering portrait of the people who claim to have "invented" Facebook, arguably the most high-profile Web site since Google - the antisocial and nominal founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), his financier and best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Napster founder and Facebook's demi-PR guy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), and rowing team twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who claim intellectual property rights - and the lawsuits that divided all of them. The film cuts between legal depositions of the main characters and the events they describe, methodically and deliberately leaving the audience to interpret what went wrong and who (if anyone) stole from whom.

Fincher does a solid turn directing here, deftly keeping the pace moving as characters register slights as betrayals and as alliances crumble under the weight of paranoia and profit. Though the film's first cuts between testimonials and actual events are a little jarring for those who didn't follow the Facebook news feed (pun intended), Fincher quickly sorts out who's after what but wisely refuses to spoonfeed us a good guy/bad guy dichotomy. True, the film and its Aaron Sorkin screenplay cast Saverin in a more sympathetic light than Zuckerberg receives, and the Winklevosses are portrayed as jock heavies more than intellectual heavyweights, but it's not clear by the end of the film how we're supposed to feel about the whole thing.

In particular, the film functions a great deal like Cobb's top at the end of Inception (the significance I won't reveal, so as not to spoil it for the DVD-waiters); it means whatever we project onto it, particularly the ambiguous final shot, scored at least somewhat ironically to The Beatles' "Baby You're A Rich Man." It seems, in the opinion of this reviewer, that The Social Network is a kind of light jeremiad against the ugly irony of using the Internet as a way to increase, not detract from, social interaction, and it appears more than slightly condemning of the sort of person who creates something only for public acceptance and the label of "cool." To these people, money is secondary to status, which also subordinates (again ironically) human companionship. One could, of course, read the film's ending as hopeful; title cards let us know that everyone got a little bit of what they wanted all along, but the uncertainty etched into the film's closing cut-to-black is more wobble than topple. It's a testament to Fincher's skill, then, that the ambiguity that pervades the film is more conducive to interpretation than to accusations of waffling.

Fincher also does a fine job pulling together a few "rising stars" (I use the term somewhat skeptically), giving me faith in at least some of the careers-to-be. Jesse Eisenberg, of course, is the undisputed star here, and for good reason; I've decried him as "the B-List Michael Cera" for his turns in Adventureland and Zombieland, but here he's starting to come into his own. The simultaneous wave of revulsion and sympathy you'll feel toward Zuckerberg by the end is equal parts Fincher and Eisenberg, with the latter now wielding a more promising future than his character. Andrew Garfield is more sympathetic as Saverin, pulling out all the stops on the road to pathos by plausibly depicting all the ambivalent feelings of his best friend's so-called betrayal; reminiscent of a young James Franco (wow, how old does that make me, then?), Garfield's making me less nervous about his front role in the Spider-Man reboots (that and the rumored casting of Emma Stone as Mary-Jane). Justin Timberlake's performance is a little more complicated, however, as I'm not sure if it's Timberlake or the character that's a touch hammy; while Sean Parker is flashy and flighty, my perception of Timberlake is much the same. So it's unclear to me whether what I'm seeing is either very poor or very convincing acting.

Maybe this is just me reading a little too much Gail Simone and other feminist theory, but I'm a bit disappointed with the treatment of the female characters in The Social Network. This is a boys'-club movie, with the facts forcing an aspect on the men of the story, but all the female characters are fairly one-dimensional and ultimately little more than impetuses for men to act. Case in point: Sean Parker's introductory scene finds him in bed with a Stanford girl, a fact we learn from a lingering shot of her panty-clad derriere; we learn her name (Amy), her major (French), and little else. Though Amy is an inconsequential character in the big scheme, she's indicative of the role of women at large in the story, which is a shame when you have such a talented female cast on board. I'm dying to see Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but it's a shame that all she does as Erica Allbright in this film is break up with Zuckerberg and incite him to start an online revolution after his heart breaks (well, maybe). Brenda Song finally gets a chance to break out of the Disney playhouse (after the unfortunate departure of Ashley Tisdale, I gave up on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and Song's ditzy heiress London Tipton), but she's essentially window dressing as Saverin's girlfriend Christy Lee; while she's certainly very pretty, Christy isn't asked to do anything else but hang on Eduardo's arm. We're told that she's psychotic and controlling, but there's only one scene where she's allowed to be that - her last one, which is unfortunate considering how well she does in it. And Rashida Jones, of The Office and I Love You, Man (whose misogynistic title, curiously, gave her more material than here) fame, is credible as a second-year legal associate who delivers the film's closing monologue - and eulogy of sorts - with sangfroid and aplomb; sadly, that's the first time she does anything more than offer meaningful glances and eat a salad. Ultimately, the film hinges on what Erica Allbright will do next, but it's too little/too late for a film that's so masculine-dominated.

This is not to say that The Social Network is anti-feminist or flawed beyond salvation. It's merely a disappointing (and for this reviewer, distracting) sin of omission that doesn't really hurt the finished product. Fincher does such a good job with the rest of the movie that he almost atones for the negligible treatment of the fairer sex. What Fincher has made here is a work that examines both a particular true story and the nature of "true stories" themselves; wisely, the movie is credited as "based on" a book about the true facts rather than on the "true story" itself, which invites a whole host of questions about what's true and what isn't. Like Rashomon, The Social Network suggests that truth is subjective, and (like Lost) argues that who the characters are and how they interact with each other is ultimately more important than what they're doing.

If nothing else, the film might lead a few viewers to go home and deactivate their Facebook profile, so unflattering is the creation myth behind the social networking site. As for the movie itself, though, I can do little else than invoke the already-labored Facebook pun and state simply, "Like."
With content friendly for the Facebook generation, The Social Network is rated PG-13 "for sexual content, drug and alcohol use and language." The film implies more than one sexual rendezvous with nothing shown beyond hasty disrobing to the undergarment level; characters abuse marijuana, alcohol, and cocaine frequently, and approximately three F-bombs are dropped.