I really don’t care too much, nor do I know that much about Aquaman. He’s not one of my favorite heroes. He lives in a state of almost universal derision, except by his strange cult like following. I’m in the middle ground – Aquaman seems like a pretty cool guy. I wish I could have his powers to be honest. But the thing is where do you approach his story for an Aquaman movie. What is important?
Tag: film
Amazing Spider-Man Clashoff: It was Uncanny
Amazing Spider-Man
I saw Amazing Spider-Man, and I really liked it. It’s charming, with actors that seem more at ease with each other than any of the other Spider-Man movies. There’s a spoiler-free review after the jump, and a second jump with a couple major problems I had. That part will have spoilers, this part won’t.
First of all, I’m going to get this out of the way. Tobey Maguire freaks me the hell out. I never liked him as Peter Parker, and his whole romance with Mary Jane seemed really odd, probably because I thought he and Kirsten Dunst were both pretty unconvincing as the characters they were portraying. In this movie, however, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have a really nice chemistry; they both have this awkward shyness and haltering speech with each other that perfectly works in their high school romance. Also, Martin Sheen is the best Uncle Ben. He has a wonderful moment where he brings Peter back down to earth when he’s being cocky, and he does it all without saying “With Great Power comes Great Responsibility”. In fact, almost all of the actors do a great job hinting at character depth without needing to explain their motivations in their entirety. Even Flash Thompson has an actual character arc!
The Lizard, too, works surprisingly well by setting him up as an opposite to Spider-Man, a lab experiment gone wrong in a scientist that’s already pretty unbalanced. Dylan Baker balances the kindly scientific mentor and creepy lab mutant personae pretty well.
A lot of the action scenes are slick and well-shot, and do a good job showing two characters moving in ways we haven’t been able to see in a movie before. Also, Spider-Man is almost always in motion, flipping, or climbing on walls or ceilings, which exactly how a character with his power set should move in fight scenes.
Overall, I’d say it’s worth the ticket price, and for the most part, the good scenes will vastly outweigh the relatively minor problems you might have with it. We’ve got a more spoiler-y review after the jump that deals with two major problems I had with the story, but didn’t manage to change my orginal review.
Better Comic Movies – Demons and Spectres
I am really tired of most superhero movies – do we need each hero to have an origin film? Why not show that we can use these characters to tell different stories? To build a universe that goes beyond being every other film? So every week I’ll post a pitch for a different kind of hero film.
Demons And Spectres
Jason Blood and Jim Corrigan are detectives hundreds of years of history together. They fight for justice but even that term has many sides and as the Demon and the Spectre, they can only keep so much of a peace. When something big enough to tip the scales of good and evil enters Civic City, Heaven and Hell’s detectives are going to throw all of Civic City and even the world … into Limbo.
Set the film in the 1920’s but give it heavy shadows and a dark setting. While these two detectives are have a history, they’ve muddied each other. They aren’t white and black – they’re shades of gray and most of the time they’d rather just pay their rent.
Also Method Man voices a CGI Etrigan.