Started the 300 mile drive to go see my best friend, got 2/3 of the way there, found out she's actually back where I live visiting for a few days. I don't know whether to start cursing in my car or cry.
Started the 300 mile drive to go see my best friend, got 2/3 of the way there, found out she's actually back where I live visiting for a few days. I don't know whether to start cursing in my car or cry.
I enjoyed it. Did get a bit worn out of the shooting towards the end, but the general plot intrigue was enough to keep me going. Also levitation + levitation chaining + death electricity was maybe a bit OP so it wasn't particularly frustrating to get through.
And I always like being left in a state of "The fuck just happened" at the end of a story >_>
I drove for about 10 straight hours today with 1 restroom/lunch break. I've seen every ecosystem and weather pattern physically possible in California in one day. I went from rainy city, to sunny beaches and hills, to rainy hills and orchards, to rainy desert, to snowing mountains, back to rainy city. It's been...a day.
This isn't on Facebook because I don't want to make my friend think that she made me go through a lot just for her and I don't want her to feel bad. None of my friends are aware of this place which is why I can post here.
I drove for about 10 straight hours today with 1 restroom/lunch break. I've seen every ecosystem and weather pattern physically possible in California in one day. I went from rainy city, to sunny beaches and hills, to rainy hills and orchards, to rainy desert, to snowing mountains, back to rainy city. It's been...a day.
This isn't on Facebook because I don't want to make my friend think that she made me go through a lot just for her and I don't want her to feel bad. None of my friends are aware of this place which is why I can post here.
I wouldn't know if my definition of a good friend is dramatically over-fantasized or if I should expect more from them. They seem to think that I should expect more from them but I wouldn't know what else to expect. Regardless, it was a nice drive and we did get to hang out and watch movies so that's a plus.
GODDAMN! This post was just written in the "Sam Raimi hates Spiderman 3" thread after some guy in the thread becomes utterly baffled as to why people hate the Amazing Spiderman movies. And here's why.
I could elaborate but there are only 24 hours in a day. But just for the sake of brevity, how about talking about the central relationship of the film, Gwen and Peter?
The entire point of ASM2 is to kill Gwen.
This is the only thing of dramatic interest or importance in the entire story. It's the only tangible change anyone goes through, it's the only event of note in any of the characters' lives, and it's the only thematic element the script even vaguely attempts to explore in any way.
So why is it at the end of the movie?
There's literally nothing else for Gwen and Peter to do for the entire film. So they spend the whole running time breaking up, then getting back together, then breaking up, then getting back together in a continuous string of Meet Cute scenes that are so Screenwriting 101 it's embarrassing. The filmmakers are lucky Garfield and Stone have natural onscreen chemistry or you'd have some scenes that would compare unfavorably to Anakin and Padme in this movie, but I digress. The point is,
the characters are just tapdancing to fill time until the movie can kill Gwen. But for some reason the movie thinks that Gwen's death is the climax of the story. It's not.
The climax of the story is Spider-Man embracing his role as Spider-Man independent of his personal tragedies. It's Peter fully embodying the "responsibility" part of "with great power comes great responsibility."
He should have learned this lesson in the execrable first film, but Roberto Orci, arguably the worst screenwriter working in Hollywood today, instead has him break his promise to a dying man regarding said dying man's daughter,
a promise based on a request by the dying man that turns out to be 100% correct, as ignoring the promise leads directly to Gwen's death in ASM2. So what's actually happened here is that Spider-Man, our hero, is an irresponsible and selfish asshole who doesn't act heroically for all of ASM2's runtime, and gets someone killed as a result, despite how many ways the script tries to bend over backwards to absolve him of responsibility.
The moment when Spider-Man finally starts acting like a damn hero is when he tags in for the little kid and fights Rhino. You know, the scene the film spends barely a minute on and cuts off halfway into to run the credits. So what should have happened here? Well, it's pretty obvious to anyone who knows story structure:
Gwen should have died in Act 2 of the film, and the final act should have been about Peter dealing with the loss, possibly acting in revenge or fury as a result of it, and finally coming to terms with it and fully becoming the Spider-Man character in all his glory. Instead we get a sulking montage as the film rushes to end following Gwen's death, as it doesn't actually know how to make its characters interesting, and is oddly terrified of showing us Peter's emotional life in any concrete fashion, being much more preoccupied with making him seem "cool" whenever possible.
So that's a 100% fatal error on the script level. Right there your movie is dead in the water, because you didn't actually know what your own story was about. Forget how stupid the Osborn genetic disease that is triggered by being told about it is, or how Peter suddenly remembers he totally hung out at the Osborn place as a kid, or how Orci once again inserts really weird 9/11 Truther subtexts everywhere, or how Jamie Foxx's character is just Jim Carrey's Riddler meshed with Schwarzenegger's Freeze but with even less motivation, or how the entire Peter's parents subplot is the biggest dead-end in comic book movie history, or how limiting Spidey's villains to all have Osborn tech origins is writing yourself into a corner before you even begin, or any of the myriad other ridiculous and terrible things in the film. All of that doesn't matter one bit in comparison to the fact that the script has no clue how to tell the Peter/Gwen story in a way that properly exploits the dramatic potential that's right there waiting to be unleashed.
It has no idea how to construct that character arc because it's too focused on the "OMG SHE DIEDED!" shocker and not paying one whit of attention to why it's shocking: The impact it would have on Peter, a kid who has already lost his uncle to his own negligence and has now directly caused the death of the girl he loves, even after he promised her mortally wounded father (wounded assisting Peter, no less) not to involve her. This is a crushing emotional wound that would incapacitate many people, and ASM2 glosses over it like they just broke up again for the fourth time.
It's completely inept storytelling. Even if the villains had been great (they weren't) and even if the B and C plots were competently told (they aren't), ASM2 would have been sunk under the weight of its own rotten core, the utterly mishandled Peter/Gwen story. Sony isn't running around trying to get Marvel to take this property over for fun, here. The entire industry saw these problems in the film right alongside the audiences, and the president of Marvel pointed them out in an email two years before the film's release.
tl;dr - ASM2 is a terrible film, and while I'm certainly not going to tell anyone not to like it, if you do like it, you like a shitty movie.
GODDAMN! This post was just written in the "Sam Raimi hates Spiderman 3" thread after some guy in the thread becomes utterly baffled as to why people hate the Amazing Spiderman movies. And here's why.
I covered up the other bits because spoiling them outside a Spiderman thread would be impolite.
I drove for about 10 straight hours today with 1 restroom/lunch break. I've seen every ecosystem and weather pattern physically possible in California in one day. I went from rainy city, to sunny beaches and hills, to rainy hills and orchards, to rainy desert, to snowing mountains, back to rainy city. It's been...a day.
This isn't on Facebook because I don't want to make my friend think that she made me go through a lot just for her and I don't want her to feel bad. None of my friends are aware of this place which is why I can post here.