The Not Really So Amazing Spiderman
The actors are better this time around, that's for sure, and by that I mean the acting as well. Emma Stone's Gwen Stacy is leaps and bounds better than Kirsten Dunst's vapid attempt at Mary Jane (and this time you understand why Peter Parker likes her, instead of hating him for devoting himself, as nerds often do, to the empty personality-non entity popular girl). The tone is just better all around, no denying it. The cast works.
What doesn't work is...everything else. The cast is wasted on a poorly told retelling. It's a reboot...and a reboot that doesn't really try to do anything new or tell a story on film that the Raimi Spiderman movies didn't. Besides a few scenes and instances that are obviously different, the formula is all there. You spend like an hour of screentime with geeky Peter Parker before he is Spiderman and then he becomes Spiderman and yadda yadda yadda, you've seen it already. The first Raimi movie comes to mind often here, as all the plotpoints are carried out, again. Four movies with Peter Parker and you know...I just don't like the guy anymore. There was something likeable and relatable to the comic character when I read them as a kid and young teen, because he was me. But now I'm watching actors who are my age (almost thirty) playing highschool kids and god do I hate their faces and their stupid problems. I don't care. The pressure is on this new era of Marvel movies to prove that Marvel can be more than escapism for self-absorbed teenagers. Iron Man and the recent Avengers movie got it right, but Spiderman is still floundering.
I did like the Lizard, however, and was probably the key point of the last half of the movie that kept my interest. A suggestion for the next Spiderman movie; don't insist on making everybody cry or look as if they are on the verge of crying. And redo Venom.
Brave
Gorgeously animated, as I expect of Pixar (I couldn't take my eyes off her fiery red hair). The story and characters themselves are...perhaps weak for for the studio's standards, though that's not really the way I want to say it. The movie is just missing something and I can't put my finger on it. Still, I enjoyed it better than A Bug's Life and the Car, but it says a lot when I remember the short film they place before the feature film more than major plot points from the main event. Still, the rich attention to what appears on screen and the commitment to giving animated films clout as real movies and not just kids stuff is what Pixer continues to do and Brave is no different.