Movies
This film felt rather empty to me. Gordon-Levitt is a fine actor, but I had a little trouble with his character. Deschanel seemed to be struggling with the same thing. The chemistry between the two felt lacking and whenever their romance did seem to ignite, the script quickly froze things down again. The postcard presentation was nice though, and there were some interesting visual touches scattered throughout the film. But there are also quite few scenes where it's just a little indie-lazy. I also grew a little tired of all the name-dropping and referencing, but that's probably because I didn't care for any of them. On the one hand, this film tried to be fun and breezy, but at the same time it also tried to be quite serious and deep. Both sides don't go very well together and mostly just work against each other. It was a decent watch, but it's also one of those films where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.Read all
While I've seen pretty much all the Marvel stuff there is to see, I simply don't care enough about the material to keep track of any coherence between the films. Amazing Spider-Man 2 was one of the few films I've missed and I'm guessing it's probably on some alternative timeline, but in the end that hardly mattered. From all the Marvel franchises, Spider-Man is probably my least favorite. After having seen this film, I remember why. The films are extremely pulpy, the melodrama is preposterous and the action is bland. Marc Webb is a horrible director who fails to bring any joy or spark into his films, which really shouldn't be that hard with the material at hand. Garfield is a terrible Spider-Man, Stone is a complete miscast and Foxx is one of the worst villains I've seen. The scenes that are supposed to be fun are drab, the scenes that are supposed to be serious are cheesy and the action scenes look like outdated video game CG (which they pretty much are). Let's hope that in 20 years time we can all have a good laugh at the popularity of these films.Read all