Kraven The Hunter

Join Kraven’s 
Hew Ground

Kraven The Hunter
UK/Iceland/Canada/USA 2024
Directed by J.C. Chandor
Columbia UK Blu Ray

Warning: This one has all the spoilers.

I think the suits in Hollywood are having trouble scratching their heads and wondering why their movie version of Kraven The Hunter failed. Well, pandemic aside, I saw pretty much every Marvel movie at the cinema whether I wanted to or not because I knew I’d really need to get a review of it up on my blog... and even I didn’t manage to catch this movie at the cinema. And the answer to why it failed at the box office is three fold and simple... and I say this because, now I’ve finally caught up to it (authenticity to the characters aside) it’s actually a pretty good movie. 

Okay, this movie failed because: Firstly it was following on from two other Columbia branded Marvel movies in the same year, the not well received Madame Web (reviewed here) and the okay but worst in the series Venom - The Last Dance (reviewed here)... which didn’t do it much favours, they should have maybe left an eight month gap between films. Secondly, the trailers for this thing looked terrible and, I’m pretty sure people my age, who remember the character from the 1960s and 70s, were a little baffled as to how a major villain from The Amazing Spider-Man comic was a) in a movie without Spider-Man and b) being portrayed as some kind of anti-hero rather than the bad guy he always was... and perhaps the comic character changed in the 90s or after but, yeah, this is not the Kraven I know (the Kraven I knew best was from the time when he joined The Sinister Six and also from the model kit I had as a kid, of Spider-Man perched on a wooden bannister, webbing a fallen Kraven on the floor). 

And even then, I would still have been up for catching this thing at the cinema and, I certainly planned to... but it was released mid-December 2024 and, I’m sorry, studio bosses need to realise that in the lead up to Christmas, when people are still buying and wrapping presents, not to mention writing and sending cards... and in the downtime just after when people are seeing friends and family... nope, people are not going to be interested in trying to plan their life around the stupidly inappropriate times these things are being shown at in the cinema. So, yeah, I believe that’s why this film failed and made such a loss for the company. 

Which is a shame because, as I said, it’s not a bad movie.

The film starts off  really strongly with Kraven (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) infiltrating a maximum security prison in order to kill the leader of a drugs/weapons cartel. After escaping we flash back to his childhood, with his brother and his dad (played by Russell Crowe) where we get his origin... which is contentious. In the comics he was just a relatively strong guy who was an expert hunter (which is why J. Jonah Jameson originally hired him to hunt Spider-Man) but, in this version of the story he’s given a potion to heal his wounds while simultaneously having the blood of a lion enter his system... all of which brings him back to life and gives him superhuman powers (oh, right, Marvel science then). Again, maybe this origin was retrofitted into the comics at some point but, if it was, I’m unaware of it. 

And then he becomes a kind of assassin who goes around taking out all the bad guys and, annually, checking in on his brother whom he deserted when they were kids. And then, as a result of him killing the guy at the start of the film, the global gangs are in a power struggle which also includes Kraven’s gang boss dad and results in his brother getting kidnapped.

And... it’s mostly pretty good. I’m saying that again because I’m going to talk about the bad stuff now and I don’t really want it to overshadow the positive stuff.

The thing is, there’s a woman who is Kraven’s pilot and we only see her from behind near the start of the movie and then, later, she’s referenced as she gives his leading lady, Calypso (played by Ariana DeBose) a lift to the jungle to meet up with him. So she’s obviously being kept in the shadows so she can be revealed as somebody important from the Marvel universe later in the movie... but that doesn’t happen. She just vanishes from the movie with no more mention of her (and we never get to see her face properly). So... I know this film had a somewhat troubled production and had to have some reshoots so, I’m wondering now if this big reveal was maybe cut to save for a later, never to be made sequel?

Secondly, the main villain here is The Rhino... another Spider-Man villain in a movie where the web head is nowhere to be seen. Okay, in the comics this was just a big guy in a Rhino onesy and, that would have suited me fine. Here, he’s just someone who can transform himself into a were-rhino when he taps into certain drugs. It all looks pretty awful guys. 

Thirdly... and I saw this coming a mile off because his talent for voice mimicry is highlighted throughout the movie.... Kraven’s brother becomes a third Spider-Man villain, The Chameleon, at the end of the film. And he does it by, in a completely dumbfounding and unexplained fashion, transforming into different people when required. I mean, literally morphing into them at will. What nonsense! In the comics he was a guy with a metal head who would slip realistic, latex masks over his noggin and mimic their voices to become them. Which sounds bad, I know but, heck, Tom Cruise and co have been doing that in nearly every Mission Impossible movie made so, yeah, they could have gotten away with it here too. And also, because it’s obviously planned for a potential sequel (again, this looks like it will never happen) then it’s just treated as a throwaway scene too... it doesn’t really work, in all honesty. 

And that’s me pretty much done with Kraven The Hunter. An actually pretty good film, despite those negatives and, I have to say I had a pretty good time with most of it. If you are a fan of action movies with a fair amount of violence and a little bit of goriness, then it’s worth giving a go. But I don’t think the franchise is going anywhere after this one, alas. 

Madame Web

Uncle Ben’s
Responsibility

Madame Web
Directed by S.J. Clarkson
USA/Canada
2024 Sony/Columbia
UK Cinema Print

Warning: Some spoilers, if you care enough.

Hmm... okay, Madame Web is the first of three Sony films released this year as part of their extended Spider-Man universe. You would think that now they have absconded again with the rights to the character, that they would, at least, feature Spider-Man in these three stories but... oh no. Or rather, actually, yes kinda in this one but... okay I’ll get to that in a minute. The film stars Dakota Johnson as the titular character (although she’s never once referred to as that in the film... which makes total sense when you see the movie) and, due to shenanigans involving her birth and special powers she doesn’t realise she had (like Diana in the first Wonder Woman movie), she is trying to protect three ‘teenage’ girls from the movie’s main villain, who sees future versions of them killing him at some unspecified point. When I say teenage... Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor and Sydney Sweeney are all in their twenties, the latter only a few ears away from 30 but, still, it’s Hollywoodland and they’re all supposed to be between about 16-18, it seems to me.

Anyhow... the movie itself has got some of the worst reviews (bearing in mind it wasn’t even screened for critics) I’ve heard for a Marvel related movie but, I have to say, though it’s inferior to almost any of the MCU branded Marvel films, it’s actually not the disaster that people are reporting it to be. Saying that though, I can totally see why it has got that reaction because the structure of the movie promises way more than it gives in terms of what the content of the film is actually going to be... the people making this weren’t that smart not to realise what they did, I think.

So, yeah, Johnson’s character is someone who gets brief glimpses of the very near future, like a very strong deja vu, so she can change things just before they are supposed to happen. So the director will sometimes use a big sound (like a champagne cork being pulled) or sometimes, quite cleverly, a distinctive camera movement, to usher in a replay of the events as they are about to repeat. And although it’s an obvious concoction the first time she does it, it is done pretty well throughout and the visual and audio shorthand built on those key aspects does the job very well.

You also have a couple of good performances, especially Sydney Sweeney (who was so brilliant in last year’s Reality, reviewed here), who really does well with facial expressions and so on to make her ‘bizarrely teen’ teenager come to life in quite sophisticated ways. However, although there are some good and likeable performances here, the structure of the film undermines a lot of the work being done.

Here’s the thing, all the stuff in the trailers where the three girls are in costume and using their spider powers are... just seen as brief, visions of the future in the heads of both the title character and the villain. So there are maybe three brief moments, maybe totalling less than a minute and a half, where you see the girls in costume, at some undetermined future date. In fact, whatever superpowers the three ‘teens’ do acquire... they don’t get them in this movie. It’s for some ‘future’ movie which, I’m guessing, might not even get made... and with Dakota Johnson jokingly downplaying the movie when she’s supposed to be promoting it, I’m guessing the four leads would have to be locked into contracts before they return to those characters. Which may well be the case actually but, I’m guessing this movie won’t be doing the numbers enough to make the next film worth making. This is obviously, like the up and coming Venom 3 and Kraven The Hunter movies, supposed to be leading to the Sinister Six, which started happening (again, it’s Sony’s second lead in after the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies) in Morbius (reviewed here)... when Morbius and Michael Keaton’s Vulture character met at the post-credits on that film. But, if the other two perform badly (I suspect Venom will do well but I can’t see the new Kraven doing much better than Morbius), then that may still not happen.

To that end though, there are some really bizarre references to the Spider-Man universe in this film... asides from the Spider powered natives in the Amazon plus the main villain all dressing pretty similarly to Spider-Man. The thing is, though, Sony are making references and shouting them out while simultaneously keeping a lid on things a little with their linking materials. If you are a Spider-Man fan and are not distracted by the visuals, you’ll ‘get’ who a couple of the characters are supposed to be... and one of them is teased but not named, even though fans will know exactly who he is.

The main action of the movie takes place in 2003 and I couldn’t figure out why they did this. Until Dakota Johnson’s character Cassie, a paramedic, calls her partner by name. He’s... drum roll... Ben Parker. Yeah, that’s right... future Uncle Ben. And the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ line, which has been a core Spider-Man ingredient since his first comic book appearance in 1962, is dangled about like crazy in slightly reworded terms. And, that’s not all... Ben’s sister is pregnant and the girls are trying to protect her so she can give birth at the end of the movie. Casual viewers won’t twig it because he’s not named (despite an earlier ‘guess the name of the baby’ scene calling attention to it in the most obvious manner) but by the end of the film she gives birth to Peter Parker... aka Spider-Man. I guess the actor who was/is supposed to be playing that role in ‘films to come’ for Sony is not yet decided, is my guess. Or... you know... not yet given a big enough pay hike to return to that role.

But the biggest problem with the film, as I eluded to earlier, is the fact that it keeps telegraphing the gals suiting up and being super heroes... and so this is what the audience is expecting to happen at some point in the movie. So many people may not be aware that the climactic action scene is exactly that until it's over, I’m guessing, because they are waiting for the superhero element to come into play. It never does and that’s why I suspect we’ve had the huge negative reviews on this. It’s just an overly complicated set up for a film to come (with a poor ending, it has to be said). But, like I said, it’s not a terrible movie... just an unsatisfying one so, yeah, I can totally understand why it’s getting the word-of-mouth that it has. Madame Web is not a crowd pleaser but it’s also not as bad as, say, Morbius was so... there’s that. I had an okay time with it... I’d probably watch it again. Just not anytime soon. Maybe worth watching to see how it locks into the next few Sony Spider-movies perhaps but, there’s absolutely no post-credits scene on this one so, something tells me that rug may have already been pulled.

The Marvels Trilogy

Heroes In A Half Sheldon

Marvels
by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - 5 issues 1994

Marvels - Eye Of The Camera
by Kurt Busiek, Roger Stern and Jay Anacleto  6 issues 2009 - 2010

Marvels Epilogue
by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross - 1 issue 2019

I can’t remember why I’d stopped reading comics for a while by the time I was studying for my degree but I do remember when I got back into them. It would have been around 1994 and I was off work for a long time with a condition known as Repetitive Strain Injury (or RSI for short). Personally I didn’t really believe in such things until I woke up one day and realised I was unable to move my arms without having searing pain. It took an awful long time to finally get them moving again but, during that time, holding a paperback book open to kill the time while you were supposed to be recuperating was nigh on impossible. Comics, on the other hand, were floppy and almost weightless in comparison so, it wasn’t long before I started back on those again for a fair amount of time. I remember what made me give up comics the second time around but... that’s another story.

So by this time I had already read the ‘new classics’ of the genre back when they first came out... stuff like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, Maus etc. However, there was one brand new classic (and we all knew it would be considered as such) which, handily, coincided with my recuperation and that was Marvels. I remember buying my first issue... they were fully painted artworks, just as you might have found in issues of Blood - A Tale, Epic Magazine or Heavy Metal... but the covers had acetate overlays for the typography and so on because they wanted to keep these so you could see the front cover unhindered by all that stuff if you so desired. They looked fantastic and, as it happened, Kurt Busiek’s writing matched the superb art by Alex Ross in every way possible. It was one of those dream comics where everything seemed to synch up perfectly.

There were four issues plus a kind of prologue zero issue which was a teaser that detailed the creation of the original Human Torch in 1939 from his point of view, as a lead in to the actual four part story told from the vantage point of photographer Phil Sheldon. And what it actually was... was a potted history of the Marvel Universe from its beginnings in 1939, right up to the notorious Death Of Gwen Stacy story arc in 1973. The heroes themselves were not the focus of the book... that is to say, they were but they were only seen on the periphery of famous events in their fictional lives as Sheldon takes his pictures and, over a lifetime career, writes a photo journalist book on these ‘Marvels’.

It was a moving comic book and detailed Sheldon’s own personal tragedies and celebrations but always in the context of the bigger picture... a picture that the audience were sometimes much more aware of than a lot of the actual characters, which is something Busiek did really well in his writing. For instance, Sheldon hated a photographer called Peter Parker because he was always selling pictures to J. Jonah Jameson to make Spider-Man look bad. So, yeah, the irony of a lot of the situations is also something which is used to add drama and sometimes suspense to the plot of the comic. There’s also a big exploration of the themes of mutants and how the human race perceives them which makes for a lot of drama.

Lovely references and characters are weaved into the fiction... as in the zero issue which had Professor Horton working on the Human Torch in a laboratory filled with Kenneth Strickfaden style props to bring parallels to Universal’s 1931 version of Frankenstein. And wonderful little cameos who would grow to be slightly bigger characters in future chapters... not to mention in the lives of the Marvels, such as the young reporter friend of Sheldon’s in 1939 who some day wants to run the Daily Bugle. No ‘Marvel No Prize’ for figuring out who that is.

And there are also a lot of non-Marvel characters and references in the book, for those eagle eyed among the readers who are paying attention to just how far the artwork can stray into protected copyright area. Some of it is more apparent on this second read through. For example I always spotted a sailor who looks the dead spit of a real life Popeye and, similarly, the young newsboy Billy Batson (aka SHAZAM... The Original Captain Marvel). It took me until this second go around, though, to recognise Clark Kent and Lois Lane in the various press meetings and events in the first issue. And how I missed Doc Savage I’ll never know (or maybe I didn’t and just forgot about it in the intervening decades).  It’s also nice to spot wedding guests like The Beatles at the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm.

Okay, so what I didn’t know until just recently is that there have been a couple of sequels to the original classic. Both written by Kurt Busiek (and I’m not getting into his alternate universe sideswipe look Ruins here... that will be for a different review) but with the first sequel, Marvels - Eye Of The Camera, being co-written by Roger Stern and artworked, in a similar fashion, by Jay Anacleto.

To be honest, Eye Of The Camera is pretty much a retread of the same story and style. Starting at a point in one of the earlier comics, the first issue catches up to itself later on and carries on from where the previous series ended... after Phil Sheldon’s ‘retirement.’ Although he still does some freelance stuff to help secure his kids’ future, this is about him rushing to get a follow up book to his best selling 'Marvels' finished, once his cynicism is abated after he is rescued from a mugging by Spider-Man. The reason he’s rushing is.... well lets say that fairly early in the book he finds he has cancer and starts hitting the chemo while trying to get the work done in spite of it. The real drama from this one comes when you try and figure out which ways Phil could possibly survive what’s happening to him and the skill of the writer as he presents a small possible hope for the character before... no, you need to read this yourself. The art and writing in this are fine but it seemed, despite its dramatic impact at the end, somewhat ‘less’ in many ways than its predecessor. In other words... Marvels was a classic. Marvels - Eye Of The Camera... isn’t.

And so we come to the latest and, very recent Marvels - Epilogue. It’s very skimpy on page count and presents a little mini chapter from a time which is set somewhere simultaneous to the events in Issue 2 of Marvels - Eye Of The Camera, apparently. There are some classic comic book history homages, once more, painted by Ross but, ultimately, this doesn’t seem like any kind of a prologue to me... and I wouldn’t read it as such. This one slips quietly into the overall scheme of things but I didn’t get much of an emotional hit from this one at all, alas. Given the themes of the previous books about the way humanity treats the special saviors that are the ‘Marvels’ of the titles, this one seems fairly slight and, frankly, not an essential read. I mean, sure, it’s nice to look at... it just doesn’t really have any substance and not much more to add, in terms of commenting about the characters and their drama within the bigger picture. We’ve already seen that story play out in full so it kinda diminishes the impact here. This one almost seems like a pure exercise in grabbing money from the memory of the original, I’m sad to say.

So in conclusion, the original Marvels is well worth anyone’s time to read. It’s one of the greats and if you are into Marvel and the history of the characters, then you will find this an essential purchase. I will be reviewing Marvels Companion which reprints the various painted Marvel comics which were influenced by the look and writing style of Marvels in a forthcoming review (and that will include Phil Sheldon’s alternate timeline as told in the aforementioned Ruins). Until then... ‘nuff said.

Spider-Man - Far From Home

Get Parker

Spider-Man - Far From Home
USA 2019 Directed by Jon Watts
UK cinema release print

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Well, Spider-Man - Far From Home is an okay follow up to the various Tom Holland starring Spider-Man movies of recent years. It’s not without its problems though and while various critics have claimed that this film is the first of what many people are calling ‘superhero fatigue’ at the box office... I think we have a while to go before that sets in yet. I think the somewhat muted response to this film is possibly because of the stealth approach to the title character but I’ll get onto that in a minute.

Of the superhero movies released by Marvel so far this year, I’d say this runs second place behind X-Men - Dark Phoenix (reviewed here) but way in front of the ‘so-so but not terrible’ Captain Marvel (reviewed here) and the terribly disappointing Avengers - Endgame (reviewed here)... so I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that, for this year at least, DC wins the best superhero movie prize with their inappropriately unfaithful (to the original comics) but immensely fun SHAZAM! movie (which I reviewed here).

So... the new Spider-Man has a lot of the stuff which worked from Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed by me here) tossed in with some excellent performances from Tom Holland as Peter Parker, Jacob Batalon as Ned Leeds and the truly wonderful Zendaya as MJ. There are a lot of old Spider-Man character references in these movies but they’re so changed from the versions of them found in the original source material that, once again, characters are given the names of their comic counterparts only and have nothing of the look and feel of them. It’s a shame but it kinda works if you can forget these were comic book characters.

It looks spectacular but it kinda drags a lot, to be honest and I think the real problem with this for me is that you never really get to see Spider-Man in one of his regular costumes until near the end of the movie. He’s either winging it with a stolen half mask or wearing a ridiculous ‘Night Monkey’ costume and none of it really gives you that Spider-Man vibe that fans of the character may want. This is not to say there’s not a lot of action but it just doesn’t feel like anything great and I also think the lack of human, villanous henchmen during the fight scenes, instead of fighting big monsters which, anyone who knows who Mysterio is from the comics anyway, will know are just smoke and mirrors, just takes things away from having any stake in the characters.

Some good stuff though... Jake Gyllenhaal is great as Mysterio and when you see him finally from a different viewpoint, he switches into Spidey nemesis mode subtly and it’s very well played. Also, bringing back Happy played by Jon Favreau and having him dating Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May is great. Samuel L. Jackson and Cobie Smulders are back too and they do some nice stuff between them.

The main meat of the story though, for my money, is the blossoming relationship between Petey and MJ, which really is what this film is all about as far as I’m concerned, along with MJ ‘discovering’ Peter’s secret identity. Alas, once more this doesn’t happen in the same way as the comics, where it turns out that Mary Jane knew he was Spider-Man even before they’d first met... but they at least let MJ figure it out for herself here so, that’s kind of cool.

Now then, there are two post credits scenes here and, unusually for a Marvel Cinematic Universe film, they’re both kinda important in terms of story beats. The first one sees a famous Spider-Man character from a previous version of the franchise (the Sam Raimi series of films) return. Interestingly, since the person playing this character was so good doing it before, they’ve got the same actor back from that earlier franchise. Now, I did kinda thought this was going to happen with the same actor actually... but I thought they might take another couple of films to do it so everybody could forget this person was in it before. Nope, they’ve really gone for it here although, it has to be said, the revelations of this mid-credits cameo may mean that he really can’t be in it a lot in future movies (although he’ll have to be in the next one, for sure). Also, they cut out a nicely done scene which was shown in the trailer for this movie and, with the consequences implied by this first post-credits scene on the future direction of the franchise, it would have made a lot of sense to keep it.

The second and final post credits scene is also something of an eye opener although, it has to be said, I was a little disappointed in the direction Marvel chose to take this. All I’ll say about this one is... you really need to have seen Captain Marvel to really understand what’s going on here.

And... that’s me more or less done on Spider-Man - Far From Home, I think. It’s an okay movie with a nice score by Michael Giacchino which does ‘more of the same’ as the previous Spiderman - Homecoming although, sadly it doesn’t use the old cartoon series music this time around. There are some cleverly thought out, retrofitting link-ins with the various sub-villains here too, with flashbacks to previous MCU movies like Iron Man and Captain America - Civil War. Ultimately, though, this is not enough to elevate it to being a ‘great’ superhero movie... it’s just a nice addition which has its problems but I suspect it will still do some box office (although possibly not as much on repeat performance as the company might be expecting from it... I certainly have no desire to rush back and see it again). I do look forward to seeing how they go about dealing with the challenge they’ve set themselves here in any sequel, though but... I also feel like Marvel really need to raise their game to continue with the unprecedented box office dominance which they’ve managed to hold for over ten years now. Great writing would surely fix this issue. This movie feels like the franchise is getting a little lethargic and, while I had fun, I was certainly underwhelmed too. It’s still worth a watch though... especially if you’re not too hung up on the comic book versions of the characters who are, mostly, not in evidence here.

The Hollywood Meme

Meme Me Up, Scotty

The Hollywood Meme -
Transnational Adaptations 
In World Cinema
by Iain Robert Smith
Edinburgh University Press ISBN: 9781474441339

This is, once again, another book that caught my eye drifting past in my Twitter timeline and I was lucky enough to be given a copy for my birthday earlier in the year. Now, it would be true to say I had a few problems with The Hollywood Meme - Transnational Adaptations In World Cinema, the first being when I finally cracked it open to read in the Jury Lounge while on Jury Service and finding that, although the cover was correct, an entirely different book had been printed and bound inside - namely Creative Involution  - Bergson, Beckett, Deleuze by S. E. Gontarski. Luckily, Amazon were more than happy to change it for me which they did, fairly promptly. So well done to their customer service team for that one.

Now the book focuses on the phenomenon of the meme as a snippet of an idea bringing together a common visual image, for example, which is then spread around such cavernous places as the internet and changed in ways which take the core meaning or notion but re-contextualises it to fit something else... if my understanding of that creative process is correct. So what Smith does here is use the notion of meme as a metaphor for the specific elements of Hollywood product and how different cultures utilise certain things from these to fit in with a specific market place and to bring more recognition and box office gain to the equation. And he does this using a few of the usual suspects by focusing on three large chapters, one each, about the Turkish, Philippines and Indian cinema at specific periods in their respective history (again, different periods) which best demonstrate what he refers to as The Hollywood Meme in evidence at the times selected to best highlight these points.

And he starts off by making a very good point about American product cannibalistically turning in on itself to reconstitute its own successful ideas and therefore reap greater profits from it. In this case, in his introduction, he starts off talking about the universal reaction that Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens was a rip off of the original, first Star Wars movie. Of course, this didn’t stop the film’s key target audience (myself included) from going to back to it for multiple repeat viewings and it’s certainly true, of course, that the very first Star Wars film itself was a potpourri of famous creative influences which owed a debt to various forms of cinema (not to mention Joseph Campbell’s writings) which A New Hope (as it was later retitled) was less than subtle with when it presented various texts combined and regurgitated back in 1977.

He is also keen to point out that the street goes two ways, as it were, in the way that various countries and cultures borrow and exchange ideas, allowing us to distill down from bits of each other’s successes within the context of our own cultural backdrop, so to speak. He makes the point that Hollywood comprises only 6% of global film production so, perhaps its reach and dominance of so much of international culture is a bit of a puzzle. Actually, in the early pages of the book I was just waiting for him to get around to pointing out Wim Wenders famous quote from his 1976 film Kings Of The Road and, sure enough, within a couple more pages he’d gotten around to that  “The Yanks have colonised our subconscious” dialogue so, yeah, it’s still a useful quotation to use as a metaphor, I guess.

He also goes onto talk about The Berne Convention For The Protection Of Literary And Artistic Works set up in France in 1886, at the behest of writers such as Victor Hugo and how this was pretty much ignored by the various people making movies at these key times of Turkish, Philippine and India.

Here’s my big problem with the book though... it’s way too academic. And when I say that I mean that the levels and denseness of the academic speak and technique in which the book is written is far more alienating and able to render vasts swards of text almost incomprehensible in the worst way. To myself, at least. I still can’t for instance, work out just what the objective of Mr. Smith’s new model for the study of transnational cinema is... even when he tries to sum everything up in the end. As I’ve said elsewhere (in a review of a book which I’ve so far been too cowardly to publish here for fear of hurting an author’s feelings), I really hate the academic approach of ‘method, text, conclusion’ as I find it a complete waste of everybody’s time but this is exactly the mode of discourse that the writer has chosen to utilise his ideas with here. The first two great chunks of text discuss exactly what he is trying to write about and prove and then, before we get to a similarly redundant conclusion chapter, the book is split up into three main chapters which actually are very interesting when you can cut to the chase, namely Popular Turkish Cinema from 1970 to 1982, Popular Philippines Cinema from 1979 to 1994 and Popular Indian Cinema from 1998 to 2010 (specifically their Bollywood strand of national cinema).

Then, at the start of each chapter he does exactly the same thing... starting off each section with a lengthy summary of what he is going to write about and then following up, at the end of each chapter, with another summary of what he’s just written about. And I suspect, with the overwhelming academic speak that some parts of this text uses, I didn’t always understand all of the points he was trying to make. Especially when the specific samples he picks... of which he chooses three to four films for each chapter to briefly write about... are all examples which are somewhat different in intent to each other and which all use slightly different modus operandi in their respective approaches to the ‘Hollywood Meme’ part of their make-up.

But, like I said, there is some ‘gold in them thar hills’ if you can penetrate the slightly alienating writing style found in many passages and he helpfully includes, near the start of each chapter, a kind of precis of each of these national industries at the period he is writing about and how they came to be at that place within a historical context. He also talks about the lack of enthusiasm or recognition of copyright laws in each respective country as an indication of the relative ease in which films like the famous yesilcam 3 Dev Adam aka Santo And Captain America VS Spider-Man are made.

So, in addition to introducing me to the background behind the ‘yesilcam’ film and the term ‘Turkification’, he explains why Turkish cinema was more Westernised and populist in its execution as opposed to the often more artistically different film produce of other countries. He also demonstrates how many of the films from Turkey and the Philippines are actually not utilising the specific characters from the source material... Batman, Robin, Superman, Captain America, Spider-man etc... but merely using the visual iconography of those famous characters to get people into the cinemas. So the only traits that the villanous Spider-man of 3 Dev Adam shares with his comic book counterpart is, for example, just the costume and the name. And often the text of the movie will point out that the characters are only borrowing these trappings due to a plot point, rather than actually being the same characters (which is kinda interesting, actually). Again, he points out that in Turkish Star Wars, while footage and music from various Hollywood products are spliced in (visually, from Star Wars) the plot and characters are different to the original Lucasfilm classic.

He goes on to look at Turkish Star Trek (this is one of the many films highlighted in this book where I’ve had a ‘DVD’ waiting in the piles to watch for years without getting around to looking at the thing) and how it’s a continuation (indeed conclusion) of a long series of films about a Turkish comedy character and how he is injected into a feature length remake of the early Star Trek episode The Man Trap (the salt vampire one... I believe it was actually the first in the series to air when the show was first transmitted, with the second pilot film following a week later) plus famous scenes from other Star Trek episodes and how this character is used to highlight, metaphorically on screen, the exchange between Turkish and US culture.

He points out, in another film I’ve still yet to get around to watching, Seytan, which is a Turkish remake of The Exorcist, how the Catholic tropes which make the film quite terrifying for audiences of a certain religious persuasion, have been replaced by Islamic ones. So, for example, the infamous, forced crucifix masturbation scene in The Exorcist is replaced with a Jinn-headed knife masturbation scene in Seytan.

His chapter on Philippines is more of the same but he points out that their cinema is a more postmodern one in terms of its borrowings from American culture, with several sources and genres spliced in so the movies can appeal to a wide range of countries in export. So, for example, Dynamite Johnson is a sequel to both The Bionic Boy and Cleopatra Wong (the Philippines answer to Cleopatra Jones). He also looks at the way their own popular characters such as the comic strip heroine Darna, who is already a little like Wonder Woman, is further enhanced to resemble the US heroine in the long series of films about her, even down to giving Darna a similar costume, tiara and bracelets that ward off the bullets of her enemies.

In the Bollywood chapter, however, Smith is quick to point out that the visual iconography of Hollywood so prevalent in the popular cinema of the Turkish and Philippine cinema of these respective time periods, is absent completely in the popular cinema of India. Instead, it is the characters and plots, scenes and shots which are transplanted wholesale... after being ‘Indianised’ with national traits like the addition of musical sequences... and this gives various Hollywood ‘classics’ the chance to flourish in a national market where penetration of Hollywood product is very low, especially in comparison with most other countries. So a Bollywood remake of Christopher Nolan’s Memento, for example, has the narrative unfolding in the correct order but also has a parallel flashback story added and it’s in that romantic back story that the traditional Bollywood musical sequences are inserted.

In his concluding chapter, where the author also tells us what it is he’s just written about, he says some interesting things about the memes taken by these countries being 'memed' themselves and altered to produce a new phoenix form the ashes of what’s gone before... especially in regards to the web. So, for example, a serialised version of 3 Dev Adam has been re-subtitled with a totally different story and dialogue, with much the same attitude that Woody Allen ended up pulling together What’s Up Tiger Lily? from the ashes of the Japanese film Key Of Keys and turning it into something funny with the addition of new dubbing.

It was in this final chapter that the writer did really go down in my estimation, it has to be said, by using the phrase ‘an history’ instead of the totally correct ‘a history’... it’s a hard ‘H’ people! Other than that though... and the somewhat tiring use of academic syntax to render what should be easily understood ideas into fairly less penetrable ones... I’d have to say that The Hollywood Meme - Transnational Adaptations In World Cinema is actually a kind of interesting book and if you’re one of those few people in this ‘bootleg DVD, internet ironic’ world who has somehow not heard about a lot of these manifestations of national cinema, then you might want to give this book a try. If nothing else, it will open your eyes to what’s around for the more jaded of cineastes to whet their appetites on. This probably won’t end up being my favourite book on the subject but, until something better comes along, it’s definitely worth a look.

Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse

Morales Dilemma

Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse
2018 USA
Directed by Bob Persichetti,
Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman
UK cinema release print.

After a sequence from this movie played by way of a second post-credits scene in Venom (reviewed here) I was really not that into bothering to go see Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse at my local cinema. After all, this film looked from the trailers like it was going to be focusing on the Miles Morales version of the character, with Peter Parker as a secondary character and, I have to say that, for the most part (with a few minor exceptions) I have pretty much only ever read the first ten years or so of Spider-Man’s comic book adventures, starting from his first appearance in an issue of Amazing Fantasy (which is nicely parodied as an alternatively titled comic book in the version of reality in which this movie is set). So I have absolutely no idea who Miles Morales is.

Two things changed my mind. One being that the score for this one has been composed by one of my favourite ‘new’ composers Daniel Pemberton and, frankly, I expect what he does to be exceptional (this movie score is certainly that).

The other reason I finally decided to give this one a go is that the film has been getting some exceptional word of mouth on Twitter, with some people citing it as their favourite movie of the year... and I didn’t want to get left out. So I went and saw the thing and... yeah... I didn’t regret it.

This film manages to do a lot of cool things and get most of everything it juggles just about right. It has many separate different versions of Spider-Man from multiple dimensions that have crossed over... including two versions of Peter Parker (one of them played by Chris Pine), Spider-Gwen (the spider powered version of Gwen Stacy), Spider-Man Noir (a black and white one from the 1930s, played here by Nicolas Cage), a strange manga/anime based looking version called SP//dr (consisting of a girl, a robot and a spider) and everyone’s favourite Spider-Pig, Peter Porker - The Spectacular Spider-Ham... there’s even a Spider-Man 2099 cameo too but... yeah, I won’t say too much about that. And, of course, Miles Morales, whose story we follow in a little more detail than the others although we get some incredible back story flashbacks for all the other characters by way of a running gag which, frankly, really works well.

As you can tell from the diverse character cast consisting of different tonal styles, the film is trying to juggle a lot of balls in the air as it switches from moving drama to broad humour and all the things in between at a fair pace. The amazing thing, though... perhaps even more amazing than The Amazing Spider-Man... is that it manages to tell a story of a team of Spider-Heroes working together in all these different styles while being as post-modern as can be and with a fairly quirky, bordering on very surreal, animation style and it doesn’t at any point lose you and, frankly, it all meshes together very well. Which seems to me to be very against the odds.

It’s fast, it’s colourful and there are some really great compositions as several source references often fight for space in the frame... this is an incredibly detailed movie and I know I’ll notice a lot more when I catch up to this one again. There’s quite a lot of the syntax of comics throughout history used, all colliding with different styles and a wonderful use of typography all clamouring for attention. In fact, even the blink and you’ll miss it typography hits have some nice jokes in certain parts which reference each other. There’s also some visual references to off-set litho print being off-register in a few cases (if I’m reading the intention of the filmmakers correctly... at first I thought there was something going wrong with the projection).

Another really great thing in this is that the non-stop cleverness never lets up and is with you right from the start. Since the nature of the film is about several universes colliding and constantly going out of phase in terms of the characters when they’re in Miles’ version of the universe, even the Columbia Pictures logo and the Marvel logo at the start of the picture are doing some dazzling things (including a nice little shout out to Cat Ballou, of all things). The logos are even followed by a nice big ‘Approved By The Comics Code Authority’ stamp... which should have a lot of people my age tripping down memory lane (are those things still on modern comics?

As you would expect, there are lots of metatextual references to various things in the Spider-Man comics and also, from very early on, quite a few references to the various Spider-Man movies over the years... but there’s also a lot of little jokes about other things making their way in there too (I loved the Shaun Of The Dead parody poster they kept flashing up in the background) and, of course, the usual nice cameo from the now departed Stan Lee (I believe it was the last ‘voice performance’ he recorded... which I suspect means we’re far from done with the cameos in the live action movies at the moment).

And, yeah, the glue which makes all this possible in terms of keeping it all together as one coherent experience, as far as I’m concerned anyway, is Daniel Pemberton’s wonderful score, which should be swinging it’s way on a shiny disc to my letterbox in a week or so, fingers crossed. I can’t wait to hear this thing as a stand alone listen.

So, all in all, glad I went to see Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse (the film with too many hyphens) to find out what all the fuss was about. One last thing before you rush to your nearest cinema, though. If you’re a fan of the old 1960s Spider-Man cartoon show, not to mention internet memes, then you’ll really want to wait until the end credits are over because... well, just watch it. You’ll see what I mean.

Venom

Venom Seed

Venom
2018 USA
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Very slight spoiler in here.

Well this was a bit of a surprise.

I saw the trailer to Venom and it looked awful. This was followed up with a lot of negative, bad word of mouth comments on Twitter on the first couple of days of its release. However, I wanted to keep abreast of things because the Fox Marvel Universe looks like it will be properly merging with the Disney owned Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) any time now and so there’s a possibility that the character could be crossing over into that world at some point, possibly with the same actors attached.

What can I say? I may be out of step with the zeitgeist again because I had a really good time with it. There are a few issues (not as many as you might think from people’s reactions) but overall it’s a pretty great Marvel movie and I hope they make good on the promise of the first of the two extended post credits scenes (so that’ll be the mid-end credits scene then) at some point. So hoping for some good box office on this one but, judging from people’s reactions, it might not get it.

I’m not that up on Venom as a character, to be honest. He’s only about 30 years old and I think I’ve only ever read the first ten or twelve years of Spider-Man in the comics. But this highlights one of the biggest problems of this movie right there, in relation to this source material and its pretence to be an adaptation of it because, although there are Spider-Man universe references in it, the primary one being that J. Jonah Jameson’s son, the astronaut, gets a few brief shots at the start of the movie and the other being mention of Eddie Brock’s New York problems (I’ll get to the final post-credits scene soon), this incarnation of Venom has nothing to do with Spider-Man at all which is odd here because... well okay here’s why.

Venom first appeared as an alien symbiont in a Spider -Man story called Homecoming... which is what the last solo(ish) Spider-Man movie was called, right? The story was part of a big Marvel event called Secret Wars in the comic, which featured all the Marvel characters battling each other on an alien world. It’s here where Spidey picked up the black, alien symbiotic costume and, many issues later, got rid of it when it became the villainous Venom and bonded with, among others, reporter Eddie Brock. Now, we saw some of this story already on screen when it was used, alas minus the Secret Wars part, for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. So I can half understand why they didn’t want to go down that route here and instead give him a new origin again (kind of, not really but I’m not going to condemn them for it) but we still have the problem that Venom still totally looks like Spider-Man.... because that’s who he first bonded with.

And that’s my biggest problem with the new movie. Venom bonds with Eddie Brock, played here quite comically by Tom Hardy who portrays him as a much more sympathetic character than I recall. And for the first twenty or so minutes after he bonds with Eddie, which in itself is a fair way into the movie... which is fine, it’s a slow burn... we don’t ever see him manifest as a full character and all the while I was thinking... oh, they’re doing this right. Soon he’ll see some footage or a picture of Spider-Man and that will justify him looking like the character. And that’s where they slipped up because, when Venom does manifest to Eddie and various others, he looks just like Spider-Man but with absolutely no justification for that. Which is what I was worried about when I first heard they were doing a stand alone Venom movie and, yeah, they really dropped the ball here.

Most everything else is great though. The movie takes time to build up the characters like Eddie, his former girlfriend Anne (played by Michelle Williams) and the movie’s main villain Carlton Drake (played really well by Riz Ahmed). And there’s even another symbiont (there’s a few actually but one other main one) which starts the movie as kind of a red herring because you assume it’s Venom but then it turns out... oh no it’s not. This character is useful in the early parts of the movie (and works much better then than in the end third of the film) because it allows the writers and director to play with the idea of the alien symbionts in almost a horror movie kind of way. This is something that’s further enhanced by Ludwig Göransson’s rather appropriate, almost cheesy riffs on a kind of 1950s style scary sci-fi approach to the scoring... which surprised me from this composer and is spot on for this. Well done to Sony for giving it a CD release at the end of next week. Much appreciated.

The musical style also changes when it needs to, especially when, somewhere in the last third or so of the movie, the tone shifts and it becomes an all out adventure Super Symbiont style action fest in the Mighty Marvel Manner (as they used to say in the comics). And this kind of works for the film too... it’s a fun watch with some nice, fast pacing and there’s even a brief appearance of a sexy Lady Venom at one point (or She-Venom as she was known in the comics, apparently). The point is, everyone is good and everything, more or less, follows through on story logic. I don’t know why people are saying it’s a mess and doesn’t make sense because, it clearly does... even if it does come off as a bit of a cross between the plotting of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (reviewed here) and Rampage (reviewed here) at certain points.

I have only two other problems with it.

One is the time continuity. At the start of the picture we have a rocket crashing on Earth and then Eddie Brock brought in to to do a puff piece interview with Carlton Drake as damage control on that event. Soon after, we have a caption that reads “Six months later” and Eddie is in a bar watching a news item. All well and good except the news announcer is talking about that same rocket crash which happened... one month ago. I appreciate that the timing relocated to a longer period makes more sense with what’s happened in the progression of the characters in the intervening months... but if you’re going to slap a caption on there then make sure the dubbing on the news cast synchs up with it. Mind you, it’s not as bad as the appalling time continuity error made at the start of Spider-Man Homecoming (reviewed here) with it’s proximity to the events of The Avengers (aka Avengers Assemble, reviewed here) so I think we can let these guys off the hook on this a little.

What really made no sense however, especially after a quite cool, extended mid end credits sequence, was an extended post-credits end sequence which is an action scene from the new Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse movie released in December... especially as it seems to have absolutely nothing to do with Venom or the rest of the film. So that was a bit strange but not especially damaging to the rest of the picture, I guess.

So what else can I say? Despite the unbelievably bad word of mouth the movie has been getting, I thought this one was a really fun ride and there are a lot worse things you could be seeing at your cinema at the moment. It’s not super great but it’s certainly not a dud and it’s also got a memorable cameo from Stan Lee near the end of the picture. So if you are one of those fans who are fond of the old phrase “Make Mine Marvel”, I think you’ll find Venom is at least worth a look. I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible

Ex Sales Sayer

Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir
by Stan Lee and Peter David and Colleen Doran
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4711-5259-7

Well this was a nice surprise present for Christmas... mainly because it wasn’t even a blip on my radar. I didn’t know it existed but I would have jumped on it myself, straight away, if I’d have known about it.  Subtitled ‘A Marvelous Memoir’, Amazing Fantastic Incredible tells the story of one of the giants of modern culture, the man behind so many of the fantastic characters that people have loved since their inception in the early 1960s... Stan Lee. And what’s so wonderful about this autobiography is that it’s done, as it really should always have destined to be, I think... in comic book form. A hardback graphic novel, if you want to get technical about it, although I would have loved it if this had been serialised monthly with cheaper looking covers.

Wait, did I say autobiography? Well it’s co-written, by the looks of it, by the famous Peter David and illustrated quite wonderfully by Colleen Doran. So the question really arises as to what this book actually is because... well it’s kind of shimmering incandescently in a state between autobiography and biography... I think. For the sake of my own sanity and as something to refer to it as for the purpose of this review... I’m going to remind myself that a lot of autobiographies were actually ghostwritten by or with other people and don’t technically count as an autobiographies at all. At least this book is giving all the credit where it’s due and, since Stan so obviously has a strong stamp on what his life story contains and how it plays out here... yeah, I’m going to go with autobiography. ‘nuff said.

So I have to start off here by saying that it’s a wonderful book. There are some things I would have liked to have seen a little more of and I’ll get to those in a minute but one of the main plus points here is that it’s a vastly entertaining read and, luckily, it’s really well written. Stan Lee’s personality and jokey trademark sense of aggrandizement shine through the pages right from the outset as it tells the tale of young Stan Leiber and his home life, growing up poor, and how he joined the company which, decades later, would become Marvel Comics. Also, how he took some time away in the middle of his job there to serve, in a capacity he probably didn’t expect, in the Second World War and of the various challenges of creating and editing some of the characters he’s come up with over the years.

And it’s really warm, fuzzy and lovely... some of it actually brought a tear to my eye... oh, lay off, I’m getting older and the tear ducts open up at the drop of a hat, these days, okay? Also, though, he did manage to surprise me a few times.

The structure is not completely linear, instead he opts to do what many good tale tellers do by highlighting things which lead in to one another and go together which could be many years apart. Obviously this helps to focus on the points being made... rather than completely doggedly following a straight route through the timeline. Lee also accentuates this necessity himself in the context of that structure and it gets him to places where he’s eventually talking to his younger self about his future. It’s pretty good in the way it does this...

... but that’s not what I meant by it managing to surprise me.

What I meant is that there are a few times in here where Stan The Man’s humour got the better of me by setting up a ‘story beat’ to follow a pattern of ‘monologuing’ he might have been using earlier in the strip and then, as you turn the page, pulling the rug out from under you... making you smile and also keeping you interested because you know you can’t always predict when his humour is going to kick in. Like the time he tells of his quick divorce and marriage (into one office for his future wife’s divorce and then into the next office to immediately get married) which had a nice little set up in the style of writing that when you turn the page... oh heck. I’m really not going to spoil it for you here.

Now this book is probably going to come under fire from some quarters, I’m guessing. I was expecting Stan to gloss over certain things and, I suppose, to an extent he does. He does, however give full page (and sometimes more) shout-outs to some of his co-creators over the years, the most famous (and possibly most troublesome in terms of whose side of the story you believe) being Steve Ditko and Jack ‘King’ Kirby. Now, as it happens, I don’t think Lee is trying to make light of any of the serious issues which became problems at certain stages in the history of the company... such as when Steve Ditko parts ways by becoming a ghostly, vanishing figure from his desk. The story about the big argument surrounding the identity of The Green Goblin is a well known one and I’ve certainly heard Stan tell it himself in various interviews... so I don’t think he’s particularly trying to hide anything here... he just doesn’t mention it again because it’s such a well known one, I suspect.

We’ll probably never get to hear about the full stories behind some of these problem issues where people became kind of casualties but one throwaway comment he makes about artists retaining their work and why he wasn’t able to do that did remind me of one thing... Stan Lee is not Marvel Comics. Sure, he is synonymous with them and he’s their mascot but... he is not always guilty for some of the mistakes made in the past. When you become a figurehead, though, sometimes you find yourself caught in the crossfire whether you like it or not. I’ve got no idea myself so I’m just going to shut up about these issues now... other than to say it certainly felt like Stan has done a good job here in giving people their due and there must have been some moments in this memoir (or autobiography as I like to call it), not just dealing with the day in and day out of Marvel, that must have been very painful for him to write and include. However, if you’re going to do a project like this, I think you have to realise there’s stuff you can’t leave out and, thankfully for us, Stan certainly seems to realise this too.

The artwork by Colleen Doran is amazing and when Stan talks about some of the comic books successes, we are presented with reproductions of the covers in question with Stan’s monologue continuing the story in little strategically placed boxes over them. It’s a nice touch, as are the pages which give you a fly on the wall perspective of the recording of the first Merry Marvel Marching Society record. Its great stuff actually and although I never had much of this kind of stuff at the time, it took me straight back to being a kid in the 1970s again because... well, Marvel were never shy on their self promotion were they? We all knew about this fan club stuff, even over here in the UK.

One thing I really would have liked to have seen, since Stan mentions his rivals DC a fair few times, is the inclusion of what was, when I was a kid, one of the most stupendous publications around. The first teaming up of Marvel and DC heroes in the Giant Sized Treasury Edition of Spider-Man VS Superman is not mentioned here... and it’s a shame because I used to love laying that big tome out on the floor as a kid and pouring over the words and pictures as Lois Lane and Mary Jane Watson got themselves into trouble.

The other thing I would have liked more of is actually dates put to incidents. You kind of have to guess a lot about when things were happening and reference your own knowledge of when certain incidents might have slotted into history... so there’s a possibility some readers may have trouble keeping up in certain areas, I think. Especially when, as I said, the narrative structure tends to hop around a bit in terms of the time frame. It doesn’t make the narrative any less compelling, though, so it’s not something that should stop anyone from picking it up.

These minor quibbles aside, I have to say that Amazing Fantastic Incredible is one of the more entertaining books I’ve read in a while and is... exactly what the title says it is. It's also a lovely homage.. or self homage... to one of comic book fandom’s greatly loved figureheads which even takes us right up to date with his cameo appearance in Avengers: Age Of Ultron earlier in the year. A nice thing to own and done in a medium which really captures the spirit of the man... or at the very least the spirit of his public persona. Greatly enjoyed and recommended by this reader, at any rate. What more is there to say?

Excelsior.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Webutantes

The Amazing Spider-Man 2
2014 USA
Directed by Marc Webb
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Big spoilers in this one.

Well, I think this is going to be a short review. Let me try to figure out what went wrong here.

The Amazing Spider-Man was called that from its first issue because of that character’s initial appearance in a successful issue of the comic Amazing Fantasy in 1962. However, the version of this and various other characters that appear in this current movie bear little resemblance to those running around in the first 100 or so issues of the comic (which is about as far as I read). It’s like the company has bought the rights to the characters and just done their own thing with them... which tells me they’re not aiming for a target audience consisting of fans of the original comics, that’s for sure. That’s a shame because, believe me, those early comics are cinematic enough that they would make great movies if adapted properly for the screen.

Now this film follows a fairly good opening movie, although it’s guilty of similar problems in translating the characters and situations to the screen. My review of the first in this series, The Amazing Spider-Man, is here and it also details the impact this character has had on me over the years. This sequel is pretty awful in many ways but, before I start pulling it apart, let me find the positives first.

The casting decision on the Harry Osbourne character is awesome. Dane DeHann looks nothing like the Harry from the comics but he is credibly able to go nuts in a sympathetic manner as he did when he played the central antagonist in the excellent teen superhero movie Chronicle (reviewed here), from a couple of years ago. Unfortunately he looks nothing like the Green Goblin either, not even being green, and his father has not yet, in this version of the story, been the former incarnation of the Green Goblin.

I don’t really know lead actor Andrew Garfield but he’s a very likeable personality and does what he’s doing here very well. He’s absolutely nothing like Peter Parker but the way his character behaves and is written is very much like the way Spider-Man is when he puts on his suit. He also has good chemistry with his on screen lover Emma Stone, who is equally likeable as Gwen Stacy. So these two are probably reason enough in themselves to watch this movie.

Okay, so other reasons why you should consider taking a look at this... um... okay. Well... no. Can’t say I can think of anything else. Let me now list the other bad things about this adaptation...

We all knew they’d be doing the death of Gwen Stacy storyline (or why have this character in there in the first place) but, Sam Raimi had already done that in his first Spider-Man movie... except he didn’t, did he? He took the exact situation of Gwen Stacy’s death, the original incarnation of the Green Goblin throwing her off a bridge and forcing Spider-Man to chose between who he saved, but Raimi substituted Mary Jane Watson in her place and, instead of dying from a whiplashed broken neck like Gwen did in the comics, caused by Spidey webbing her in an attempt to break her fall and save her, Mary Jane survived her onscreen version of this issue. In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, director Webb loses the specifics of the situation but keeps the whiplash element and Gwen does die... but it seems a cheaply won death after such a mess of a movie... at least to me it did.

Electro was my favourite villain in the original Spider-Man universe and I’ve always wanted to see him done right on screen. Looks like I’ll be waiting another good long while for that then. The white dude with the yellow and green costume culminating in a kind of starfish-electricity hat has been replaced with... Jamie Foxx playing him like a meek Spidey fanboy who suddenly goes mental, acts tough and can even convert himself into raw electricity. What a load of rubbish. I was heartbroken when it came to this aspect of the character... but they’ve also taken some pretty bad liberties with The Green Goblin so, I was getting distracted left, right and centre here.

Paul Giamatti, one of the great actors of our time, is just wasted here. The Rhino is not the mutated strongman of the comics wearing a latex rhino suit. He is an exoskeleton piloted by a Russian mobster. He plays a small role at the start of the film and then is ignored for the rest of the movie, despite the marketing campaign being heavily weighted by his presence, to be brought back as a kinda cheap punchline at the end of the movie. Admittedly, the scene where Spider-Man returns from retirement following the death of Gwendy to take on The Rhino is somewhat moving and will have the audience cheering but... seriously, it was underwhelming.

And I don’t know how this scene could have possibly been underwhelming when the movie was so slow and the villains, for the most part, so weak. The pre-amble to the creation of Electro was too long and, frankly, all the scenes with him in it, before and after his elevation to the status of super-villain, just seemed slow and boring to me. I took my parents to this one and they got so bored with it I had to keep nudging them awake. The action scenes with Electro were far from spectacular and, since you pretty much knew The Not-So-Green Goblin was going to kill Gwendoline Stacy in this, his scenes also felt like they lacked the necessary danger element.

Also, no J. Jonah Jameson (though he is alluded to), no Betty Brant, no Liz Allen and no Mary Jane Watson (although she would have been around in the same timeline in the stories as Gwen Stacy... they even resembled each other quite a lot). We have been teased with a character called Felicia who is quite possibly the same Felicia who will turn into The Black Cat... although she is lacking the white/silver hair here.

Even Has Zimmer’s music seemed to be all wrong for this picture. Jimmy Horner, who has a certain negative reputation with a certain segment of film score fans (including myself) did a credible and exciting score for the first movie. Zimmer, who is a composer I’ve really gotten into in recent years, delivered something that, on the few occasions I could actually hear it... since it was so buried in the sound mix beneath the various sound effects... seemed out of place. Now, I’m going to buy the album if it gets a release because I would like to actually hear what he did for this without the competing noise, but my judgement on it in the context of the accompaniment of the film was... not such a hot score. Which is kind of a shame because I really wanted to like this one. Maybe I still will, if the score album makes it into my player anytime soon.

And that’s pretty much me done with this movie. It was slow and boring, for the most part, and the only sequences which held any interest for me were the two handers between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy and, again, Peter Parker and Harry Osborne. Oh, and the one other good thing was the ghost of Captain Stacy haunting Peter and flooding him with guilt every now and again... that was a nice touch. But, seriously, this is not a movie I would recommend to anyone with an interest or love of the main title character. I think I’d probably rather be watching something like Spider-Man: The Dragon’s Challenge from 1979 than this thing. Plaudits to some of the cast and some of the dialogue writing in certain scenes but, ultimately, I’d say don’t bother with this one and go see Captain America: The Winter Soldier (my review here) instead... it’s much, much better.

‘Nuff said.