I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
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I'm poor, and tickets for the 3D version were pricey, so I opted for 2-D—the peasant experience. It was the right choice. No one should waste any extra dollars on this movie.
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will be a financial success. People give money to these things because they satisfy two hours of idle time with flashy effects and stupid humour. The formula pleases the most generic filmgoer. But it’s an insult to anyone who actually grew up reading Spider-Man comics, as I did. I was one of the many bullied, socially awkward kids who grew up collecting action figures and who connected with Peter Parker as a smart-guy outcast, not a cool, wisecracking jerk.
I walked into the theatre wanting Spider-Man to become real, something more than another crowdpleaser. But maybe the joke's on me—on us. Didn't comics once belong to an elite class of nerds, the kids who got teased and left out, like the comic-book Peter Parker himself?
Not anymore. Hollywood has stumbled onto a gold mine, and teen idol Andrew Garfield has turned the nerd Peter Parker into a smartass punk with a coif. This Peter isn't a brainiac. He's not at the top of his class. He's not the shy geek who doubles as a crime-fighter by night. He's just Andrew Garfield with a one-liner script, which gets progressively sillier with the introduction of Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy. Miss Stone looks 30 years old (at least) but plays a high school senior and tells Peter she "just can't live like this anymore," because life is just that hard in high school.
Jamie Foxx talks to himself in most of his scenes. The filmmakers boldly deviate from Electro's comic book origin story and make him another OSCORP mishap (involving electric eels, no less). Nobody should ever work at this place.
There are more rapid body transformations—a favourite feature in Marvel movies. The injectable serums that create these transformations always seem to be so easily, unbelievably accessible to anyone unfortunate enough to find them, and they always go wrong. At one point, one wonders, do they decide to tighten their security around dangerous chemicals or just make ones that don’t turn everyday people into freaks? How is OSCORP still in business?
Almost as an afterthought, moments from the credits, Paul Giamatti yells in his ridiculous Rhino suit. He's in the film long enough to shout his villain name ("I'm Rhino!") in broad daylight before charging horn-first into a convoluted train wreck of a finale that doesn't come quickly enough. Nothing amazing here, folks.
Love, Beastly