Best of Its Kind, So Far

The Amazing Spider-Man

Starring Andrew Garfield
   Emma Stone
   Rhys Ifans
   Denis Leary
   Martin Sheen
   Sally Field

Directed by Marc Webb

What's amazing, in a way, is that the movie industry could re-tell the same story it told only ten years ago, in a pretty good movie with Toby Maguire in the title role, and do it with almost no real risk of failure. (I know: there are movies that lose money, probably most of them. Occasionally there is even a blockbuster that loses money, an Ishtar. But when you get right down to it, there are only two kinds of movies that lose money: bad movies, which is most of the losers, and good movies that are not widely promoted. And everyone in Hollywood knows this franchise is a cash cow; just the litigation shows that.)

What they've done is go back to square one, inventing a new back-story for the character of Peter Parker. This time, he's looking into a small mystery left by his late father, and gets bitten by a spider in a genetics lab. The super powers he acquires, combined with his own remarkable technical abilities, not to mention the ability to sew better than any other straight teen-aged boy, turn him into the hero of the film.

Most of the comic-book characters portrayed on screen these days seem to depend entirely on special effects for the entertainment values. Not so this Spider-Man film. There is actual craft evident throughout the film, and more-than-merely-capable performances from almost all the players, even in the small roles. Garfield is believable as the skinny high-school kid with hidden depth, and is still believable when he engages his dragons. Stone is believable as the brainy hot chick (a role that probably came somewhat naturally to her), and Martin Sheen absolutely becomes the principled father-figure, Uncle Ben. Rhys Ifans portrays the villian sympathetically, so we're not too disappointed when he survives the film to set up a sequel (after the credits start). And Denis Leary manages to hold his tongue just enough to keep the film's PG-13 rating, while still exuding his trademark bile until [Spoiler Alert] he finds salvation on his death bed.

The film is good enough, too, for us to overlook a few incongruities. Just how many shells can the police chief's shotgon hold? How did Spider-Man get his mask on, when he's hanging from the bridge with the kid with one hand and the rope with the other? How does Peter Parker manage to encounter only blond long-haired thieves? And what are all those crane operators doing at work at that hour of the night; aren't they Union?

In the end, though, it's the quality of the special effects that keeps us buying in to this film. They are mostly done seamlessly, except for one scene (about a second, maybe two, long) in a longer fight sequence that seemed somehow less-well-crafted. The detail in computer-generated images, of water, of reflections, of shadows, is still amazing to me and, I suspect, to many other viewers. When you pair that with a good story, well-told, we don't really care if we've heard other versions of it before.

It's Called Art.

From the New Yorker magazine, a concise explanation of why I have no interest in modern art:

In 2004, an installation by the Japanese

artist Noritoshi Hirakawa consisted of a

pretty and prim young woman sitting in

a chair, reading a Philip Pullman novel,

and next to her, on the floor, a little heap

of her excrement, which she renewed each

morning.

page 34, May 7, 2012.

Let's Go To The Mall Redux

OK, I'm more than a little older than the teeny-bopper crowd the recent inane hit, Call Me Maybe, is aimed at, but does anyone else see the similarity between that dopey song and the farcical "hit" by Robin Sparkles created for the story line of the TV program, How I Met Your Mother?

I mean, beyond the fact that both singers are Canadian.

One Reason for One Republican to Vote for Obama

I first heard of the Dream Act a year or two ago, when our local throwaway weekly rag of an alternative newspaper — that word should probably be in quotes, but that's beside the point — ran a story about students at one of the local universities who were engaged in a hunger strike or some such protest because Congress had done nothing. (Quelle surprise.) I was largely unimpressed with the stories of the particular students, but it did seem to me that there was a certain injustice about deporting people who were brought to this country (illegally) as children and who had grown up here. This bill, a darling of the weepy left and yet another anathema to the growling right, had been oozing its way around Capitol Hill for some time, without getting much traction; hence the protests.

There are certain fundamentals about the situation the bill addresses that I think need being addressed. What makes us Americans? It's not just being born here. The constitution provides that anyone who is born here is a citizen, but the universe of citizens is not quite coterminous with the universe of Americans. People who have been here from an early age, who have gone to our public schools and played on our playgrounds and sat in our movie theaters and walked on our sidewalks all their conscious lives are as American as me or anyone else; even if those schools were substandard, even if those playgrounds were dusty underfunded sorry imitations, even if those movies weren't in English, even if those sidewalks were dusty roadside tracks where sidewalks should have been. It is the long process of growing up in America that makes someone an American, and I think it is only right that those who have done that ought to be able to live here. Maybe not as citizens, but in some capacity.

President Obama has cut through the bull, and announced a change in policy by executive order: people who meet certain criteria will not be subject to deporation. They have to have been here before their 16th birthday; they have to have lived here continuously for at least 5 years; they have to be in school, or graduates of our high schools (or US military veterans with honourable discharges); they must not have a criminal record, and they can't be more than 29 years old.

Now, I will disagree with some of the details. For one thing, I'm not convinced that a person can really fully develop the American identity if they only start at the age of 15. I would have set the bar no later than 12 years of age. And I'm concerned that the requirement that they not have a criminal record could be too inflexibly interpreted. No one should be denied this kind of status just because they were, say, arrested for disturbing the peace at an Occupy protest, or getting in a fight or something. Our society lacks the political discernment it once had, and we now use our criminal courts to deal with everything from fights after school on up. When we no longer brand young men as child-sex offenders because they have indecent pictures of thier girlfriends on their smartphone, I'll be more comfortable with the criminal-record criteria in this executive order. (I would also want to be certain that, just because they get to stay, it doesn't mean their parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins get to stay, too.)

But I applaud Obama for having done something to rectify a fairly clear injustice. I agree with Mr Romney's lackluster, mealymouthed response ("this isn't the way to go about it"), but he knows damn well that the spineless hydra that Congress has become will never act without being forced.  If nothing else, Obama's bold and righteous act will have forced them to do their job in response.