Film Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

America's favorite stalker

Oh, brother. It's only been two years since the last Spider-Man movie, but it's amazing how the goodwill for the franchise has been zapped in those two years. After the disappointing third installment of the Tobey Maguire-led Spider-Man franchise, Andrew Garfield's web-slinger was a breath of fresh air. And the first movie, despite its many problems, was still incredibly enjoyable. Most of that was due to the one-two punch of Garfield and co-star Emma Stone and the fact that charisma and chemistry can be enough to carry a movie. It's worked for plenty of worse actors in plenty of worse movies.

I wish the same was true of the sequel, which picks up not long after the events of the first film. Still trying to make good on the promise he made to her father, Peter Parker (Garfield)

Nemo and Darla Part II: Spider...MEN?!

A few weeks ago, my cousins and I wrote a short story titled "Nemo and Darla's Adventures in Crime: Part 1" without any indication of whether there would be a part 2. In this work of fiction, collectively written by myself and my two cousins (age 10 and 13), we followed the lives of a boy, Nemo, and his best friend, a unicorn named Darla. We each took turns writing a sentence, and slowly but surely a strange story emerged.  Well, the first installment was wildly popular, so I forced my cousins to write another chapter (just kidding, they wanted to...I swear). In continuing the series, my cousins and I attempted (ever so slightly) to tell a story with a little more pop-culture relevance, and we accidentally landed on a story about the superhero of the moment. We're talking Spider-man!

The Amazing Spider-Man May Not Be So Amazing

We were perhaps a little overly exclamatory in our review of The Amazing Spider-Man. Maybe we were clouded by our love of Emma Stone (she almost made us like Crazy Stupid Love after all), or we were too busy marveling at Andrew Garfield's gravity-defying hair (he and Ben Whishaw need to have babies).

Whatever the reason for our lapse in judgment (we gave the film an 8/10), there are now a slew of videos that quite rightly put the film in its place and have taught us a valuable lesson about hindsight:

Film Review: The Amazing Spider-Man

No upside-down kissing this time around.

Nobody was asking for a Spider-Man reboot. Or, at least, very few people were clamoring for a Spider-man reboot. Two of the three Spider-man films which already exist (starring Tobey Maguire and directed by Sam Raimi) are actually pretty great films. The second film, AKA Spider-Man 2, is one of the best Marvel movies of the past few decades. Unlike the The Incredible Hulk movie that followed the unremarkable and overly artsy Hulk movie

[Spoiler Alert] Best Picture Nominees #9: The Social Network

Everyone's Friend, Everyone's Enemy

The two films that lead the pack in this year's Oscar race are The King's Speech and The Social Network.  Both films have won numerous Best Picture awards, with The Social Network winning big at the Golden Globes and The King's Speech predictably kicking ass at this year's BAFTAs. The great thing about the films is that they are so vastly different, and occupy almost diametrically opposite ends of the film spectrum.

The Social Network succeeds mostly due to a cracker-jack script and brilliant direction. Aaron Sorkin creates a rich dialogue that is packed full of dense exposition that