Pageviews, Concern for Ava's Demon, and 2002's "Spider-Man" (Respectively)

Hi, all.

So, first thing's first.  You got me...

EIGHT EXTRA VIEWS!  YOU WIN!  WHICH MEANS I WIN!  WHICH MEANS I LOVE YOU!  Just to be clear, I loved you anyway.  BUT NOW WE WIN!  Thaaaaaank youuuuuuuuu!  ^.^  *gives you virtual cake*  Caaaaaaaake!  (Next time you can, go buy yourself some actual cake.  Because you deserve it.)

Second thing - I realize I talk about Ava's Demon kind of a lot on this blog, but I'm actually a little concerned because it stopped updating recently (I don't have the exact date) completely without notice. Maybe it hasn't been as long as I think (my memory is just shot lately), but the author's usually pretty good about that, so I hope she didn't die or anything?  Also, I think she has a tumblr, but I don't know what it is, so if anybody has that info, I would like it very much.  ((UPDATE: nevermind, it's here, and also she was just sick for a while.  it's all good.))

Now.  Let's get down to business [to defeat the Huns].  Because Spider-Man is my favorite superhero, every now and then I go on a Spider-Man media binge.  This time, as I'm sure you can guess, the binge was brought on by The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  So after watching that and its precursor movie, I grabbed the slightly older series, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (AKA Tobey Maguire/that-kid-from-Gatsby/early 2000's Spider-Man.  That one).  Because IMDb is the very greatest movie reference site ever, I have its Spider-Man page here.

I feel I need to point out that Spider-Man is in no way a prequel for The Amazing Spider-Man.  I think people make this mistake because both came out so recently (in the same ten years, at least), but no, these renditions are in no way related other than that they were both based off of the original comic series.  In other words, trying match up and then make sense of the storylines is like trying to match up Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with 1995's Batman Forever.  Both are great individually (Batman Forever has a special place in my heart), but make absolutely no sense put together, I assure you.

That said, let's review a movie, shall we?

Knowing me, this may take a while.

Let's start with a synopsis.  In Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire plays high school senior Peter Parker, who is fairly smart but painfully awkward, has been in love with his neighbor Mary Jane Watson (MJ) since the fourth grade, and lives with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in New York City.  Here, dear Peter goes on a high school field trip and is bitten by a genetically modified spider that somehow got out of its container (which is never revisited or explained).  He wakes up the next morning with spider-like abilities, such as that to climb and stick to walls and that to shoot webbing directly from his wrists.  Additionally, his eyesight is now perfect (he previously wore glasses), and he has super-strength (he was a total wimp).
     Meanwhile, Dr. Norman Osborn, father of Peter's best friend Harry Osborn, is the owner of Oscorp, the city's largest science research lab.  Dr. Osborn has been working on a human performance-enhancer for quite some time, but his higher-ups threaten to pull his funding, so he skips through the process to human testing - the human being himself.  A possible side effect of the performance enhancer was insanity, and thus it drives him insane, turning him into the Green Goblin.
     Peter has a fight with his Uncle Ben, who tells him "with great power comes great responsibility" and is killed shortly thereafter by a street thug in a car robbery.  Peter then decides to become a superhero and fulfill his responsibility to rid the streets of crime.  You know, basically.

This movie is great because it's lighthearted and Tobey Maguire constitues a very likable Peter Parker because he's cute and socially inept and just completely lost for MJ.  So if you're into that, go for it.  Go see this movie for its cuteness, and to broaden your experiences of Spider-Man.  It was fun to watch.  (Particularly in a group.)  But if you really break movies down like I tend to, um...be warned, I guess.  There are a few kinks in the plan.

So when I watch or read things, I tend to put writers into two categories: those better at plot and those better at characterization.  These were plot writers.  To say the least.  The most glaring example of this is MJ.

(courtesy of: nyctalking.com)

Mary Jane Watson is a perky redhead with subtly accentuated boobs who wants to be an actrice and
speaks in a softly sweet voice.  She'd never hurt a soul, says things you'd sooner expect from a sugary romance novel, and must wait ten minutes for Spider-Man to save her from the crumbling ledge instead of just crawling off it herself.  Mind you, I am being perfectly objective; even though no one beats Emma Stone, and my official OTP is Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy (which I am fairly, if not completely invested in), I actually quite like MJ.  In other versions, she's been this sexy, green-eyed redhead with a sharp wit and a little black dress, a character who knows what she wants and always stands up for the little guy.  But in this, MJ was basically the epitome of a weak female character.  I am a bit influenced from also watching Spider-Man 2, in which this problem is I think exponentially worse, but still.

(courtesy of: comicbookmovie.com)

The other painful character is, I think, Dr. Osborn.  One of the greatest things you can do for a movie is develop the villain, but they did not take that opportunity.  His entire characterization is that he's a rich, uptight father turned crazy, bipolar scientist.  His only reason for becoming a villain is that an experiment went wrong and made him a villain, which I think is a bit of a characterization cop-out.  It started as just a conflict of interests - Dr. Osborn originally just wanted control of Oscorp back because the board kicked him off (because he's crazy), but Spider-Man fundamentally disagreed with killing the board members one-by-one, but he went after Spider-Man vendetta-style, like it was personal.  Which is completely irrational.  It's as if the writers couldn't think of a legitimate reason to make him want to kill Peter, so they just drove him insane instead.

My main dispute with stories is usually poor characterization because it's really important to me that characters - and by extension, people - are imagined complexly.

(courtesy of: splashpage.mtv.com)

However, to end this on a good not, I should point out that there is a character in this movie that I particularly like, and that is John Jonah Jameson!  JJJ is the cheap-ass, no-bullshit, always-talking-never-listening, fast-paced head editor of the newspaper The Daily Bugle, which Peter is a freelance photographer for.  He's not particularly nice, as you might imagine, but he's completely hilarious in his own blunt brutality (and doesn't mean half of what he says).  And though I've been trying not to compare the two because bias, JJJ is the main aspect I'd pick of the Spider-Man series that's actually better than The Amazing Spider-Man series.  The latter is seriously lacking, but JJJ in this is fabulous, and all in all, he makes me happy.

So that's it, I guess.  A fair post with which to end the year.

Thanks for reading,

-Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
  (not really, though.  it's just me.)

Vital Vocab 30 - An Ass-Kicking English Class

Vocab: vocation, wane, whimsical, zealous, zenith

Commonly Confused Words: its/it's, they're/there/their, you're/your, except/accept

Grammar Focus: parallel structure and semicolon/colon

Hi, all.  

You should spam me with pageviews.  I was hoping I'd reach 1500 page views by the end of the year, but this is my last Vital Vocab, and on Friday, I post my last required post.  (And I'll try, but let's just accept that I don't do a lot of overtime posting - especially compared to this friend and this friend and probably several others.)  I will, of course, post my epistolary when it's finished, and whatever else I write because I actually really like this blog and stuff, but...but I digress.  1500 pageviews.  And look at this!  Look.  At.  This.

Thirty views!  By the end of the week.  Can we do it?  (Probably not, but it's worth a shot.)

But so, on to other end-of-the-year things.  I know other people have already done their final Vital Vocabs on this same thing, and also, I am an awkward turtle and I suck at telling people who I really admire that I really admire them, but that doesn't make this any less necessary.  So, um, yeah.  Mr. Parker...ya done good.

Honestly, this was the best class I've had in a long time, English or otherwise.  Everything we read in class (Killer Angels doesn't count - summer reading) was something to stay with me, something useful to me, something I'll be sure to remember in a year.  We read and discussed books to care about, books to love, books to zealously shove under others' noses (just ask my mom; they're really stacking up for her).  I was excited to go to this class from the first weeks of the year, and that feeling didn't simply reach its zenith and wane.  We've got just four weeks left until summer, and I still look forward to English as much as I always did.  

Now, note that I've got four fabulous friends in my English class, a fortune I haven't been presented with since probably the third grade, so that certainly helps matters.  (And I am so sorry that there's always that constant and useless whimsical chatter from us.  Please don't mistake that for a lack of respect; it's really just our pitiful lack of control.)

Now obviously, being me, I have a personal affinity for English classes.  But this is the best one I've had in a while.  And I generally try to skirt around how people sometimes point out to me that they think I have a vocation for writing, but this class...it's really nice to feel like you're fairly skilled at something, and that maybe your life could go somewhere.  You know, eventually.

So, all in all, I'm kinda bummed about the end of the school year, except I signed up for Mr. Parker's Creative Writing class next year, so there is yet hope.  

Thanks for the reading and the pageviews, friends.  May good fortune come your way and your eyelashes not fall directly into your eyes.  Until next time.

-Allie

Vital Vocab 29

Vital Vocab Dictionary

Vital Vocab 29 - Spider-Man

Vocab: vapid, vehement, veracity, vestige, vivacious

Commonly Confused Words: course/coarse

Grammar Focus: parallel structure and semicolon/colon

Okay, guys.  We have to talk about something.  And that something is Spider-Man.

Specifically The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  

First off, DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE IF YOU ARE EPILEPTIC.  There is this one scene that is no good for that, I will tell you right now.  Second off, I promote this movie vehemently, but this is not so much a review as it is a rant, which means THIS POST IS GONNA BE CHOCK-FULL OF SPOILERS.  (Mr. Parker, you should go see it before grading this.  I'm not kidding.)  It also probably won't be very cogent.  (<<ha.)

For you to fully understand all the feels I feel about this movie, you need to know two things about me: a.) I view all things media as two parts writer and one part an emotional human being, and b.) Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy always has been and always will be my OTP (One True Pairing, for any non-fandom-y readers), rivaled only by AnthoBea (Anthony Rousseaux and Bea Holmes, one-shots of which surface periodically on my girlfriend's blog here).  Additionally, Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone are like my two favorite actors ever because gosh they are both such adorable dorks and I love them oh my god.  They are perfect.

But so of course, they killed her.  

Yup.  

And it was beautiful.

That is not to say that Death is beautiful.  It's not.  It's harsh and ugly and desperate, and unlike every other perfect and lovely Hollywood actor, the broken way that Andrew Garfield cries portrays that quite nicely.  However, the death is beautiful from my writer-y point of view.  Having seen the movie twice in its first three days, I have such an incredible amount of respect for whoever wrote it.  

They spend the entire movie, it seems, building us up.  They make us so sure of Peter, whose web shooters never miss a beat even when they're broken, who saves every pedestrian, who responds so immediately in every situation; he is the perfect hero.  And they make us so in love with, so incredibly lost for Gwen, who's gorgeous and intelligent, not some vapid damsel in distress, but the high school valedictorian, who knows what she wants and makes her own decisions, who so obviously loves Peter and makes everything un-complicated for him, but also lives and leads her own life.  

Given that, the true excellence of Gwen's death scene relies so heavily on defeating the heavily set conventions of the genre.  When the villain claims he'll kill the girl, you know his words are written without a vestige of truth because a true superhero never loses a soul, especially not the love of his life.  Furthermore, in every other movie, when the protagonist holds their loved one's lifeless remains in their lap, crying over their body, begging them to open their eyes...the person always does.  Sometime, I'll have to review Frankenweenie to fully express my thoughts on this scene, but let's suffice it to say it is the most clichéd thing you could ever write into a story, and I will lose all respect for said story if you do.

But these writers broke the cliché.

Gwen does not open her eyes.  And somehow, whether it's due to the integrity the movie has already shown, or the sheer finality of her limp body once she's hit the ground (she falls from a clock tower, by the way), you know she won't.  And Peter's sobbing, and it's brutal and coarse and unexpected, and although it's a factor that I came in to the movie already invested in the characters, this was the first movie I've ever cried in.  When his web reached down to catch her, the end of it opened slowly into an unmistakable hand.  But he couldn't catch her this time.

But somehow, even without my two-parts-writer perspective, the crushing honesty of Gwen's death doesn't ruin the movie for me, because it ends with Spider-Man coming back to the city after his period of grief because Peter finally watched a video of the speech Gwen gave at graduation.  It says that there are dark times ahead, but not to lose hope, because people need you and things do, eventually, get better.  So Peter gets new hope and closure, and goes back to saving the city, and the movie ends with the same shadowy figure who spoke to Dr. Curtis at the end of the first movie talking to Harry Osborne, setting us up for another sequel.  

Our beautiful Spider-Man will go on without Gwen Stacy, as will his adventures.  And I truly believe that no one beats Emma Stone, but honestly, I'm pretty excited to see what vivacious or sexy redhead may play MJ in the next movie.

I'm gonna really miss Gwen, though.

-Allie

Update: so, it came to my attention in searching for pictures of Gwen's death that she actually died in the comics as well (which apparently I should have known - I really need to find those), but my points about clichés and everything still stand.  but so yeah.

(courtesy of: Sneak Peek)

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