(The Amazing) Spider-Man

Today I thought I’d talk about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, and Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider- Man.

Both are loose adaptations of Stan Lee’s original origin for the character, with elements of Brian Michael Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man influencing the latter.

Raimi’s film has all the quirks, interesting camera angles, and appropriate use of computer graphics, but Tobey Maguire falls short as Spidey for me, mostly because he’s such a boring guy. Spider-Man without jokes doesn’t feel like Spider-Man, and Raimi taking the character into the tortured hero realm defeated the purpose a little bit.

Marc Webb on the other hand casts Andrew Garfield in this role, and I’m not going to lie, he mops the floor with Tobes. I have to assume Garfield was probably cast after his performance in The Social Network, where he played an intellectual character. Webb said that he wanted Spider-Man to feel like an outsider, and modern, and praised Garfield’s role in helping redefine “the idea of what a nerd is.”

The character feels like someone you could know, but at the same time, he flies right off the page. The jokes are funny, the dynamic is there, from a fan standpoint, Webb’s movie is superior.

Where Webb fails is in his cinematography and overuse of computer generated graphics. Rather than cloak The Lizard in darkness to hide the fact that he looks basically like shit, Webb lets the audience take in just how awful the character looks in brightly lit close-ups.

Yikes.

The acting and the writing for the villain could have been better on Webb’s part too, but he’s more focused on our hero anyway.

Raimi, on the other hand, has always been better at writing villains, and even his best horror movies are pretty much known for his ability to make something appear scary or villainous.

Both stories are ripped right out of the comics, with Raimi adapting The Night Gwen Stacy Died and Webb adapting Lizard’s plan to make an army of super reptiles (yeah, it’s pretty stupid) from Amazing Spider-Man #6, and #45-46.

When I look at it like that I want to give the nod to Webb right there, for taking such a shitty story and doing so much with it. Raimi, on the other hand, adapts the two most iconic stories in the character’s history and manages to make what I consider to be a passable, but lackluster film.

Ultimately, I give the nod to Webb, because he does the best job at defining the character and making him likable, and considering the fact that the movie and the franchise pretty much depend on that. Raimi still feel likes the better director, but not the better fit for Spider-Man.

 

The Walking Dead Season 1

Today I will talk about the first season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, adapted from Robert Kirkman’s comic of the same name.

Walking Dead is one of those shows, like Dexter, that started strong, but quickly fell back on its own gimmick. In future seasons the pacing was ruined and as much action as possible is packed into each episode, which really softens the blows when they do come. This is possibly due to AMC’s attempt to appease its core audience, but also likely due to the shakeup in showrunners, as Frank Darabont was fired in 2011, a month into shooting for the second season.

The first season is adapted from the first six issues of Walking Dead, and the first episode, Days Gone Bye, is almost a shot-for-shot recreation of the comic book.

I found some nice comparisons from other blogs:

I recommend the black and white version of the pilot, because the lighting is so unique that it adds to the feeling of isolation in the opening sequence, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, they stuck to the script, and it actually worked pretty well.

From here they follow out the rest of the story from the first book, except at the end of the season, Shane, a villain from the first book, is not killed like he is in the comic. This upset some people, but it created one of the most compelling characters on TV for others.

Kirkman, who serves as an executive producer on the show, said that this is how he would have played it had he known the book would be a success.

Keeping Shane around kept a tension on the show that the zombies couldn’t create on their own, and it made his death at the end of season 2 that much more satisfying.

Another time the first season strays from the script is in the last episode of the first season, when the survivors come to a military complex working on a cure for the outbreak. Of course there is no cure and the man who runs the complex eventually decides to destroy the complex with our heroes inside. It sounds like a situation in a cheesy eighties movie, and it plays out like one too.

Another notable problem is the terrible southern accents, which are forgivable when you consider Andrew Lincoln’s Britishness (he’s married to the daughter of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson!).

Ultimately though, the first season of Walking Dead is a strong season of television, and it’s involving enough to keep you watching into the later seasons to see what’s happening with the characters, even if you know the writing is going downhill.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire was, in my opinion, a better work than it’s source text, Q & A by Vikas Swarup.

It’s by no means a perfect movie, and I’m not sure if I believe it deserves the status it has been elevated to, but I do believe it improves on Q & A, by being less obvious and overdone.

I can’t speak on the controversies about it’s social and political responsibility because I think that’s pretty much fucking crap. To be scholarly about it: art is art, it doesn’t have any responsibility to anyone; and if it isn’t art, then fuck it.

In the spirit of the last few weeks, let’s talk about its Oliver Twist elements.

First of all the protagonist, Jamal, is passive through most of the film and forced to enter into different circles, much like Oliver. He does eventually learn to take his life into his own hands, but he spend most of the movie having things done to him rather than doing things. Oh yeah, and he’s an orphan.

Ram on the other hand is much more hands-on, and in my opinion much less Twist-esque.

Also, Jamal, Salim, and Latika start working for Maman, who is pretty much Fagen, except he scoops out people’s eyes. It felt the most like Dickens during that time, and even includes them escaping and then eventually coming back to reckon with the problem.

It’s not just like Dickens though. The most important way it differs is that Jamal actually does move up in class, unlike Oliver who merely regains what was already his. This really is a rags to riches situation, though when we get there it doesn’t even seem like the money matters to Jamal.

Trains are a big theme in the film, and they seem to represent change, just as they’re said to in the novel. The first time the train comes the boys lose their mother, and they lose Latika later on too. But it also brings Latika back to Jamal, and it’s used to connect the boys from early childhood to their teenage years.

As I already expressed, I think that the adaptation is quite a bit better than the original. By abandoning the Forest Gump-esque references and absurdity and replacing it with a more believable story, we’re left with something that is more appealing. Sure it loses its humor and much of the subtext is lost as well, and I think that’s a shame.

Q & A might have more to say, and it might even be more historically or politically correct, but at the end of the day Beaufoy’s story is just better.

Dexter

Today I’m going to talk about the first season of the Showtime series Dexter, based on Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter.

I though this might be an interesting topic because in the past the novel we’ve read have been longer than the adaptations, but in this case the series is actually much longer than the novel. Because of this, the series expands on the characters and their roles.

I want to focus on how the series appropriates to tackle deeper issues that don’t exist in the novel.

Both the series and the book are about Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who kills serial killers. Dexter begins to get clues from the Tamiami Slahers (The Ice Truck Killer in the show), a local serial killer that the police are after. Dexter isn’t sure of his connection, but through cleverly place clues, Dexter’s past begins to unravel.

In both mediums this leads to a confrontation between the killers where Dexter finds out that the Slasher is actually his long lost brother, Brian.

The novel ends rather abruptly, and it doesn’t work very well because all we find out is that Dexter has a brother and a dark past.

The series works around this weakness and delves in to how Dexter and Brian ended up killers after watching their mother get murdered and cut up in front of them.

The show sticks with the psychology, but introduces Brian at an earlier time in the story as Rudy, a prosthetic manufacturer who begins dating Dexter’s sister Debra in order to get closer to him. The TV show then hints at Brian’s darkness and delves into the psychology of the killer, and why Brian would be interested in prosthetic limbs, and why he cuts his victims up when he kills them.

Dexter’s past is also looked into by flashback scenes, and the question of whether or not Dexter has real feelings is a big part of the show.

Dexter is a blood spatter analyst as well, so blood comes in to play as a symbol here. Dexter prefers to save it, and Brian drains it and dumps it, preferring a cleaner kill.

Visual imagery is a big deal in the show and the way Brian wraps the body parts of his victims after killing them, and his obsession with amputated parts is one of the most interesting parts of the character.

Brian also has a thing for women with stump hands and likes to paint their prosthetic’s fingernails different colors just like his mother used to, which brings some Freudian ideas into the mix too.

The series appropriates to give a look into why the characters are the way they are, rather than just making the best of a decent idea like the book does.

It’s what makes the first season of the show interesting, and the subsequent seasons shitty.