Salon.com > Andrew Garfield

Enough, “Spider-Man”: No more origin stories!

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 15:10:00 +0000

In "The Amazing Spider-Man," the new remake of Sam Raimi’s adjective-less "Spider-Man" – because if you remember 2002, you weren’t there – a radioactive spider bites socially awkward teenager Peter Parker, who then gains superhuman abilities and learns that with great power comes great responzzzzzzzZzzzzzzzzzz....

Whoa, I just had the craziest dream – a nightmare, really – in which no one responsible for creating our mass entertainment ever had an original idea again!

While the gullible spend $13 on a movie they saw a decade ago, I’m going to watch it on DVD for free. Actually, I’ll do nothing of the sort, because – even though I love superheroes more than a man in his late 20s probably should – I never want to see another superhero origin story. And judging by "Green Lantern’s" box office, neither does anybody else. (Two weeks after the release of Ryan Reynolds’ by-the-numbers film, ScarJo divorced him. Coincidence?)

Spider-Man and Holden Caulfield: A secret history

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Look, I realize it's silly to cop an attitude about the decision to relaunch the "Spider-Man" movie series with a new cast of actors and a somewhat different origin story for the fabled web-slinger. Pop culture reinvents itself even more ably than capitalism-at-large does. (Actually, capitalism-at-large is having some problems with that at the moment.) That goes double for comic-book characters, the ersatz gods of our age, who get spread diffusely across a wide range of media and audiences until they stop being characters at all and become a Heisenbergian smear of uncertainty. In what sense can the Batman of the 1930s Detective Comics series, the Adam West Batman of early 1960s camp television and the Christian Bale Batman of "The Dark Knight" be said to be the same "person"?

Six degrees of Spider-Man

Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:00:00 +0000

Is your Spidey sense tingling? Marvel Comics and Columbia Pictures certainly hope so, having made the unorthodox decision to recast and reboot the immensely successful “Spider-Man” franchise, just a decade after Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and writer-director Sam Raimi captured the nation’s post-9/11 mood -- and launched the 21st century superhero boom.

As anyone who’s seen a bus shelter, a train station, a freeway billboard or a television set in the last several weeks already knows, “The Amazing Spider-Man” will open worldwide just before the Fourth of July, with English actor Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network") as tormented webslinger Peter Parker and Emma Stone (Skeeter in “The Help”) as his love interest.