SPIDEY 4 becomes AMAZING becomes Marvel's SPIDER-MAN

[Ben]

Spider-Man Begins?

[James]

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=63191

Spider-Man will swing into theaters worldwide in 3D beginning July 3, 2012

[Dacey]

Um...why are they opening four days after "Star Trek"?

[Ben]

To try and appear bullish and attempt to take away the Trek thunder. Little do they know that we're really not interested in a Spidey 4, or 1.2 even!

Trek will rule, the spider will be crushed, and they can all point at Sam Raimi and say it was hist fault!

[Daniel]

And the new lead for the Spidey reboot is... Andrew Garfield. Who I can honestly say I don't know of.

[eddievalient]

Neither do I, but after seeing a short montage of him on youtube, I think he'll probably do a decent job. At the least, he looks and sounds like Peter Parker ought to.

[Dacey]

He's 27 years old...and he's supposed to be playing Peter Parker in "high school."

That just doesn't make any sense at all to me.

[Ben]

What interest I had in this just plummeted as Sony announced Rhys Ifans as the villain in Spidey 4 (they didn't say who he would be though). Through some people that know Ifans, I have heard he is a very unlikeable person, and if you've ever seen the Kevin & Perry movie, he's not far off the character he plays in that, apparently. But I've heard enough insider info not to warm to him, and I avoid as much of what he does as possible. However, people always remember him as the quirky friend in Notting Hill, so he keeps getting the jobs, I suppose.

Anyway, at least I'll genuinely hate the villain, if I ever bother to see this...

[estefan]

Well, Marlon Brando was hardly the nicest person in the world, but it's hard to deny his acting chops.

Though, I'm not comparing him to Brando, since I haven't seen much of his work. But, I have a tendency to ignore somebody's off-screen behaviour when it comes to seeing them act. Then again, I'm one of five people on the planet who thinks Lindsay Lohan has a good come-back in her somewhere.

And judging by the box-office results of Knight & Day, I'm one of those rare people nowadays who likes Tom Cruise and I have no problem paying to see his films.

[Ben]

It's slightly different when you know people that have worked with them. And Brando, whatever the faults, was super-talented compared to Ifans, who really doesn't have any chops to act.

Count me in the five people who think Li-Lo could make it back. But still not from the place she's in right now. It's going to take a while, maybe even five years or more, if she's still around.

I think a lot of people still like to pay to see Tom Cruise, but by all accounts, Knight & Day was a terrible movie. M:I-4 will be huge not only for it being a franchise picture, but people like to see Cruise in a certain type of role. The guy can't really do comedy, but give him an action film where he has to hold a plot together, and it's a done deal.

[GeorgeC]

He's 27 years old...and he's supposed to be playing Peter Parker in "high school."

This is the funniest thing I've read today...

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As for Li-Lo,

I think it's almost too late.

She's got a couple of things going against her --

a) the legal system in California that cow-tows to wealth and celebrity at the expense of public safety and common sense;
b) her long list of enablers from agents to parents to hangers-on's;
c) her generally spoiled, F-& attitude of entitlement (she should have been slapped with contempt of court for what she had painted on her fingernails in her arraignment a few weeks back);

and d) the long list of enablers she's had for close to 10 years.

If this girl lasts past 5 years without killing another person or overdosing, I'll be very surprised.

By then, she'll be far surpassed by another Disney graduate.

=> Hands-on bet is Demi Lovato. <=

Very talented and so far she has not embarrassed herself in public like Niagara Fontana has...


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Brando was very weird. Great actor but very strange. Gotta feel for his kids... Father of the year he was not!

If the theatrics of his personal life were not enough to give you a hint about his strangeness then his infamous Larry King interview should have!

SNL didn't have to work hard to spoof him with another strange fellow (John Travolta) playing barefoot Brando to Norm McDonald's(?) Larry King.


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Don't care for Tom Cruise personally. I've heard stories about him from a fellow I used to work with. Strange guy, a jerk to people on-set... ( => Unlike Robert Downey, Jr. who most people were rooting for to get better. Genuinely nice guy in real life.)

All I know from his films is that his basic on-screen persona hasn't changed much since Top Gun and I HATED Maverick.

Besides, the real star of that film was the F-14...

Too bad the plane was retired before the actor. It served a purpose and was entertaining in real life.

[EricJ]

Then again, I'm one of five people on the planet who thinks Lindsay Lohan has a good come-back in her somewhere.

Count me in the five people who think Li-Lo could make it back. But still not from the place she's in right now.

Just off the subject: Remember a while back on one of the other movie boards, we had one had one annoyingly gay gossip-watcher who insisted on keeping the members off-topic updated with Perez Hilton bulletins on what shenanigans "LiLo" was up to twice a week, and driving most of the members to frothing frenzy...

Finally, I don't know what took hold of my keyboard fingers, and I'd ended up typing:

Update on LiLo: After only two films and one series, the young Hawaiian-born star may be in trouble with the Disney studios for her increasingly self-indulgent lifestyle. Her recent erratic behavior has worried most of the film community, particularly after her well-publicized meltdown at the Elvis Convention in Las Vegas--Including the infamous "nude hula" incident, in which she afterwards lashed out at reporters, calling them "weirdos" and "big dummies"...

(Too long to post the rest, but it's amazing the creativity that frustration can unleash.)

As for the Raimi-free Spidey, I can only hope that new producers won't be quite so anal about insisting on Silver-Age villains:
The problem with Sp3 was that there were three distinct cooks in the broth--Raimi who wanted the Sandman, the fanbase who wanted Venom, and Sony who insisted that he continue the Osborne Saga for sequel-canon/contract-star's sake--and all three were battling the movie out figuratively if not literally.
(The problem with the Sandman was that with recent Marvel spoiling us for complex motivations, it was getting hard to explain old-fashioned 1965 bank-robbers in 2005, and the villain had to have some "deep inner reason" for robbing an armored car...)

I assume that any studio that didn't read the comics is going to jump for the next "recognizable" name--and most fans are already assuming it's going to be the Vulture or Lizard, just for being "next"--whereas if it'd been back in the Marvel family, they'd have tried to keep current-comics recognition fresh with Carnage or some such.

[Ben]

Hmmm...well with the casting of Ifans, I'd say Vulture just took a major swing in his favor. I could easily see that, since Sony would also want to be pushing for a recognisable villain to non-current followers too, and one that they haven't just seen in Raimi's trilogy ("oh, yeah, but Alfred Molina did him so much better")...y'know what I mean?

But Ifans has that rough, vulture-ish look, with that wispy hair. I could see that, though with make-up they could make him look like whoever!

[Dacey]

Isn't he also going to be in the next "Harry Potter" movie? Like as Luna Lovegood's father?

[estefan]

Well, I would think that Harry Potter has pretty much finished filming. Part 1 of Deathly Hallows is coming out in a month and it was filmed simultaneously with Part 2. So, they're probably just in post-production right now, so Ifans is free to shoot Spidey come December.