Did nobody at Sony remember Spider-Man 3? I could have sworn that turkey solidified the rule that an origin and conclusion story for three villains plus a romantic subplot did not a cohesive and coherent movie make. Perhaps it did, and they concluded the ideal solution was to chuck a mystery about our hero's parents' shady past on top of the pile. Yeah, that'll make shit easier to understand. Fret not, however. The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro is not Spider-Man 3. Nothing in this film feels uncharacteristic or out of place or, for lack of a better word, bad. There's just so much happening that you barely have a chance to register any of it. It seems bizarre to say of a two and a half hour film that it felt like there wasn't enough, but it's true. There's a scene about halfway through where Electro has been locked up in an asylum, and I couldn't for the life of me remember if he'd been captured in his previous conflict, because the very second the fight was over, the movie was pushing me along into the next subplot. It runs through the whole movie. Peter's submitting photos to The Daily Bugle, but the only hint we get that J. Jonah Jameson exists is an email he sends. The very second a thought has been communicated, the film bounces off into something completely different because it simply doesn't have time to breathe.
Where Spider-Man 3 dropped the ball with Venom, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 does the same for the same reasons with Green Goblin. This is a character that should have been introduced and established so that he may have the spotlight in the next flick. Instead, he's conspicuously absent during the supposed final conflict with Electro only to pop in straight after to give Spidey another fight, and as a result, something detrimental gets ruined in the crossfire. Now, I don't usually do this, but what I'm about to discuss is pretty significant to the Spider-Man universe, and if you're not familiar with anything but the movies, there's a gigantic spoiler ahead. When Green Goblin swoops down on his glider and takes Gwen Stacy, it's pretty obvious what's coming. Her death scene was handled fucking beautifully. She's falling from a clock tower, and Peter shoots his web. He catches her just one second too late. She hits her head on the concrete and when he has her in his arms and sees that thin line of blood come from her nose, it's been done. It was so perfect, as a single scene. Unfortunately, everything preceding and following it was so rushed that almost all emotional resonance was sucked out of it. Its effect on Peter and, more importantly, Spider-Man should have been monumental, and as far as the plot summary goes it was six months of grieving, but it's all tidied up in a quick montage. Of course he'll be Spider-Man again in two minutes, because the movie has no time for him not to be Spider-Man for any more than two minutes.
The reason for this speedy story is obvious. Time that could have been spent making you feel something in the film's final moments is replaced with a Sinister Six hint, which makes it apparent that Sony's trying super hard to catch up to Disney. What a shame that such a good movie is tarnished in the process. And don't read me the wrong way: there is so much good in this movie. The opening scene nails perfectly the appropriate mix of CGI and real effects, giving us perhaps the most exhilarating web-slinging scene yet while real cars flip and crash down below. Every single one of Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone's scenes exude genuine chemistry and warmth that once again made this cold-hearted cynic smile and giggle endlessly. They deserved more than this. They could have had it too, because perhaps the saddest thing is how well the movie understands Spider-Man. There's a scene where a kid is being bullied in an alley. Spider-Man appears and the bullies scatter. He pieces together the kid's science project and says he'll walk him home. As the two begin to walk out of the alley, the kid introduces himself. "I, well, I-I'm Spider-Man," Peter replies. In the final scene, the same kid steps into Rhino's path in a Spidey costume, standing boldly in the face of missiles and machine gun fire. Spider-Man appears behind him, puts a hand on his shoulder and says, "You are the bravest kid I've ever met." I'm crying as I type this. It's such a disappointment that a business strategy forced three really good movies to congeal into one mediocre movie. I liked everything about The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but I didn't love anything. I wasn't given enough time to.
The Grand Budapest Hotel
In the final scene of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the titular character is talking to journalist Jane Winslett-Richardson about her baby. "In twelve years, he'll be eleven and a half," she says. "That was my favourite age," Zissou replies. This line destroyed me. I'd spent the film thinking at the back of my head that the entire experience was kind of like all the stories and games I would think up with my friends in the backyard, running around pretending to be secret agents and hunters, and I was just watching adults act those stories out. That one line confirmed my suspicions, and moved me to tears. I'm a fan of Wes Anderson's entire body of work, but it's his efforts in the last ten years that have really resonated with me. I'm obsessed with the idea of holding onto emotional youth while adulthood looms, and small or large, this concept has popped up in almost all of his works since The Life Aquatic, none so much as in The Fantastic Mr. Fox, a family drama about a father going through an existential crisis born from a children's book about a cheeky mammal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a movie about being a child, but it's also, in tandem, a movie about stories, and how they're passed down.
It begins with a young girl visiting the grave of an author. She has a copy of his book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Perspective then shifts to the author, ruminating before his death about the nature of a storyteller. Perspective then shifts again to the same author a few decades ago, and how he came to meet Zero Moustafa, the curious owner of a dilapidated hotel in impoverished Europe. The author asks Zero how he came to be in possession of such a building, and perspective shifts back a few decades once again, when Zero was a fresh lobby boy under the command of Gustave, his eccentric concierge. Zero's recount of the story moves at an energetic pace, and hops genre at a whim, from adventure to romance to murder mystery to action film to even horror at one point. What it results in is a tale with small details that couldn't possibly be believed, if only for how cartoonish they seem. But that's because this is a story being told by an old man, pulled from his memories of when he was a child, and how he would have perceived them at the time. Why wouldn't he remember being shot at as an all-out gunfight between the entire floor of the hotel? To that end, Gustave's unrealistic personality is probably also being pulled from Zero's perception of him at the time. He's a mature kid, so he can see the man as a Peter Pan who was born in the wrong decade. He knows his lifestyle is bullshit and outdated, and so is he, but he's so determined not to let the facade fall, and in that way becomes heroic in Zero's eyes.
As always, Wes Anderson communicates these themes on a technical level as well. Aspect ratios change based on who is currently narrating at what time. When Zero is young, the ratio is lower, to reflect films of that time, but to also communicate that he was steadfast in his professional ambitions at this point of his life, with little thought for anything else. When he is old, the screen is far wider because he has a greater understanding of life's importance. In tandem, the author's is so wide at this same point in time because the world is his playground, and he's treating it as such, but it shrinks in old age because these wonders are no longer in front of him and his life has settled down. Wes Anderson still puts a fucking boatload of information and thought into every second of film. My favourites include a shot of Gustave and Zero standing in front of two wagons, one slightly shonky with small, washed out blue wheels and the other freshly built, with two huge, bright red wheels, and, as a result, the staggering colour palette: every scene built of two perfect colour wheel contrasts. But my absolute favourite thing about The Grand Budapest Hotel comes from one man asking another a question, and like a good storyteller, he knows that a question is just an opportunity to tell a tale. How did Zero come to own the building? That isn't really answered until the last couple of minutes. Does that make it a bad story? We come to the last shot of the film. The young girl is still sat by the grave, reading the book. The film is the author's retelling of Zero's account of his childhood memories. There must be something worth hearing in a story so old.
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