I was just wondering about Jeremy Renner’s state of mind as The Bourne Legacy approaches, his first real test as a leading man. Well, if there’s anyone who can empathize, it’s Andrew Garfield. He’s got to be a bigger basket case than Renner, right? One, The Amazing Spider-Man is next week. It’s here. Crunch time. Two, he’s younger, and I don’t think Garfield’s been seasoned much by failure. Like, the worst thing that’s happened to him was that the Oscar nomination for The Social Network didn’t materialise. Relax Garfield fans, I’m not holding that against him—I’m just saying he’s been lucky so far and failure hurts a lot worse when it comes with a price tag in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although I don’t think Spider-Man will fail. As I mentioned previously, there are enough Spider-Man fans out there to propel this movie to success, and the tracking is strong. And it occurred to me that while I am why-is-ing this movie, because we just had three other Spider-Man movies in the last decade, there is a whole new generation of kids that were too young to get into the Sam Raimi trilogy who are primed to glom onto this new iteration of Peter Parker. So there’s your target audience, really. Get the young’uns who missed out before, who won’t suffer from the déjà vu that some critics have complained of.
Weirdly, it’s the comic book fans who seem weariest of the movie. Reviews have stayed mostly positive, which is especially good notice for Garfield, but what complaints there are have largely come from the genre/comic book community. Nit-pickers, you could say, except they each cite the same sense of retreading territory we’ve just visited. They’re not hating on the movie itself—in fact, they all pretty much agree that it’s a decent flick—it’s just that it doesn’t separate itself enough from Raimi’s movies. You know what this reminds me of? The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perfectly well made movie, enjoyable even, but in the end, kind of meh, right? It was just too much like the Swedish films. What was special about it, you know?
In related news, did you see Andrew Garfield in his amazing checked suit at David Letterman? I’m into Garfield’s taste for colorful suits, but there’s usually a little too much going to really sell the look. Well not with this one. He nailed it head to toe. A friend said it looks like something Ryan Gosling would wear, and it does, but if Gosling wore it would be with a dark shirt, no tie, and like, loafers. Garfield styled it traditionally though, and tailored the sh*t out of it, and jebus, he really is a good looking guy.
Fingers crossed, dude. Fingers crossed.
(Lainey: also attached - Andrew Garfield being really cute with the children at the Boys and Girls Club the other day.)
