Alex writes about his favourite moment in The Amazing Spider-Man, and why Spidey will always be his favourite superhero, no matter how many mediocre movies he’s in.<\/em><\/p>\n

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NO.<\/p><\/div>\n
As I walked past a small, basement theatre in Whistler earlier that afternoon, I checked the movie listings that were taped to its front door, to see what I wish I was doing instead of carrying around 100 pounds of camera equipment. (I assume this is the lazy person\u2019s version of window-shopping.) The Amazing Spider-Man was playing, a movie I was so interested in that – for approximately ninety seconds – it made me almost not want to go on this job at all. I assumed I wouldn\u2019t get time to go see it until I got back into Ontario, but then I got lucky\/just kinda fucked off for two hours.<\/p>\n
When I actually went down into the theatre, I was first struck by how fucking old everything was. This theatre certainly remains unchanged from the last time a Spider-Man franchise began, and it looked like it probably hasn\u2019t changed since Spidey animators in the 1960s used odd colour palettes to give six-year-old kids pseudo-acid nightmares. After buying a ticket, I had to walk down a weird, long hallway with faded James Dean and Marilyn Monroe paintings to get to my actual cinema, and the chairs in the room were so comically gigantic that two of me could have fit in one. The floor was sticky, I could tell the sound was probably going to screw up a bit at some points during the movie, and the pre-movie advertisements consisted of promotions for local clothing stores that inexplicably encouraged cheating on your spouse. I also wondered why the theatre\u2019s left section was designed to only have rows of two seats, practically begging couples to give each other handjobs. But whatever, I was about to watch a movie. And regardless of the fact that I was pretty sure said movie would be aimed at the Twilight crowd, I was excited.<\/p>\n
Again, the movie itself was far from stellar. The parts that were good were incredible, but even the good scenes never really flowed into one another \u2013 it was like a series of good three page scenes in a comic, but none of them ever totally tied together. Certain scenes made me extremely happy, and others pissed me off to no end. Somehow, though, at one point in the first half of the movie, I completely forgot where I was. Not like when people hyperbolically claim that they got lost in the metaphorical wilderness of good fiction, but I was literally confused as to where I was. After a particularly good scene ended and a worse one began, I realized I did not recognize the room I was in. Of course, I quickly clued in, and then realized that this brief moment was precisely the reason I go to the movies at all. People always over-romanticize the idea of movies as escapism or a way to truly lose yourself in something, but I never believed Peter Travers or Roger Ebert when they said these things. I assumed these were childhood feelings that they wish would still happen, but never actually do. Now, however, I might.<\/p>\n
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I cannot stress enough how rarely this feeling happens. In fact, I can only think of two other times in my adult life that this has occurred, and I feel like only the memory of one of those occurrences remains unembellished. It\u2019s a weird, unknowable feeling, and whenever it happens, I\u2019m perplexed. A similar feeling can occur when you find yourself moved emotionally in some way by a piece of art, particularly by an idea you didn\u2019t realize you agreed with, or a piece of score that doesn\u2019t seem like something you should even like. All emotions are like this; laughter, sadness, and excitement all have to hit you when you don\u2019t expect it in order to deliver any sort of potent punch. If you can see the joke coming, or hear the John Williams music swell as a horse solves Nazism, the emotions simply don\u2019t hit you as hard as they would if you weren\u2019t expecting them. Since we\u2019re all media literate beings in a world that often treats us otherwise, we\u2019re rarely surprised anymore. And the only reason to repeatedly do something is to hope to be surprised by anything.<\/p>\n
The Amazing Spider-Man is a movie about Peter Parker trying to find his place in the world: not necessarily as Spider-Man, even, but as the teenaged Parker, as we are in the post-Batman Begins era and this is how it is now. Despite having always self-identified with Pete (minus the murdered uncle, superpowers, and good grades in science classes) I never really felt like him when I was a teenager. I was a nerdier teenager to an extent, but I was always confident in that aspect of my personality. I was never good at sports, but I took gym because I liked it regardless of my lack of skills, and I shrugged off the consistent defeat at the hands of the better athletes. Nobody disliked me in high school, so I disliked nobody. I didn\u2019t have a goth phase, because I didn\u2019t feel I earned it, having lived a remarkably easy life. I still feel this way, but I\u2019m far more confused about where I\u2019m going now than I ever was as a teenager. When I was Peter Parker\u2019s age, going to the movies a few times a week after school, I assumed I would graduate, find a job I liked and just do that until I die. Now that I\u2019m about ten years older than my favourite teenaged superhero, I know I found that job, but I don\u2019t know how to make a living doing it. It probably shouldn\u2019t have to involve being deliriously tired from a paying job I\u2019m not entirely into, but it might have to. So be it. Maybe I just need to continue to try to lose myself at the movies in order to figure out where it is I should be headed when I leave the theatre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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