Rogueish

Perhaps the main thing I took away from The Amazing Spiderman is how pretty Emma Stone’s eyes look through the IMAX projection process, but the rest of the film is pretty good, too. For plot purposes Peter Parker was kind of a nerd, but in general demeanor he seemed more of a hipster, with his skateboard and vintage camera. I wonder if this reflects a more general change in the way New York presents itself. The Raimi Spider-man films were set in a kind of Giuliani-fied New York, a kind of 50s theme park of a city; the new film on the other hand represents a city which seems grittier, more aware of its decaying industrial infrastructure, but this is aestheticized in a characteristically hipster way. See for instance the scene where Peter Parker uses an old factory building to try out his Spider-man powers, as something between a gym and a circus (I was reminded of the scene in Girls where Hannah and Adam cycle to a train yard in search of scrap metal for some kind of art project).