Spidey: $200 Million Revenge Of The Nerd
As critic Anthony Lane puts it: ‘Our hero, Peter Parker, is played by Andrew Garfield — Tobey Maguire, the previous incumbent, having reached the unthinkable age of thirty-seven. Garfield was excellent as the hapless Eduardo Saverin in “The Social Network,†and he still bears the mournful traces of a smart kid who had to agree to an out-of-court settlement. If anything, he is rather too mournful. I know that years of sappy cinema have left me lachrymose-intolerant, but I really couldn’t understand why Garfield’s Bambi eyes kept glinting with a mist of tears. Peter lives in Queens with his Uncle Ben (Martin Sheen) and Aunt May (Sally Field). His closest friend is a skateboard, which I guess is a step up from Mark Zuckerberg. As befits so many superheroes-in-waiting, Peter is bullied, and, if we never entirely shake off the sense that we are witnessing a complex, two-hundred-million-dollar revenge of the nerd, that also is a defining strain of the genre.’
