Meet the New Spider-Man, Same As The Old Spider-Man. Mostly.

So they rebooted Spider-Man.  Some people think this is stupid, having a new Spider-Man this soon after the last movie.  To which I say, “Did you see the last movie?”  No offense, man, but better to leave that in the wreckage and start over than trying to venture into IV territory.
There has never been a really good fourth movie in a series.  Ever.  Burn it to the ground.
Anyway, so this new Spider-Man is pretty much the same as the old Spider-Man – young boy learns about responsibility through a gunshot wound, fights crime, does not get the girl.  And it’s satisfying.  It’s not quite as good as Spider-Man 2 – what could be? – but it’s better than the first first Spider-Man.  Should you go see it?  Do you like people swinging from rooftops, beating up muggers?
Well then.  Your answer’s clear.
The difference is really all about nuances, and the nuance here is that Toby Macguire was a nerdy-looking kid who became smooth when the time came.  His upside-down kiss with Mary Jane?  Smokin’.  When he put on the suit, he became someone who was actually kinda cool.
Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man is never cool.  He moves like a spastic bug – no, seriously, he’s trying to move like a spider, all gawky.  When he kisses Gwen Stacey, it’s almost wince-inducing, because he’s not quite sure where his mouth goes, and neither is she, and though he later proclaims her a good kisser, one senses a bit of rightful hesitation before she returns the favor.  He has the haircut of a modern emo star, but if there’s an opposite to “Moves like Jagger,” well, Andrew nails it.
However, Garfield’s Spider-Man makes up for it by being clever.  Toby’s Spidey lucked into things, evincing no particular brightness, whereas this new Spider-Man knows science!  He reads books!  He uses tricks in combat, bouncing all sorts of things with his webbing to dazzle his enemy!  Which, in a way, makes him more of a hero.  You had problems buying Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man as being someone hated by the crowd, but Garfield’s Spider-Man?  He moves like an untrained kid with super-speed flailing about.  You believe he could hurt someone by accident.  He looks a little out-of-control.
Which is kind of nice.  Both Gwen Stacey (Spidey’s TRUE love, he says sneeringly) and Peter are incoherent, trailing off in Seinfeld-ish riffs as they’re both a little too flustered to finish their thoughts.  Neither of them are cool.  You wind up rooting for them because, hell, who else would they date?
Obvious plot is obvious, but this is a comic book movie and we know that President Josiah Bartlett must die.  Unfortunately, the stunt casting of Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May is distracting, because I kept going, “Why is Forrest Gump’s Mom raising Peter Parker?”  And Martin Sheen is trying a little too hard to give big speeches, and not quite hard enough to connect with Peter on a human level.  Ben’s death, however, is exceptionally painful because it’s not the usual comics death where he gets to gasp out the classic speech about “With great power comes great responsibility” before he dies – no, he just gets shot.  And his legacy is a voicemail Peter can’t quite bear to listen to.
The weakest part of this Spider-Man is, sadly, the villain.  The Green Goblin was possessed of all of Willem Dafoe’s inherent looniness, and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock was the warm, supportive uncle you’d always wanted to have.  Curt Connors, however, is pretty much a vacant space on screen.  He stares longingly at his missing arm, as though it’s where his screen presence used to be.  When he becomes the Lizard, the initial scene is very compelling as he’s trying to be the hero, but then he degenerates into monologuing as he starts wanting to CHANGE TEH WORLD in a way that’s not really driven by his character all that much.
And Denis Leary does a fine job playing Denis Leary.  If you’ve always wanted to see Denis Leary in a Spider-Man film, well, here he is.  If you expect to see him act as Captain Stacey, well, let us just say that his last major scene in the film is perhaps the most laid-back approach to tragedy one will ever witness.  In a moment of what must be personal anguish, he looks as though he’s about to eat a sandwich.
Still, hey, it’s Spider-Man.  It’s a good riff on an old favorite.  Well worth seeing, if not nearly as exciting as the first time you saw Spidey bouncing around.  They do a good job with the 3-D, but there’s only so many ways you can make a web-slinger crawl.  Still, it made my birthday celebrations grand.

Lo! My Natal Anniversary Is This Very Day!

At 10:13 this evening, I will turn 43.  That’s right; at least for this year, I’ll be in the primes of my life.
That sound you hear is the next “tick” counting towards my inevitable demise – a situation that might well cause you to go, “Shouldn’t I give this poor old man a present of some sort, perhaps with candles atop?  That seems like some sort of tradition.” And lo!  There are two things you can do!
First off, if y’haven’t noticed, I’m blogging my butt off for the Clarion Blog-A-Thon.  I’m doing my usual Clarion Echo schtick, writing live fiction for a secret community of donors, which is both wonderful and sad; the wonderful thing is that I think this is the best Clarion Echo I’ve ever had.  Since I’m plotting a novel, this is really getting into the nitty gritty of “How do you balance creativity with achieving the goals you want for this story?” – and as I develop character profiles and themes and explain why things do or do not work, I’m really displaying a lot of how the writers’ process goes.  I wish I’d had access to this kind of thing back when I was still struggling.
The sad thing is that this is my lowest-attended Clarion Echo ever.  Oh, the people in there are talky and vibrant, but several of my usual writer-buddies from part Echos are missing.  I’m left wondering whether “plotting” just isn’t as big a draw as “pure writing,” even if I find this detail more fascinating.
In any case, if you wanna make a weasel feel happier as he crawls his way towards the grave, then donate $5 and join the community!  More people in there make me happy.  That’s the way this works.
Failing that, if you’d like to get me an inexpensive gift that will nevertheless make me do little happydances of joy, feel free to post cheesecake pictures of yourself in the comments here. (Alternatively, if they’re spicy or you’re shy, mail ’em to me at theferrett@theferrett.com.)
If you do not know what cheesecake pictures are, they are not pictures of desserts. According to Wikipedia, which is always correct and never in error, “For ‘Cheesecake’ in the sense of female glamour photograph, often sensual, see Pin-up girl.” A slightly antiquated term, but hey – if Justin Timberlake can bring sexy back, I can bring cheesecake back.  (And I’m antiquated at this point, so I can use antiquated terms!)
(As always, every year I do this, some guy goes, “Oh ho, here I am! You didn’t expect this!” and posts a picture of himself. And it’s true that I’m straight, but a) I like seeing pictures of people anyway, b) I’m never shocked by photos of guys, and c) as far as I’m concerned, posting cute pictures of yourself where women can see them is always a good idea. So it’s like whoah, you sure have put one on me, sirrah.)

How Would You Like To Read the Fairyland Sequel Before Anyone Else Does?

I’m going to tell you how you can read The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There long before almost anyone else does.  But first, you have to understand why “Catherynne M. Valente” and “Clarion” go together in my mind.
My friend Cat Valente was instrumental in getting me to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.  She knew I was stalled in my writing, and needed a breakthrough.  She told me about it, she bugged me weekly about applying for until all right, Cat, I’ll submit a damn story, and when I got accepted she was my biggest cheerleader. And in the four years since Clarion, I’ve sold twenty-two stories and got nominated for a Nebula, so it certainly got me over the hump.
Which is why it’s nice, you understand, to see that she’s had some success herself since I went to Clarion.
At the time, she was breaking out with her Orphan’s Tales series, but Cat Valente has since become a genuine superstar with her YA book The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which became a New York Times Bestseller.   She’s been nominated for just about any major award you can imagine.  Her lush prose was famed before, but now she’s inspiring young girls everywhere with her bold, sensible protagonists.  And I couldn’t be prouder.
But good Cat Valente fans know that she’s written a sequel: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There.  Most people can’t get their hands on it until October.  But you have a chance to win an Advanced Reading Copy, signed by Ms. Valente, and read it early!  And how do you do that?
By donating to the Clarion Write-A-Thon Fund, which helps get people scholarships to future classes.
Here’s how it works: Every $5 donated to the Clarion Write-A-thon gets you one entry into the raffle, which will be held at the beginning of August.  Cat’s book is the second of twelve planned prizes.  When the raffle is drawn, the first winner will have first choice of all the fabulous prizes to offer, and the second winner will have second choice, and so on.  (I have no guarantee on when exactly Cat will send it, but one assumes “Some point before the book is out.”)
The current prizes are:

• An ARC of The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks” (premiering tonight if you’re in San Francisco! Go!)

And what you get for your donations:

• Every $5 donation gets you an entry into our raffle pool
• $10 total donations will get you access to the Clarion Echo community, where I am live-plotting my novel in progress in an attempt to teach some of what I have learned at Clarion.  (You’ll need a LiveJournal account to join, so email me with your name and I’ll make sure you get in.)
• $25 will get you a story critique, if there are slots available.  You’ve got three left!  Go!

Shut Up And Take It, You Wonderful Person You

So over on Fetlife, there was a fascinating discussion of “forced adoration” that went like this:
“Instead of a bottom being restrained and being humiliated and abused, why not try some forced adoration?  Totally different type of experience: being restrained, while friends and members of the community take turns writing kind things, compliments, comments, affirmations, hopes, all over your body.”
A friend of mine, who is notably neurotic about accepting kindness, said “I think this would be a hard limit for me. I feel horrible just thinking about it happening to me.”  Many others followed, saying that being forced to endure compliments and kindness would be unthinkable for them.
That made me sad, but it also made me think.  How awful is it in our society that so many of feel guilty and sick about hearing the things people love about us?  Learning to accept compliments is, I think, vital for happiness and health.
So I’m spontaneously declaring today National Accept-the-Niceness Day.  Anyone posting in the comments of this entry may be complimented, for no reason whatsoever, by anyone who knows good things about them.  Anyone posting in the comments of this entry are encouraged to say something wonderful about someone else, in the hopes that the subject of their niceness will see this.
And anyone complimented in these threads cannot deny the compliment.  Today, here, you must own the fact that you have made someone happy enough that they feel the urge to gush about you.  This is not them doing it out of obligation, for who the hell needs to post in a thread on some dude’s blog?  This is not them being lured into an illusion of your wonderfulness – if you’re reading it, drop your impostor syndrome for a moment.  Open yourself to the idea that what they’re happy about is actually real.
Anyone reading this is welcome to steal the idea for their own.  And then post a variation on their blog.

"Bleah" is the Word Du Jour

I’m awfully glad the Supreme Court didn’t strike down Obamacare, because I got the news yesterday that someone very dear to me (not Gini) may need a great deal of medical treatment in the near future.  So while I’m personally in a decent mood, I am sad for other people.
So no post for today (except for my inevitable post in the Clarion Echo community, since my relentless need to give people a value for their wonderful blog-a-thon donations never stops).
If you need an absolute Ferrett fix, I posted an “Ask Me Anything” over at Fetlife, which already has some interesting questions about my seduction techniques, how I avoid bruising my partner’s feelings, and what my favorite part of a woman’s body is.  If you’ve got an account, check it out, and feel free to ask, of course.