The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro

Every comic book movie faces the same challenge when going up on the big screen, to stay faithful to the original comic or to appeal to the sensibilities of modern cinema, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Rise of Electro comes up firmly on the side of the comic books.

While the original Amazing Spider-Man faltered, not quite finding the right balance between its origins and the "realistic" stories current cinema seems to be enamored with, this film is much more successful in establishing tone.

TAS:ROE picks up roughly a year or so after the last film, with Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) fighting street thugs and Russian mobsters while graduating from his final year of high-school.

Luckily the film skips right to the graduation because watching Peter Parker doing his juggling act of school/personal life/superherodom yet again is probably more than the audience would have been able to take.

Insert "catching the bus" pun here.

Django Unchained

Quentin Tarantino has perfected his craft of making an exploitation film in his most recent venture, Django Unchained.

Tarantino continues the tirade against the racists and bigots he started in his Nazi exploitation piece Inglourious Basterds, this time aiming at slave traders in the Deep South of the USA.

Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave in the mid 1800s, being transported across the country for sale. About half way through their journey, the convoy is stopped by a traveler who offers to buy Django. Vexed by the traveler's fancy words and offended by the way he speaks politely to the slaves, the slavers try to get rid of the traveler by force. This ends badly when the traveler kills one slaver and severely maims the other.

Turns out, the traveler is one Dr King Schultz (Christopher Waltz), a bounty hunter who wants to use Django to identify a trio of outlaws. During their travels, Django quickly adapts to the hunter's life and a friendship begins to blossom between the two men, with the former slave telling Schultz he wants to find his wife.