Badminton and Spiderman

I've been playing badminton all week with my family. It's nice! It's the sport I am best at. LoL, but I guess everyone is good at badminton. It doesn't require much skills, besides hand-eye coordination and luck, unless you are intentionally trying to scorn the other person and spiking it downwards every chance you get. In that case, you are no fun to play with. But I'm having a good time, sweating it out, playing in the shade. It's nice, very nice. It's what summer is all about.

On another note, I saw The Amazing Spiderman yesterday. I liked it. It's the best comic book superhero movie I've seen this year. Yup, Avengers, I'm talking to you. I liked Spidey better. (I didn't really like The Avengers.) But we will see how well The Amazing Spiderman stacks up againstThe Dark Knight Rises, when it comes out later this month. I absolutely loved The Dark Knight and I'm expecting The Dark Knight Rises to be just as great. Those are my two favorite comic book superheroes: Spiderman and Batman.

Minor Spoiler Alert.

But they're different movies. The characters are different, so maybe there's room for the both of them in the cinemas. For one, the villains in Christopher Nolan's Batman are evil, downright evil. Can a being be that evil? While the villains in Spiderman are more like anti-villians. They are beings who are confused between what is good and what is bad. Dr.Connor/Lizard genuinely believed he was helping the world. He also had a sort of Jekyll/Hyde complex, which I won't go into. I also can relate more to Peter Parker than I can to Bruce Wayne. I do really like what Nolan did with Bruce Wayne's character though. But when it comes down to it, an angst filled, nerdy Peter Parker is more down my alley than a confused and lost billionaire Bruce Wayne.

And that 's what I really liked about The Amazing Spiderman: how nerdy the new Peter Parker was. I haven't read the comics, so I don't know how nerdy Parker is supposed to be, but I liked the very nerdy Parker. When I saw that he had a magnify glass on top of a PCB, I was like this nerd is legit. We have those magnify glasses in our lab, because sometimes, really, the text on the random components we amass is just too damn small to distinguish, and somethings are nigh impossible to solder without a magnify glass. The web slingers gadgets were also different from the previous Spiderman, who didn't need a gadget to sling web. The slingers, once again, show how nerdy Peter Parker was to be able to invent them. The previous Spiderman was also a nerd but he didn't display any of it asides from attending Columbia, if I remember correctly. I also thought the portrayal of Peter Parker by Andrew Garfield was much better than Toby Maguire. I also like Gwen Stacy better than Mary Jane Watson. Gwen has way more going for her than just looks, which was basically what MJ had. And Emma Stone nailed her part as Gwen Stacy.

So The Amazing Spiderman beats it's predecessor is the conclusion.

Post Script: I updated the header over at Stay Curious Emily. I must admit it took me a lot longer to draw than it should've and it's nothing great. But hey, it's something, and I like it.