Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

I can't figure out if I'm supposed to be happy or sad right now. I do know that I liked this film and that I did get all emotional at the end. This movie certainly has its funny bits, but it has an equal number of touching, sentimental moments as well, which I guess is the best way to handle a movie about the end of life on earth.
Steve Carell does an excellent job as Dodge. He really plays it down, letting the absurdity of the various situations and the other actors deal with the comedic aspect. This isn't like his role in the 40 year old virgin where he is playing a straight man to the rest of the cast, he plays Dodge as this low-key nice guy who is willing to admit that he has wasted his life but still maintains enough personal integrity to do right by people and dogs.
Keira Knightley plays Penny, the opposite to Dodge. Her character is fr ought with absurdities, but not ones that were brought on by the end of days, but rather ones that she has always had. While more chaotic, Penny turns out to be a good soul, too. Knightley handles the role with the panache you would expect from her. She does a job that I put on par with Natalie Portman in Garden State - quirky but adorable, and completely believable.
I found this film really interesting for the way it showed how different people would react to the news that the world was coming to an end. Some people go wild, some handle it with grace. Most seem to not know what to do with themselves. I think this is a pretty good representation. I do think that there would be more lawlessness. There wouldn't just be rioting in the major cities with some people getting killed by the angry mobs, I think there would be a lot of people that were just, "fuck it" and would grab their guns and set out to see how many they could kill before someone got them. You kind of get a hint of this with Grissom's character, I mean, William Peterson's character. He found out that he had inoperable cancer and six months to live right before the world found out that it only had three weeks left to go, so he hires an assassin to take himself out. Actually, I'm not sure if hiring is the right term as much as just asking someone to provide a service. It does make you think about how you would handle the situation.
Of course the setting and premise of this movie is an allegory for how unpredictable and short our lives can be and often are. The message is that if you want something, you should try now, else you might die unfulfilled, unhappy and very alone. In the case of this film, that was going to quite literally going to happen.
One thing about this movie that really amuses me - at the very beginning of the movie when Dodge and his wife, Linda, hear about the impending  doom, she just gets out of the car and runs away and Dodge never sees her again. That is not what's funny, that's actually kind of heart-breaking. What is funny is that Linda is played by Steve Carell's real-life wife, Nancy. That is funny stuff, and I guess being a producer of the film as well as a star does have it's moments.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World on IMDb

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

When this movie hit the theatres, I wasn't that excited about it. I like the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies. Sure, the third one was not the movie it could (should) have been, but I don't hold that against Raimi, I know that at the last minute his script was changed on him and he was forced to add a whole bunch of crap to make the producers happy. I liked the complete geekiness of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker. I loved the interaction between Parker and Watson and Osborn. I did not think this needed a reboot, just a rework, going back to the original idea that Raimi had. I was looking forward to going farther along the Spider-Man timeline and discovering what his life was like after high school and college. I had hoped that it would involve Dr. Connors and the Lizard.
Instead I got a reboot that didn't have Mary Jane Watson or J. Jonah Jamison. I got a new cast, a new director and new producers. I got some British kid playing a beloved American icon. I got a revamp of the origin story with definite nods to the original version but not following it. And you know what else I got? A totally enjoyable movie.
Before the X-Men, before Batman and Superman, I was a fan of Spider-Man. I have distinct memories from when I was four years old and having a Spider-Man web shooter toy. I vaguely recall watching a Spider-Man cartoon. I would be older before I would see the 1970s live action films and the Saturday morning cartoon that teamed Spider-Man up with Iceman and Firestar. It would be late grade school before I started collecting the comic books and wearing the red knit cap with the Spider-Man suit design - the hat that covered your whole face except for your eyes and that I would wear and run around the neighborhood pretending to shoot webbing from my hands, though I don't recall ever battling any of his super foes. But then I was the only kid that would pretend to be Han Solo or Luke Skywalker. If someone else who'd have been willing to be the "good guy" I would have gladly portrayed the villain (especially Boba Fett as I recall). But the neighborhood kids were only interested in playing with the toys. That's fine, because I had the books to read and my imagination was more fertile than all of their's combined then and now.
While I was a true collector and kept all of my new comics bagged on boards, I also had a huge collection of less than new comics garnered from garage sales and flea markets. In a couple of years I was able to put together hundreds of issues of the various Spider-Man titles which I read several times. It's because of this that I can handle a reboot of the movie series and not get too upset about it. The run of the comics has seen the origin story told and retold a number of times. Peter Parker ages and matures and then is snapped back to that moment of beginning. Would it have been nice to get more than a trilogy out of the Raimi version of Spider-Man? Hell ya. But, this new kid, Andrew Garfield, did a pretty spectacular job. It was refreshing to see Gwen Stacey be the focus of his affections. And I really like the playing up of the mysterious nature of the disappearance of Richard and Mary Parker.

The Amazing Spider-Man at IMDb