REVIEW: ‘The Amazing Spider‑Man 2’ Spins a… Oh, I Can’t Even Be Bothered to Think of a Clever Pun

Dear Mark Webb —

I only just noticed writing the title to this piece how appropriate your last name is to the Marvel franchise you have tried to reboot. The fact I didn’t notice the minute your name came up on the screen at the closing credits shows how little I care. Still, even if my mind was yawning, you affected my post-screening gym workout not one wit.

I do have to apologize for not seeing every frame of The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Having earlier been swimming, I got one of those sudden cardio-induced hunger attacks in the middle of the second act — I understand why Karl Lagerfeld advises not to exercise if you want to stay slim. I knew that with an unnecessary running time of nearly two and a half hours, and with a weightlifting session pending, I needed nourishment.

The Underage‑Sex Reverse Richter Scale

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

Editor’s Note: This marks the 100th post on the PFC blog, which wouldn’t mean much if this were TMZ with a dozen fluffy gossip posts an hour, but a PFC piece requires a lot of TLC to create.  It’s only appropriate that Eric Baker take this honor because it is he who kicked us over the 4,000-views-a-day mark on Friday with his Duran Duran story.  — James Killough

We were talking movie directors here the other day (actually, I was talking movie directors and Killough was like, “Yeah whatever, Baker—shut the fuck up—I know”) and Roman Polanski came up, not for his movies but for his marriage to Sharon Tate. The Polanski-Tate union suffered from the dreaded Billy Joel-Christie Brinkley syndrome years before medical science had even identified the disease, which occurs when an ugly, talented man marries a beautiful, possibly talented, but who cares, she’s a goddess, woman. And Sharon Tate was a goddess.

But, Sharon, why Frodo? WHY?

You may know that Tate was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson’s gang and that Polanski went on to perpetrate a sexual act against a 13-year-old girl in the mid 1970s.