So you went and saw The Amazing Spider-Man to witness Andrew and Emma fall in love. Sweet. A lot of critics, comic geek bloggers and my FB friends have been praising The Amazing Spider-Man, mostly for the relationship between Gwen and Peter. I whole heartedly disagree with all of you. There were about a gazillion critical story errors and the script was dull as clipping dry toenails. My one sentence review is: “I’m assuming it’s better than Battleship.” Reading positive reviews has me ranting at my computer screen, wanting to respond with all the reasons the film failed, when it occurs to me: I have a bi-weekly online column. I hardly ever post anything controversial or offensive, and I am inspired by this genius Promethius review, so I figured it was about time to express a contrary opinion (sorry to butt into your space On The Contrary). So here are the reasons The Ambianzing Spiderman super disappointed me and the people who saw the movie with me. I do address that relationship thing in my final point below. (yes I know it’s Spider-Man, but out of disrespect I’ve been calling him Spiderman in one quick blurt. Take THAT mysterious corporate movie production overlords!) WARNING: There are spoilers out the wahzoo in this piece. Plot Problems Once Dennis Leary makes Peter Parker realize Spiderman is just a vigilante (by chasing guys who look like his Uncle’s killer) they just DROP the whole “Who killed Uncle Ben?” thing. Did the writer/director think “Ok, well we’ve used that plot point to get us to here. We don’t really need to tie that storyline up do we? Nah…” How did Peter Parker get the “super tensile spider web” vials from Oscorp? Isn’t that stuff worth a ton of...

Just where has Nerd in Transition been? She has been commuting from downtown Los Angeles to downtown Long Beach five days a week, traveling two hours each way on our cities brilliantly engineered mass transit system. The reason for this oft repeated time suck? Free rehearsal space in Long Beach. As you may know from a long ago blogumn I wrote, I took it upon myself to produce a version of the play Night Mother. I picked a director I have known for a few years, yet never worked with, approached her about coming on board with me and she said yes. We cast the Mother role, I took the daughter role, and rehearsals started. Halfway through the woman playing the Mother dropped out. Looking at this as an welcome opportunity I pushed the show dates back from June to September, recast the mother role and started rehearsals back up a month later. This is the first time I have produced anything. It’s kinda a big deal. Aside from the obvious career push and artistic actor fulfilment performing in this particular show could provide, my reasons for taking on the producer role go much deeper. I have a horribly destructive habit of starting things and not finishing them. So I decided that the next step up in my period of transition would be to take on a rather large project and see it through to the end as the leader. I also have a wonderfully constructive habit of attacking a problem head on. Such as the time I decided to conquer my fear of singing in front of people by performing the National Anthem in the middle of a roller derby track surrounded by almost 2000 people. The way I saw it by producing...