The Amazing Spider-Man

The Amazing Spider-Man stars a very different Peter Parker with a very different heroine and a fairly different premise. In the earlier Spider-man trilogy, Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider in a lab on a school field trip. Here, he gets bitten in a more sophisticated setting: at Oscorp Company on an official internship, and although he technically sneaks his way in, we know that he's smarter than the scientists.
I guess the way to tackle the rest of this review is to compare it to the older Spider-Man movies, which I liked more. 
Starting with the characters:
Toby McGuire's Peter Parker has this quality of sensitive maturity that makes him very likable. He is a very sweet, lovestruck Peter Parker. Andrew Garfield comes across I believe as the comic book version of Peter Parker, who he portrays as a punk geek that uses more hand motions and batters his eyes and cocks his head and repeats "yeah" many times before saying a sentence. Although I personally find this Peter Parker less endearing, I admire Garfield's effort to make him more of a kid. Sure it's implied in his stance, poise and mannerisms, but I feel the dialogue also makes a big contribution. In this one scene, Spider-Man invades a car that a robber is trying to steal and says with a quirky confidence, "Next time, if you're gonna steal a car, don't dress like a car-robber." Another dimension the Garfield character adds is initial cockiness. The moment he realizes he can, he isn't hesitant to give the school bully a hard time, and argues with the police when they call him a vigilante ("I did eighty per cent of the work for you!"). I enjoyed that element. ALL in all however, Toby McGuire stuck with me more.
HOWEVER, I like the heroine Emma Stone brings to Gwen Stacey. She is smart, plucky and sweet. And Stone brings a sense of charm to her roles that makes it seem like she's secretly teasing the hero. It's entertaining.  I liked her WAY more than the Mary Jane Watson character portrayed by Kirsten Dunst, who at the end of every movie HAD to go through one maniacal booby trap after another and needed to be desperately saved at least five times.
The villain played by Rhys Ifans is Dr. Curt Connors, who lost a hand limb and desperately wants to regenerate it. So Peter derives this formula that Connors uses... but alas. It turns him into a giant lizard. Is he scary? Overall, he's not THAT intimidating. Well, there are a couple of scenes where I jumped because he appears out of the blue in well-timed shots, but overall, when I saw a giant lizard moving on top of cars, I was not impressed. Would I look back, and cringe? No.
The rest of the characters are well-acted but not significant. Sally Fields (from Brothers and Sisters) plays Peter Parker's aunt. There is no Harry Osbourne and it seems as though Peter doesn't have any friends in this installment (until his uncle dies and the bully becomes his school buddy, I guess).
The special-effects are overall dialed down, which I am ambivalent about. I don't think "dialing them down" adds any emotional depth to the movie. Yes, there is this one touching scene where Spider-Man saves a boy from a falling car. It is moving yes, but visually, not that exciting. I thought the train sequence from the first Spider-Man movie is MUCH better, because it is NOT ONLY moving, but there are more people being saved, and more amazement on screen. Also, I guess Peter Parker's past is explored a BIT more, in that we realize his dad's a scientist, had to run away, and left him at his uncle's, but there are a LOT of loopholes that remain unanswered.
 and the sound track is DEFINITELY not as good as the previous movies.
BUT, the romance is based more on chemistry than the usual "damsel in distress" sequence, which pleases me.
Yet I still find this movie to be blah. It is not amazing. I do not think there needs to be a sequel to this prequel. I would rather watch a sequel to Spider-Man 3 (with Emma Stone being Mary Jane Watson perhaps).

Game of Thrones

When I first saw Game of Thrones, I flinched. All the characters seemed flawed in major ways -- including the so called Queen of "Westeros" (the Kingdom a bunch of people are fighting for). But, nonetheless, I found myself getting hooked on.
Game of Thrones is about a series of sexual, historical, and above all, political transgressions that occur between "Lords" and "Houses" spanning across seven kingdoms, all fighting for the throne at King's Landing. I am not sure if the whole world in Game of Thrones consists of seven kingdoms or more, but it seems as though people, who are not kings, princes, or part of the "kings guard" are poor, illegitimate, and unhappy.  Wearing rags and other variations of dark meager clothing, they languish at the feet of their feudal owners and cry morosely for justice in the courts. It seems that the fate of men depend solely on their fathers and that women are either married off or sold to the local brothel.
This leads the high rulers being the only ones who can read, talk and participate in the "Game of Thrones," constantly scheming and backstabbing each other.
So yeah, the tone is grim and the people are doomed --Yet things may not entirely be what they seem; there may be a ray of hope -- and that's what makes Game of Thrones a remarkably good show: the complexity, the complexity, and the complexity. The complexity of the characters, the complexity of the rules, the complexity of the circumstances, the complexity between reality and fantasy, insanity and ingenuity... 
The show is incredibly well made and well acted, with scenes so grim and real, they make Lord of the Rings look like an amateur kids movie. Also, it's incredibly juicy, with a lot of the characters having motivations so immoral that revenge seems the most righteous one.
 There are also dragons, magical fabrications and terrifying creatures called "white walkers."  What is not intriguing about that? 
In an interview with George R.R. Martin, the author of "the Game of Thrones" trilogy,  it is revealed that none of the characters are entirely good or bad, and reflect real people, including Martin himself. If this is true, then Martin must be one messed up fool. I wonder if he shadily negotiated his way into getting his series made into a TV show...