I liked it but I was bored for most of it due to the origin story. What saves that first hour though is the cast. Andrew Garfield is great (although he is a bit tall and.....28 years old) as are Emma Stone and President Bartlet. Also, while I liked the fact that this Spider-man quipped a fair few times, the action scenes were somewhat lacking. I don't want to get into spoilers but the last scene annoyed me a tad. It made a previous event in the film a bit pointless.......

Also, who asks a boy round for dinner with your family on the first date?

This is where the idea of "constantly increasing revenues" kills the business. The suits are beholden to their shareholders to make more money every year than the year before, to where movies that make 100 million domestic aren't viewed as blockbusters anymore (when they used to be just 15-20 years ago). No, now you have to make 1 billion worldwide to be considered a big success, so instead of having several moderately successful medium budget flicks, lets throw 200 million at 3 tentpoles and call it a day.

I still don't understand how in the fuck these movies are spending this money either, because it sure as hell isn't on screen. It's like film-makers aren't even TRYING anymore to be resourceful. How the hell do you go into Green Lantern and decide "Naww, we'll do his mask in post, it won't be a problem". That's such a self-evidently terrible idea, like, lets spend 100 million dollars making a rubber-looking mask in Post. Same thing with something like Captain America, where instead of using a body-double with face-replacement, they decided to just film it with Evans and shrink him in post. It ended up looking great, but you can't tell me it wouldn't have been 3 times cheaper and looked just as good if they just did face-replacement.

At least with something like Dark Knight Rises, I see 500 extras fighting on wall-street, and I see Nolan hanging a plane fuselage from a helicopter as he has stunt guys parachuting onto it, but he seems to really be the last holdout still clinging to the old-school big-budget film-making arts.

If there's any hope on the horizon, it's that film-technology/craft/funding has finally trickled down enough in foreign countries that they're now starting to make the kind of movies that hollywood used to. I wouldn't be surprised if some really great more-restrained genre movies come out of Europe/Asia in the next 20 years.

Globalization - if you're making films for one culture, you can play with the rules, give a wink, rely on audience knowledge, etc. But if you now have to be mindful of BRICK (Brazil, Russia, India, China, Korea), it's gotta be as bland, generic and dumb and light-on-dialogue as possible, so it plays in all markets with as little modification as possible.
Everyone can understand chasing and 'plosions, no matter what language they speak or if they've been educated in some foreign college. So serve up 2 hours of chasing and 'plosions, with an A-lister and a pretty side-kick and the suits say that's guaranteed $300M profit.