Kick-Ass 2

I saw Kick-Ass 2 a couple of weeks ago. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. The film's tone shifts so often, sometimes within a scene, that it kept me off balance for nearly its entire running time. Sometimes, it's a comedy. Sometimes, it's an action adventure. Sometimes, it's a gruesome and tragic horror show.

Here's the setup: it's a year or two after the events of the original Kick-Ass (which I quite liked.  See my review at the link). Our hero has hung up his costume, and second (but more interesting) lead Hit Girl has done the same. But it's boring in the real world, and someone's gotta take on evildoers. Soon enough, our leads are back in harness: and just in time. Evil has a plan.

With a setup like that, a film can go anywhere. Kick-Ass 2 goes everywhere. It's an adolescent comedy, a superhero teamup movie, and a horror movie all at the same time. Do you like vomit gags? Kick-Ass 2 has 'em. Do you like that shot in which the team walks, slo-mo, abreast toward the camera? Oh, yeah. How are you with graphic torture and murder? Sexual assault? An underage girl using a pair of pliers to rip off a man's penis? Yeah, me neither.

The film has another strange feature: its title character isn't particularly interesting. Aaron-Taylor Johnson plays Dave Lizewski (aka Kick-Ass) as a bland nobody, someone who comes fully alive only when in costume. While Lizewski (who made a fine lead in Godzilla) does the job, he has a real handicap: he's cast opposite Chloë Grace Moretz, who's a genuine movie star. Not only does she have the more interesting character (a 9th-grader so damaged that she's only happy when killing), but she's a better actor; she brings a maturity and sophistication to her performance that reminds me of a young Jodie Foster.

So, toss together a number of dissonant elements, put your best performer in a supporting role, and bake until strange. If that sounds like a good recipe to you, you just might enjoy Kick-Ass 2.

The Best of 2010

WHAT I THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT I SAW - 2010

2010 has been another great year in movies.  Among the top three films on this year’s list, any one could have taken the top spot.  But #1 is so visionary, so refreshingly original, that I believe it is the best film of 2010.

#10:  Kick-Ass
   
Violent, vulgar, clever, and careful, Kick-Ass is an audacious and original take on the superhero genre.  You won’t see another film like it this year.
   
#9:  The Killer Inside Me
   
It takes great big stones to make a lurid, pulpy novel into a lurid, pulpy movie with world-class production values.  It takes even bigger stones to film its story in all its horror and expect an audience to stick with its antihero.  The Killer Inside Me gambles big and rakes in all the chips, delivering a compelling and disturbing story while establishing Casey Affleck as one of the most interesting young actors working in American film today.
   
#8:  The Secret of Kells
   
In this animated feature, young Brendan is a monk in an abbey/fortress in medieval Ireland.  Torn between the abbot who’s driven to ready for the next Viking attack and the illuminator who unleashes his genius, Brendan finds a magical ally deep in the woods.  The Secret of Kells reflects its milieu with a daring 2-D animation style that reflects the illuminated manuscripts in which Brendan finds his inspiration and his calling.  This film is beautiful and imaginative and delightful.  See it even if you don’t have kids.
   
#7:  The Other Guys
   
It’s hard to make a big budget action-comedy that’s actually funny.  The Other Guys, however, is funny all the way through to the end credits and it delivers on the big action set pieces and it works in a Yojimbo joke.  How many wide-release comedies can you name that work in a Yojimbo joke?  Look for clever supporting work from Michael Keaton, Eva Mendez, and Ron Riggle.
   
   
#6: Shutter Island
   
I define a gadget movie as a film that’s as much a puzzle as anything else, and Shutter Island is a terrific gadget movie.  This challenging and puzzling film features a deeply compelling and disturbing premise, and it comes through on it.  Scorsese orchestrates, shepherding knockout performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo in a film that’s as gothic, creepy, compelling, and horrifying as anything I’ve seen this year. I need to see it again, and soon.
   
   
#5:  True Grit
   
True Grit is a no-nonsense, three act western featuring outstanding work from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Barry Pepper, Josh Brolin, and especially young Hailee Steinfeld, as the heroine Mattie Ross.  The film is full of little moments that define and develop its characters and its world, and we get the sense of a picture whose every detail was carefully designed and executed.  This is as professional as the professional western gets.  John Huston would be proud.
   
#4:  The American
   
George Clooney plays Alain Delon playing a very bad man in hiding from some other very bad men in a film that feels more like a late ‘50s – early ‘60s French or Italian production than a modern American one.  I like Goerge Clooney.  I like Alain Delon.  I like French and Italian movies from the late ‘50s and early ‘60s.  And I can’t stop thinking about the sense of world-weariness, fear, isolation, and dread that comes through in nearly every scene of this criminally underappreciated film.
   
#3:  Black Swan
   
I challenge you to name a Darren Aronofsky film that doesn’t rank among the best releases of its year.  Black Swan, the latest in a line of Aronofsky masterpieces, will baffle you and scare you and challenge you and elevate you.  It’s filmmaking about high art that is, itself, high art – a film about a dancer in ‘Swan Lake’ that is, itself, a production of ‘Swan Lake.’  The film enraptured me in the moment, and I think about the sound and imagery of its emotional climax several times a day.  I suspect it will become as much a part of my touchstones of great filmmaking as the sand Kyuko Kishida’s body in Woman in the Dunes or Hugh Jackman in the bubble in Aronofsky’s The Fountain.  You must see this film.
   
#2:  Winter’s Bone
   
Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sprang from the same soil as Mattie Ross, and I think Mattie would see her as one of her own.  When Ree sets out to find her father in the moral and economic wasteland of meth-corrupted Arkansas, she’s in territory as strange and dangerous as the Indian country Mattie penetrates to find her fugitive.  While Mattie had help, however, Ree is alone.  She alone must find her father, dead or alive, so to save the pathetic home in which she’s raising her younger siblings.  She alone must brave the suspicion, the fear, the hostility she meets within her own family.  She must do it all, and Winter’s Bone takes us every step of the way, plunging us into the icy winter waters of its world and daring us to grab hold onto what we may find there.  Winter’s Bone is a perfectly executed, utterly horrifying film.  You must see it.
   
#1:  Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
   
Inventive, audacious, and infectiously fun, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is the best film of 2010.  The picture crosses from reality to fantasy and back again with delight and energy, immersing us in the mind of its hero so completely that we cease to care about the objectively real and happily ride along with him while he, well, while he works himself out.

Granted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World isn't the first film to explore boundaries between fantasy and reality; neither is it the first to exist almost entirely in the head of its protagonist. The film recalls Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, which gave us a man-child protagonist whose fantasy world so thoroughly informs his connection with the real world that we cannot understand one without the other.  While Gondry's man-child seems cloying and stunted, however, director Edgar Wright here gives us a man-teen so bursting with geeky enthusiasm, so ready to take the step into actual adulthood, that we root for him instead of just wait for him to grow up.

Scott Pilgrim does this by evoking the Big Three of nerd culture: comic books, video games, and alt-indie rock.  It doesn't do it by just throwing references out there and hoping for a few lightbulbs to come on.  It does it by borrowing graphic references from comic books, co-opting the look and feel of video games from their 16-bit arcade heyday to their modern, hyperrealistic incarnations, and overwhelming the audience both with music and with unique visual depictions of music.  Scott Pilgrim doesn't just reference this culture or remind you of this culture: it immerses you in this culture.  As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, "There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World ... has the opposite effect." 

Bravo, Mr. Wright.  I can't wait to see what you do next.

Kick-Ass

I didn’t laugh all the way through KICK-ASS.  Sometimes, I’d remember that young children sat in the audience, and the horror of that realization’d take me out of the film.  Then something ostentatiously ridiculous or violent or vulgar would occur, I’d laugh again, and I’d rock along quite happily until I happened to glance over, once again, at those little kids.

KICK-ASS is not a movie for children.  It’s bloodily violent, so foulmouthed it’d take a sailor aback (Sigh.  The Navy has changed.), and too graphically sexual for prepubescents.  It’s also hilarious.  From star Aaron Johnson’s perfect mix of idealism, enthusiasm and awkwardness to Nicholas Cage’s ridiculous Adam West imitation to Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s geeky riff on Mr. Glass, the character work here is spot on.  Add Mark Strong’s deadpan villainy as a New York mafioso and young Chloe Moretz as the astonishingly vulgar Hit-Girl, and you have one of the best comedies to come along this year.

Here’s the setup:  Dave Lizewski (Johnson) is a teenaged comic book nerd who wonders why nobody ever steps up, puts on a costume, and actually tries to help people out.  He decides to take the plunge and, for his trouble gets beaten, stabbed, and run over by a car.  But after months of hospitalization, a reinforced skeleton thanks to all the plates and pins installed after his massive trauma, and major nerve damage leaving him nearly impervious to pain, he’s ready to try again.  He’s ready to become Kick-Ass, defender of people who need defending, rescuer of kittens, getter of the girl, etc.  And it isn’t long before he meets Mr. Big and Hit Girl, a father-daughter team whose idea of quality time is dressing up in costumes and killing thugs.  So basically, he gets everything he wanted.  He’s got cool hero friends.  He lands his Mary-Jane.  He occasionally kicks ass.  And he finds himself in the sights of Mr. Big (Strong, a gifted character actor who needs to stop playing villains before it’s too late).  Mr. Big, of course, is ready to finance a nemesis.  And there we are.

Based on the trailers, I expected this movie to be violent and vulgar and over the top, but I didn’t expect it to be so funny.  Watch Strong and Mintz-Plasse argue over their plans for movie night.  Watch Johnson stumble from one adventure to the next, and watch him take on the baddies with gear that appears to be made from tin foil and lawn chairs.  Watch Cage apply his eye makeup before a big night of fighting crime, and watch Moretz do pretty much everything she does.  You will laugh and laugh and laugh.  Then you’ll cringe for a while.  Then you’ll laugh some more.

Either that, or you’ll cringe and cringe and cringe, then maybe laugh for a while.  Your mileage may vary.

Regardless, you must respect this film’s audacity.  KICK-ASS isn’t afraid to go for broke, and it delivers a rousing time at the movies.

Just don’t bring your kids.