Kick-Ass

Just For One Day

2010 // USA - UK // Matthew Vaughn // May 11, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

C - The high concept that undergirds Kick-Ass, while hardly a model of sparkling originality, at least holds the potential for a witty character piece or an intriguing flexing of generic norms. Colorless, clueless high school student and comic aficionado Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) poses what he believes to be a fair question to his fellow geeks: Why has no one ever tried to be a real super hero? The answers seem obvious to Dave's pals. Super-powers don't actually, you know, exist, and even "regular guys" like Bruce Wayne are billionaires with access to science-fiction technology. Any real masked vigilante would end up in traction fairly quickly. Dave will not be deterred, however. Kick-Ass presents itself as a miserablist "What-If?" scenario about a scrawny kid donning a green wetsuit and attempting to fight crime. Unfortunately, the film lacks focus: at times it prefers the mode of a violent comic book played straight, or a limp high school farce, or a deadpan send-up of the superhero genre. Director Matthew Vaughn simply has no notion of where he wants to take this adaptation of Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr.'s comic, and the film's sporadic moments of droll inventiveness don't redeem its awkward muddling of its pedestrian components.

Clearly not having thought his plan through, Dave assumes that all one needs in order to be a superhero is a colorful costume and the will to stand up to evildoers. (One might call this a repurposing of Matt Yglasias' Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, which leads us to some kind of strange comic geekery / political blogging ouroboros.) There is a kind of guileless charm to Dave's naïvité, even if Johnson's performance is a clumsy blend of Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker, Cera/Eisenberg discomfiture, and the stammering nerd from a 1980s sex comedy. When Dave assumes his new superhero persona, Kick-Ass, Johnson's physical presence feels more vital, especially in the way his wide blue eyes and slack lips perfectly convey the dim adolescent dork behind the mask. His Travis Bickle mimicry in front of a mirror notwithstanding, Kick-Ass' cracked voice and self-conscious manner hint that Dave's wish-fulfillment will not end well. Indeed, the poor sap's first attempt to confront a pair of thugs lands him in the hospital, with deadened nerves and metal plates bolted to half his bones ("Just like Wolverine!" he enthuses.)

Meanwhile, the film introduces us to middle-aged widower Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage) and his eleven-year-old daughter, Mindy (Chloe Moretz). Like Dave, Damon and Mindy are in the masked vigilante game, but unlike Dave, they actually know what they're doing. Damon is a former hero cop framed by a New York City drug kingpin, now cutting a bloody swathe through the criminal underworld as Big Daddy, assisted by his lethal sidekick Hit Girl. Damon has trained Mindy relentlessly since the age of five to be a walking weapon of mass destruction, and while they are utterly devoted to one another, their father-daughter chats are on the relative merits of automatic pistols rather than the mean girls at school. It's heart-warming, in an utterly twisted and fucked-up kind of way, which I can only assume is one of the primary points of Millar and Romita's comic and, by extension, of Vaughn's film. Namely, that for all the paternal kindliness attributed to the hero-sidekick relationship, there's something more than a tad depraved about schooling a child to be a ruthless killer, especially when it's in the service of your own thirst for revenge.

By pure happenstance and a succession of misunderstandings, Kick-Ass eventually gets tangled up in Big Daddy and Hit Girl's scheme to topple drug lord Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong). Eventually, their efforts draw the attention of D'Amico's witless, slightly spoiled son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who has superhero fantasies of his own. It's not worth elaborating on the story any further, because it isn't especially compelling on the whole, or even that thrilling or amusing in its moment-to-moment particulars. There's a subplot about a ridiculously gorgeous girl at school (Lyndsy Fonseca) who befriends Dave but—get this!—mistakenly thinks that he's gay. (Hilarity does not, in fact, ensue.) Vaughn's approach to the film's action is just tired and oddly disengaged, as though it's something he can't wait to get through. And I can't blame him. There's a clinical kind of fascination to the gore-spraying mayhem of Hit Girl's vigilante berserker rages, but the character-centered exchanges between Cage and Moretz are nonetheless far more engaging than the admittedly uncanny sight of a preteen murdering drug dealers with abandon. (Side note: For all of Cage's excesses as an actor, the deliberately bizarre cadence he adopts as Big Daddy is an inspired, genuinely funny flourish and a clever dig at Christian Bale's Batman rasp.)

There's an admittedly cunning little fake-out at the heart of Kick-Ass, in that Vaughn tricks us into believing that his tale is primary about the titular character. Dave's simple character arc from oblivious optimism to disillusionment and back to seasoned optimism occupies much of the film's rather tight thematic space, but narratively speaking, Kick-Ass is actually about Hit Girl. Vaughn is plainly trying to be edgy by centering his plot on a foul-mouthed, bloodthirsty eleven-year-old girl, and the film's probings at comic book conventions aren't entirely off-the-mark. Yet the whole enterprise smacks of trying to have it both ways, of critiquing such conventions as grotesque while also reveling in their sheer awesomeness. Contradiction isn't necessarily a defeating quality for a film. Snyder's underrated Watchmen had its share of problems regarding the simultaneous celebration and revilement of superhero violence, and still managed to be a contemplative and gloriously messy fantasy. Tarantino's superlative Inglourious Basterds was an exquisite snarl of mixed messages, and it even pulled a similar trick, vis-à -vis the gender of its "real" protagonist. However, Vaughn isn't up to the task of juggling his scold and fanboy sides with anything approaching Tarantino's agility, or even achieving Snyder's giddy attention to detail. Kick-Ass simply isn't good enough to accommodate everything that the film-maker wants to achieve. Brutal, bloody violence (borderline torture, really) sits uncomfortably alongside fantastical, bullet-spraying action that bears no resemblance to reality. The casual dismissal of superhero stories as juvenile silliness bumps up against copious gadgetry techno-babble and flamboyant sets. Shoehorning these elements together doesn't make a film complex when it's done so gracelessly, or with so little regard for the coherent whole.

Ponyo

2008 // Japan // Hayao Miyazaki // May 9, 2010 // Blu-ray - Disney (2010)

While it possesses neither the unexpected gentleness of My Neighbor Totoro, nor the apprehensive grandeur of Spirited Away, Ponyo surely deserves a position close behind those Miyazaki masterpieces, even if it never attains such perfection itself. Certainly, there are stray elements in this alternately grounded and oneiric fable that never quite fit together comfortably, and the conclusion feels unaccountably limp and vague after all the fretting about a "world out of balance" provoked by our titular fish-girl's giddy escape. On the other hand, Miyazaki's tendency to elide crucial details about his fantasy cosmologies seems far less of a stumbling block here than in his other works, if only because Ponyo privileges unadulterated joy and the subtleties of the parent-child relationship over world-building. Together, Miyazaki's film and Henry Selick's Coraline gave us more thoughtful ruminations on growing up than the rest of the decade's kiddie fare combined. On a second viewing, what's striking about Ponyo from a visual standpoint is the spectrum of drawing styles. Consider the shots above; would you assume that they came from the same film, if it weren't for that conspicuous shock of orange hair? Given how closely Miyazaki himself supposedly labored on the animation, it's hard not to conclude that this diversity is intentional. The cruder, almost doodle-like style seems to predominate when Ponyo is caught in the protean state between goldfish and little girl. The visual approach to Sosuke and a now-human Ponyo at play, meanwhile, invites comparisons to Charles Schultz's precocious tykes, albeit given roundness of form and a richly realized environment as only Miyazaki can.

Children of Men

2006 // Japan - UK - USA // Alfonso Cuarón // May 7, 2010 Format: Blu-ray - Universal (2009)

This was my first occasion to revisit Cuarón's despairing-then-hopeful thrill ride since its fumbled theatrical release and more recent best-of-the-decade accolades (the film appeared at #76 in Slant's countdown and claimed Reverse Shot's #19 slot). In retrospect, it's clear why Children of Men—and not the hot-and-bothered arthouse amble Y Tu Mamá También, or the auteurist blockbuster Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban—is the feature that secured the director's status as the most disciplined and effortlessly engaging of Mexico's big-name film-makers. Four years later, it's not Children's dense science-fiction world-building that most impresses, nor the technical bravado of those one-take action set pieces (especially given that the visceral, immersive impact of a first-time viewing can never be recreated). No, what's astonishing is the simplicity of the thing, despite the stable of screenwriters and the mammoth, textured character of Cuarón's near-future landscape. Compared to the other science-fiction achievements of the past decade, Children of Men is a tightly plotted thing, lacking any of the extraneous elements that so often bog down other entries in the genre. While it may be less thematically ambitious than either WALL•E or Moon, Cuarón film doesn't seem to have a single narrative fumble or pinch of flab. Everything serves its propulsive, harrowing observation of Theo's journey from apathy to heroism, an evolution that Cuarón and leading man Clive Owen make all the more potent by rendering it with perfect naturalism. If Children of Men's Abu Ghraib imagery now seems stale, consider that Arizona's recent enactment of a "Papers, Please" law lends the film's police-state treatment of illegal immigrants—excuse me, "fugees"—a new-found weight. It just goes to prove that a pitch-perfect dystopian fable never loses its relevance.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2009 // Sweden // Niels Arden Oplev // May 1, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Plaza Frontenac)

B- - The film adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson's phenomenally popular novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a nearly flawless Swedish replica of a lurid Hollywood thriller. Whether that statement represents high praise or a backhand compliment depends on one's regard for lurid Hollywood thrillers, but director Niels Arden Oplev has created, at minimum, a fierce little whodunit that is unwavering in its crackling regard for its heroine. That would be Lisbeth Salander, a misfit hacker with anemic social skills and an eidetic memory, embodied with spooky precision by Noomi Rapace. Oddly alluring and as tightly wound as a feral cat, Rapace is far more compelling than Michael Nyqvist's doughy journalist or the film's convoluted story of a vanished teen. Oplev, to his credit, preserves the novel's righteous anger at misogynistic violence, and also its flair for lending thrilling significance to the tiniest of clues. However, the film's gloomy aesthetic and faux-provocative shocks don't conceal its fundamentally disposable nature. Salander may add some texture to the ranks of fictional female sleuths, but Girl is still just crime, peril, and conspiracy recast as entertainment, a movie-of-the-week seen through a Scandinavian, post-Thomas Harris lens.

The Losers

2010 // USA // Sylvain White // April 29, 2010 // Theatrical Print (AMC Esquire)

C - Adapted from the comic of the same name by writer Andy Diggle and illustrator Jocks, The Losers suffers from a sloppy sort of faithfulness to its source material's story, motifs, and dialogue. Exaggerated generic elements are essential to the language of the comics medium, but on the screen, The Losers' techno-thriller gobbledygook and melodramatic tropes just seem like the markers of lazy film-making. ("Hey, if we're going to incinerate a bunch of hapless kids, we might as well linger on the charred teddy bear. Y'know, for pathos.") Still, aside from some cringe-worthy racial "humor," there's not much about this A-Team variation that's actively bad. The Losers delivers exactly what one expects of it: wise-cracking Special Forces badasses (and one obligatory hot chick) pulling off hyper-violent heists. It's often fun, occasionally funny, and utterly forgettable. Unfortunately, few of the actors seems to realize just what sort of film they're making here. The exceptions are Jason Patric as spook super-villain Max, who nails the necessary blend of menace and high camp, and to a lesser extent Chris Evans, who's clearly having fun playing a bit against type as a high-strung, motormouth hacker. Ultimately, The Losers is just ninety minutes of stuff blowing up real good.

Dispatches from Ebertfest 2010: Saturday, April 24

Roger Ebert was in attendance at his festival this year. It was the first time that I have been able to see him in person. Cancer has taken his lower jaw, and therefore his voice, but he was still very much a presence at the festival. His populist, humanistic, literate approach to film obviously informs the programming, but it also permeates the spirit of the event. There's a sense of genial adoration towards the guy that is actually a bit disconcerting. No one who attends the festival is there because they dislike Ebert or his taste in film. They're there to bask in an event dedicated to Stuff He Likes. What's fascinating is that now that Ebert is, by his own admission, on the downslope of his remaining years on Earth, his presence at the festival seems to engender joy as much as melancholy. People just love seeing him and knowing that whatever his physical limitations, his enthusiastic cinephilia is the animating force behind the festival.

Whenever Ebert appeared, he seemed to be deliriously good spirits. His frequently threw his iconic thumbs-up gesture, not so much a seal of approval as a generalized cheer-leading pose struck to convey the pleasure of good movies. Chaz Ebert introduced each film, but Roger also offered some words from time to time, using prepared text read by a computerized voice on his laptop. What was truly unexpected was how integral Ebert's physical presence at the podium was for these introductions, and for the festival as a whole.  He could certainly have had someone else read his remarks. Instead, he got up, clicked on the laptop himself, mouthed the words with his now-slack lips, mugged enthusiastically for the audience, and gestured flamboyantly. His lines consistently got the best laughs. It drove home how essential his celebrity is to the festival's pulse, and how his boisterous cinephilia is itself a kind of defiant stance against his physical diminishment.

The first screening of the day was Tim Fywell's 2003 coming-of-age feature, I Capture the Castle, based on the novel by Dodie Smith. Ebert pitched it as a family film, but I suspect Castle is bit much for younger kids. It's not the stray bits of nudity (tasteful and humorous) that present a challenge, but the subject matter, which treads on class, madness, violence, virginity, and a thorny romantic melodrama that veers between the subdued and the exaggerated. The real pleasures here are the green, damp locales of the English countryside, and the familiar faces: the captivating Romola Garai (eighteen-year-old Briony in Atonement) as lovelorn narrator Cassandra; Bill Nighy as a writer languishing in poverty and flirting with madness; and a baby-faced Henry Cavill (The Tudors' resident Adonis) as a servant boy seduced by London's pleasures.

The DIY slot this year was filled by Jennifer Burns' 2008 directorial debut, Vincent: A Life in Color. Burns profiles Chicago's "Fashion Man," Vincent P. Falk, who takes it upon himself to entertain river tour boats by dancing on the city's bridges in a seemingly endless collection of shockingly bright suits. Vincent is strictly low-budget, unaffected, human-centered documentary film-making, so naturally it sinks or swims on the strength of its subject. The appealing thing about Vincent is how easily he evolves from a one-note joke to a fascinating figure with a rich history of achievement, tribulation, and tragedy. Burns clearly admires the guy's unflagging spirit, but the film is at its best when it probes deeper than "Do Your Own Thing" bromides and upends our assumptions about disability, celebrity, ego, work, and the urban community.

First time director James Mottern's Trucker hits all the American indie beats: a plot driven by an economic squeeze, battered and tricky human relationships, a pop-drizzled soundtrack, and plenty of dusty gazing into the distance. While the territory is familiar, what Mottern and his performers get spooky-right is the sense of despair that prevails when your expectations for your own life are simple, selfish, and maddeningly thwarted. As a sullen truck driver whose abandoned eleven-year-old son falls back into her life, Michelle Monaghan is called upon to go through one emotional whiplash after another, and acquits herself beautifully. Firefly alum Nathan Fillion brings a witty, warm-hearted appeal to Monaghan's too-eager (married) friend. It was Ebert that correctly discerned Trucker's most potent gesture: It ends at exactly the right moment, a merit more films (and more indies specifically) should endeavor to emulate.

Saturday (and our time at the Festival) ended with Barbet Schroeder's biographical snapshot of Charles Bukowski, Barfly. There's a scuzzy genius to the simplicity of this film, which doesn't have a plot so much as a character arc that circles around right back to where it started. Essentially, what we're treated to is the tale of two serious alcoholics--a battered, limp-haired Mickey Rourke and a waxen Faye Dunaway--who meet in a Los Angeles of endless dive bars and seedy apartments. They then spend nearly every waking hour pursuing a state of perpetual drunkenness. The attraction here is almost entirely due to Bukowski's screenplay, which is deliciously quotable from beginning to end, and Rourke's mesmerizing performance. It's a ridiculously affected role, but so languidly fierce (if such a phrase is applicable anywhere, it's here), you find yourself grinning ear to ear before you realize that the guy you're grinning at is, well, an unrepentant addict. Under Bukowski, Schroeder, and Rourke, alcoholism becomes a font of gutter wisdom, repugnant and undeniable.