October Country

This American Life

2009 //  USA // Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher // June 5, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[October Country is being featured in a limited engagement from June 4-10, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

B+ - On its weather-beaten surface, October Country is a straightforward documentary in the "anthropological study" vein. Surprisingly deft and arresting, the film profiles a blue-collar family living in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York, and marks co-directors Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher as emergent talents in documentary film-making. Emulating Errol Morris' signature approach—restive, slightly distanced, and ever-conscious of their medium's artificiality—the directors chronicle a year in the life of Donal's extended family, observing their tumble-down surroundings and listening to their stories with sorrowful attentiveness. Undeniably, the Moshers' tale is a bleak one, characterized by wartime ghosts, criminal betrayal, domestic violence, cruel estrangement, foolish decisions, and perennial economic hardship. What's remarkable about October Country is how Palmieri and Mosher elevate the story beyond voyeuristic goggling at misfortune to achieve something far more intricate. In its finest moments, the film serves as a bitter rumination on the cyclical quality of family history, as well as a cinematic séance, not only with the Mosher clan's particular demons, but with the Puritan shades that still haunt the American experience.

The film follows four generations of the Moshers for a year, from one Halloween to the next, gradually revealing not only the ever-shifting landscape of their travails, but also the surprising and often heartbreaking texture of their personalities and relationships. Dottie is the resolute but also palpably saddened matriarch, determined to keep her family afloat despite mounting evidence that its fate is almost entirely out of her hands. Her husband Don is a taciturn Vietnam veteran, a man who returned from the war hardened and withdrawn. He seems to be the most level-headed member of the clan, but his resentments and his untreated (and virtually unacknowledged) PTSD consume him. Their daughter Donna is a domestic abuse survivor who gave birth to a daughter, Daneal, when she was still a teenager. Daneal, in turn, has repeated her mother's mistakes, and is fighting for custody of her two-year-old daughter Ruby with the girl's abusive father. Daneal's eleven-year-old sister Desi is both smart and a bit of a smart-ass, pushing nonchalantly against the constraints of her kin and her town. Other family members lurk around the periphery. Don's obese, arthritic sister Denise is a cemetery-skulking Wiccan, shunned by her brother for her religious beliefs and her "attitude". Their own familial problems notwithstanding, Dottie and Don have taken in a foster son, Chris, a swaggering shoplifter who is painfully aware he is on the wrong path, and yet seems unwilling to change his ways. Everyone chain-smokes.

Palmieri and Mosher permit the family to paint the contours of their story in their own words, intruding only rarely with an off-camera question or two. Similar to Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's stunning feature, Trouble the Water, the directors avoid domineering narration in favor of a shared storytelling approach with their subjects. In contrast to agitprop documentarians, Palmieri and Mosher's artistic arsenal is first and foremost that of the cinema: photography, sound, music, editing, and always the faces of the family. Their visages command the frame, simultaneously seeking the camera's approval and ambivalent about how anyone but God (or the dead) perceive them. The film's understated revelations are as compelling as anything in the worthiest fictional feature, such as when ex-cop and war movie aficionado Don is shown laboring in his attic woodshop on, of all things, delicate dollhouse furniture. However, where Lessin and Deal's film forged a triumphant sense of perseverance from calamity, Palmieri and Mosher are working in a far more poetic mode, one that is unabashedly melancholy and offers no easy answers. Consumer culture, globalization, misogynistic violence, abortion rights, and imperialistic war all feed into the Moshers' tribulations like raw, knotted timber, but the film is not ultimately about such matters any more than it is about the Halloween holiday that serves as a backdrop to the opening and closing scenes.

Repeating patterns figure heavily in the thematic landscape of October Country, and the "turn of the seasons" framework—cogently but modestly presented—resonates with the cycles that crop up in the lives of the Moshers. Daneal is following in her mother's ill-fated footsteps, but resists the hard-won wisdom of the older woman's bruised experience, preferring the simple myth of villainous mom and saintly (absent) dad. There are boyfriends, one after the other, always possessive and abusive and always trashing the family before leaving it, like a cheap hotel room. Chris is a habitual criminal who has no intention of straightening out, even as he speaks glowingly of the Moshers' generosity and love. He promises that he will eventually hurt them, and he does. Everyone looks at Desi, on the verge of adolescence, and wonders aloud if she will repeat their mistakes. The girl just snorts, rolls her eyes, and turns back to her video games: "I'm smarter than any of them." There is an aura of Old Testament doom that permeates the film, a sensation that nothing that was ordained by unseen forces can be escaped. Will I always be a bad person? Will I always love bad men? Do I have to grow up and get a shitty job in this shitty town and eventually die here?

Palmieri and Mosher pose their film not just as record of personal despair in twenty-first century America, but also a communion with something more profound in the national fabric. Deep in its chilly bones, October Country represents a fragment of our ongoing cultural struggle with our Puritan forebears, those English exiles who valued stoicism, saw the Devil's hoof-prints everywhere, and still hiss of the futility of escaping that which God has written. What would those forebears say, the film implicitly asks, of the plastic witches and artificial cobwebs of the Moshers' Halloween party? What would they say of Family Dollar and Ninentedo, of family court and disability checks? What would they say of Denise, with her unicorn paintings and loneliness, standing with a camcorder in a graveyard and asking the phantoms, "Anybody want to talk to me?" Whether our Puritan past has any salience in this age of modern uncertainty and desolation is debatable, but October Country is persuasive in its assertion that—to paraphrase Faulkner—the past is not past at all. It's a sentiment written on every careworn and hard-bitten Mosher brow.

Bad Timing

1980 // UK // Nicolas Roeg // May 25, 2010 // Digital Projection (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Bad Timing was screened on May 25, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the early films of Nicolas Roeg.]

[Note: This post contains spoilers.]​

If you have ever harbored a nagging suspicion that there's something a tad creepy about Art Garfunkel, then Bad Timing serves as a resounding confirmation of those qualms. If, however, your conception of the soft-spoken folk musician is bookishly benign, then his presence in Nicolas Roeg's curious film is likely to deliver an uncanny jolt, particularly when Garfunkel's character, psychology professor and profiler Alex Linden, is revealed to be a twisted obsessive and rapist. The most fascinating aspect of Bad Timing is how skillfully Roeg--working from a script by Yale Udoff--essentially achieves a noir bank shot off Garfunkel's public persona, and more generally off of his audience's assumptions vis-à-vis relationships and gender. For roughly the first half of the film, the story seems to be about a meek academic who is used and abused by Milena (Theresa Russell, all thighs and eyes), a self-absorbed party girl and compulsive liar. Then the emotional contours of the tale begin to subtly shift. The jarring, seemingly arbitrary flashbacks that Roeg sprinkles throughout the film start to accumulate into a more truthful picture of Alex and Milena's rotten relationship, and—presto!—the story is actually about a damaged woman who is controlled, stalked, and ultimately assaulted by a sociopath. It's a fake-out, but not an especially galling one. Roeg's disjointed storytelling technique is preoccupied with concealing not the mystery surrounding Milena's drug overdose, but the inevitably violent clash between her negligent personality and Alex's disturbed need to control and possess her. It's not clear there was ever love there, so let's call it a tale of lust gone sour, amplified by Roeg's relentless cutting and peculiar (at times even silly) scoring choices. While it can't hold a candle to Don't Look Now in terms of atmospherics or emotional vigor, it's still nasty, daring stuff.

Walkabout

1971 // UK // Nicolas Roeg // May 22, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Walkabout was screened on May 22, 2010 as a part of the Webster University Film Series' retrospective on the early films of Nicolas Roeg.]

The most remarkable thing about Roeg's directorial debut—other than the fact that such an unabashedly poetic and self-assured work could be anyone's directorial debut—is the density of the thing. This is a film that is richly layered with meaning, and yet Roeg achieves such thematic bulk while hewing to an approach that is fairly realistic. Sure, there are heavy-handed cross-cuts, and much gooey lingering on ripe orange sunsets, and narrative digressions that range from the obscure to the weirdly comic. However, there's not much in the film that one could categorize as surrealistic or avant-garde, at least in the mode of Jodorowsky or Lynch (or, for that matter, later Roeg). It's fascinating, then, that there is such ample room for disagreement on what Walkabout is, well, about. There's some embracing and critiquing of cultural myths in there: the ignorant savage, the noble savage, the wilderness as utopia, the wilderness as wasteland. There are obvious themes of colonialism, civilization, and, yes, communication. What resonates strongest for me is the allegory of a sexual awakening (and the fear and confusion it engenders), but this is but one fragment of what makes the film such a compelling experience. Certainly, the closing scenes add a heaping dose of wistfulness, a bittersweet eulogy for those times and places to which we cannot return and are almost certainly idealized in our minds. The thematic correspondence between Roeg's film and Terence Davies' exquisite Of Time and the City is only underlined by their shared quotation (at the end and beginning, respectively) of A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

Home

Little House on the Shoulder

2008 // Switzerland - France - Belgium // Ursula Meier // May 19, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)

[Home was featured in a limited engagement on May 14-19, 2010 at the Webster University Film Series.]

B+ - Suffused with both balmy affection and a mounting aura of calamity, Ursula Meier's Home presents an unnerving portrait of a family floundering on the shoals of modernity. The director has described her film as a "road movie in reverse," and that seems as apt a description as any. While the archetypal road movie entails a journey outward to discover something of value, Home concerns itself with a family that has already found everything it needs, only to have its idyllic state disturbed, fractured, and ultimately pulverized by the movements of others. The film's clan—never graced with a surname—dwells in a modest house in the countryside, where an old, unfinished highway runs right through their front yard and has been re-purposed as the family's personal parking lot and street hockey rink. One night, asphalt trucks rumble down the road, and steel barriers spring up along the shoulder and the median. The metaphor is stark: the highway's abrupt completion sends cracks through the family's contented existence, disrupting their physical environment, their well-worn routines, and their interpersonal dynamics. However, Meier steers clear of tussles with central planning bureaucrats, or other Kafkaesque ordeals. Instead, she vividly explores the results of the family's perhaps blinkered determination to stick it out and carry on with their lives. And therein she discovers compelling insights into the fragile nature of domestic happiness and the anxious, bewildering character of contemporary life.

The family of Home is a boisterous nuclear tribe, which middle-aged father Michel (Dardenne veteran Olivier Gourmet) and mother Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) wrangle daily into some semblance of order. They are loving and liberated in the casual manner that only French families seem capable of achieving. Older daughter Judith (Adélaïde Leroux) smokes while bathing in the same tub with her kid brother, Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein), and they splash each other while their parents tease them in the cramped bathroom. Everyone is relaxed, except perhaps for middle daughter Marion (Madeleine Budd), who even in the earliest scenes possesses a simmering anxiousness. Meier and a gaggle of writers leave much unrevealed about the circumstances of the family's move to the country, which occurred years ago. There are hints that it was a shift undertaken by Michel for the benefit of Marthe's mental health, and that this particular house next to the abandoned highway has some obscure quality that puts her at ease. That ease ends, of course, when the road is tarred, striped, and re-opened for the tens of thousands of vehicles that eventually roar past the family's kitchen day and night.

Meier relies upon a lean, disciplined approach to storytelling that favors observation over exposition, where scenes are rigorously explored and yet not drawn out beyond what is necessary to convey a particular character detail or depict a fresh indignity wrought by the highway. There are no significant characters in Home other than the five family members, and each is a victim. Meier relishes devoting time to each, conveying their habits, flaws, and differing responses to their familial crisis, but her creations never betray a self-conscious quirkiness. Judith sunbathes and listens to heavy metal as if nothing has changed; Marion begins obsessing about car counts and pollution-borne illnesses; and Julien turns the highway into his own personal source of amusement. Michel just wants his family to remain happy and safe, but his demeanor betrays doubt. It is Marthe's behavior that seems to shift the most drastically, and not for the better. The highway makes her uneasy and distracted, and the ceaseless noise of passing cars prevents her from sleeping at night. She hallucinates oncoming headlights in the distance, and gazes across the road with a fugue-like vacancy, Meier's camera seeming to anticipate with palpable dread an oblivious, suicidal stroll across four lanes of barreling traffic. Huppert commands our attention with her creased femininity and escalating fearfulness, much as she did in Private Property, another splendid fable of threatened localities and riven family bonds.

Home posits a contemporary world where adaptation is tricky at best, and the resolve and optimism so cherished as virtues by the middle class become proverbial albatrosses. Meier doesn't comment on the fundamental unfairness and cruelty of the family's situation, and the film never suggests that the highway can be defied. It has been channeled past the clan's front door by inscrutable powers, a disruption as uncaring and irresistible as a hailstorm or marching army, but limitless in its duration. Instead of the civic melodrama of a family's struggle against powerful forces, Home presents the mesmerizing collision of human tenacity with a fundamentally untenable situation. The film's central question eventually snaps into focus: How long can the family keep up the pretense that their home is still livable? It's at once enthralling and sickening, as fixed in its outcome as a game of chicken between a man and locomotive, but no less nerve-wracking while it unfolds.

Meier displays an unwavering regard for the urgently personal dimensions of her story as well as an absorption with the willful transformation of environments. This latter impulse risks an ill-fitting element of the grotesque in the film's final act. The contradiction between Marthe's misery and her unwillingness to leave her home forces Michel to take measures that are almost cartoonish in their severity. However, in its closing scenes, Home's somewhat silly gambit—which finds the family sweating inside a sealed habitat, awash in junk and rotting food—pays off cannily as Marthe at last takes her liberation in her own hands. Crucially, the film is not concerned with charting the correct path for those who find themselves trod upon by modern life, but with critiquing the hang-together obduracy that tends to seize families in crisis. Meier suggests that this simplistic ethos threatens to minimize the reservations of some individuals, while lending outsized power to the dysfunctions of others. Ultimately, Home asserts that the longer that mere pluck is substituted for hard-eyed assessment and adjustment, the more traumatic our ultimate dislocation will be.

Iron Man 2

Metal on Metal

2010 // USA // John Favreau // May 16, 2010 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

B- - If one regards it primarily as the second chapter in a presumable trilogy of films about billionaire industrialist Tony Stark's super-weapon persona, Iron Man 2 is a slick slice of cinematic entertainment. Director Jon Favreau and leading man Robert Downey, Jr. deliver heaping helpings of the essential vibrancy and wit that rendered the first entry in Marvel's technophilic franchise such a giddy revelation. However, while it functions well enough as a sequel, or as a mere episode in a broader saga, Iron Man 2 is bit soggy when approached on its own merits. Favreau and scripter Justin Theroux—the actor/writer who penned the deliciously acidic Tropic Thunder—are aiming for too many targets in some scenes, while in others they seem to be spinning their wheels in anticipation of the next action set-piece. Accordingly, the film has trouble conveying the sense of nitro-fueled urgency necessary for the Iron Man myth, which is at bottom a Popular Science wet dream with a dash of guilt and ambivalence. The sequel just doesn't hum along so effortlessly as its predecessor, which in retrospect, seems much leaner and more focused, as origin stories often are. Favreau gives us a middle chapter that is preoccupied with mortality, legacies, and thinly veiled allegories about geopolitical blowback and loose nukes. These elements are tackled with aplomb, but cobbled together in such a manner that Iron Man 2 feels a bit haphazard. Eh, no matter. We're all just here for Downey's quips, right?

The new film finds Tony Stark, now exposed as the man behind the crimson-and-gold suit, facing Congressional pressure to turn over his technology to the United States government. The response: "Thanks, but no thanks."  Despite his new-found commitment to world peace, Stark's craving for attention doesn't seem to have diminished one iota, and when he's not jetting off to compete in the Monaco Grand Prix, he's producing an enormous World's Fair-style Expo dedicated to cutting-edge technologies. Meanwhile, a nasty-looking Russian gorilla named Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke) labors in secret on a device that suspiciously resembles Iron Man's arc-reactor. (When a heavily tattooed character dwells in a dank apartment with a wall of newspaper clippings about the protagonist, that character is by definition Up to No Good.) Stark has more pressings and visible concerns, however, such as the palladium in his suit's power source that is slowly poisoning him, or his smug ass of a rival, weapons manufacturer Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell).

In keeping with the first film, Downey is the real draw here, and as expected, he delivers the lighting wit and cocksure demeanor of Stark with swooning precision, even as the sequel grants him more scenes of private grimacing. The film's headiest sequence involves not a robot suit soaring at Mach 3, but a moment of scientific revelation (re-discovery, really), tinged with familial warmth and painted with a whirl of holograms. Downey captures the bliss effortlessly. The cast of characters that Downey played off of so well in Iron Man has returned: Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow), James Rhodes (Don Cheadle, crisper and cooler than Terrence Howard, but much more believable as an Air Force officer), and even Favreau himself in a more substantial role as chauffeur Happy Hogan. Distracted by his crime-fighting duties, Stark elects to name a flabbergasted Pepper as CEO of Stark Industries. He then brings in a ravishing notary from the legal department, Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson), to act as his new Girl Friday. (Of course, most notaries don't have martial arts training...) Thankfully, Favreau doesn't permit the trite girl-on-girl rivalry angle to blossom into ugly flower, and before the second act both women are butting heads with Stark over his juvenile behavior.

Favreau's penchant for actor improvisation is on fine display here, perhaps even more so than in the previous film, with both Downey and Paltrow acquitting themselves marvelously with their effortless, rapid-fire banter. (Who knew Paltrow had it in her? Not me, certainly.) Rockwell is given free reign to create a thoroughly unlikeable villain, a whiny reflection of Stark who possesses all of his arrogance but none of his confidence. However, the character of Justin Hammer, while he might adhere to the principles of comic book villains, isn't especially menacing. Rockwell is fun to watch, but he merely reveals how genuinely threatening Jeff Bridges was as Obadiah Stane in the first film, even (or especially) when he just wore a business suit. Sadly, Rourke seems a bit wasted here, mumbling out the odd line in a thick Russian accent and seemingly cast for his physical presence more than anything. Johansson is, well, Johansson, gorgeous but ultimately colorless, lending nothing in particular to an underwritten part.

Consistent with the first Iron Man, Favreau here exhibits his remarkable facility for rendering action sequences with clarity and drama, while maintaining the aura of cartoonish thrills that the source material fundamentally demands. Here the "shiny new toy" exhilaration of Stark's outings is still present, but also complicated by the doses of selfish foolishness and strained friendship. There's little need for Dark Knight chills in Favreau's wily, jocular approach, which makes it all the stranger when the director and Theroux nod at graver thematic concerns. In one scene, an amused Vanko asserts that an attack on Iron Man doesn't have to succeed to work: it merely has to put the scent of blood in the water. It's an unsettling notion... until one recalls that Christopher Nolan conveyed far more with a single fearful line from Gary Oldman's Lieutenant Gordon in Batman Begins ("What about escalation?") Still, the result of this dire gesturing isn't so much clumsy as cluttered, as it prevents the sequel from achieving the kind of propulsion that powered the first film's neatly spun tale of a warmonger's redemption. Ultimately, Favreau seems to be demanding too much of his second chapter. He wants to convey the rising global threats that Iron Man's existence engender; conduct a corresponding critique of real-world arms races; warn of the hazards of turning to flawed Randian messiahs; and tackle the unresolved Daddy Issues that plague Stark as his own mortality creeps up on him. Meanwhile, the groundwork for the upcoming Avengers film keeps getting slathered on, which makes for some fun reveals, but diminishes the efficacy of Favreau's proximal story. In this manner, a stirring adventure is made to feel unaccountably like a holding pattern.

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.