Getting Your Ass Kicked.

Yeah, my apologies as usual for not updating very often.

So I DID see Kick-Ass. Last weekend. When it came out. And yes, I quite liked it. The more I thought about it, though, the more depressing it got for me. It's not depressing like The Dark Knight, where you go in expecting a down movie and get it, but Kick-Ass is advertised as a comedy and the thing is, it is funny... but incredibly sad.

Watch out for potential spoilers, folks. I'll try to be gentle though.

As we all know, Kick-Ass is an average guy. And his first foray into crime-fighting goes very poorly. In fact, he gets stabbed. Then hit by a car. Sure, the getting hit by a car is much worse, but watching him get stabbed was just so painful to me. Once he gets out of the hospital, he's still not very super; just a super punching bag. His "super power" is total defense, which means that to be of any use, he has to get his ass kicked. I took no joy in watching him endure all the pain he does and it is was a sad fanaticism that Kick-Ass pursues his career as a crime-fighter. He's bad at it, he almost gets killed a lot, and his ass is saved by the real super hero, Hit Girl, multiple times. Watching Hit Girl is a delight. Watching Kick-Ass is just so sad.

The movie opens with the question, as we have seen in the trailers, asking why no one else tried being a superhero before Kick-Ass. And after watching this movie, I understand and myself have no desire to pursue a career of crime-fighting. There is no glorious montage where Kick-Ass learns how to fight or actually does any ass-kicking at all. Even his fight with Red Mist toward the end is just a show of his incompetent they both are. With no power, comes no responsibility, sure, but is also means having no power, including all the advantageous parts of being a superhero. While the best superhero stories involve the question of how painful and lonely it can be to be such a powerful figure (see: superhero deconstruction, aka, why I love superheroes), Kick-Ass is so ordinary it is painful to watch him get his ass kicked. When Batman is getting his ass kicked, we know he can handle it, because he is Batman. But Kick-Ass is really just Dave with a scuba suit; his mask is the only thing that makes him different than everyone else. At least Nite Owl and Silk Spectre had some training.

Dave, in the end, is just an average guy in way over his head. He can handle the pain, physically, so he survives because that's his ability: to survive. But that's it. He's just like the faceless human beings that survive with the help of the real, trained, able superheroes, or simply heroes. The tough ones who can endure the pain, but also can't do anything to stop it.

Kick-Ass is not a superhero movie; if it really was, it would be called Hit Girl, because she is the superhero. She's got the training, the bloody fight sequences, and the strong origin story. Kick-Ass is, instead, the story of everyone who is not a superhero, but people like Dave, like me, like every fan on the planet, that dreams even for a second what that life would be like. Kick-Ass shows us that that life sucks. It would be hard and unrewarding. So unless we go to ninja school or have a mother train us for a life of crime-fighting or build a super suit or get bitten by a radioactive spider, we are screwed. Because being a superhero takes more than wanting to be a superhero; it takes dedicating yourself to the role. Dave doesn't do that, so he just manages to scrape through and make a few heroic moves outside of all the non-heroic moments he has in the movie. He's the Bond girl to Hit Girl's Bond; he might lend a hand, but really, he's just normal.

So when I first left the theater, I was a bit disappointed that Dave wasn't more badass, that he wasn't more heroic. But as I thought more about it, I just realized that I wanted him to be tougher because it was hard to see him be so normal. It reminded me just how normal I am and that if I were to try what he tried, to just put on a scuba suit and fight crime, I'd probably get stabbed in the gut too. Superheroes aren't normal. And that's just fine; they shouldn't be. Being good at anything takes real dedication, not just posturing in front of a mirror and doing a few sit-ups.

I'd like to see it again, of course, to further assess it and to understand what it is going to give me rather than what I want out of it. If I want a story of a heroic super-human, I'll watch my Dark Knight or Iron Man DVDs. If I want to be brought back to Earth, well, that's what Kick-Ass is for.

Iron Man 2 hits theaters in 2 weeks. That's good, because I need some badassery to keep me sane.

And Heroes!?

This is the comment I posted in regards to EW.com's recap of the Heroes season four premiere:

"I was sure I was going to give Heroes up after this premiere, after being someone extremely proud of her commitment to Heroes all through three seasons no matter how bad, predictable, and lame the storylines and characters got. But then I watched the season premiere and although FAR from being good or properly redeeming, there were enough good points (and the bad points were comical enough) that I might actually bother to continue watching (that is, DVRed episodes when I find some spare time). I really like the carny folk, and for the first time in forever is Peter’s nice guy behaviour actually interesting and refreshing. And, although everything about the Matt/Sylar storyline referred to far better scenarios (firstly, the already noted BSG subconscious nestling cylons incredibly lamed-down by Ricky Worthy’s appearance; secondly, the use of a substance abuse program to refer to a substance no one else has in common like in season 2 of Dexter (except that Dexter wasn’t even trying to get better and his “power” of serial killing is far more interesting); and thirdly, the whole bad cop, uneasy marriage calls back to the far superior new series FlashForward’s main characters), I actually found Zachary Quinto’s performance to be wonderful. Of course, especially with Star Trek’s (and his) success, he’s really too good for the show anymore, but he was fun to watch. So Heroes is definitely nowhere near my favourite show like it used to be back in its first season, but I might actually bother watching. Plus, the way it’s going, it’s not going to last much longer anyway, right (God, I hope so)?"

So I suppose I might bother to keep watching. It's not exactly fun in the way it used to be because it's just lame television (that makes me say "WTF?" about every five minutes), but there's still a part of me that enjoys seeing those characters (well, maybe except for Claire... I hate her so...) do their weird things. Plus, the battle between Peter and Edgar-The-Fast-Dude-With-Swords was NICE; I've always been hard on Heroes for skimping on the whole power-battles thing and it was nice to actually see one, even if it was relatively short.

Stealing From My Livejournal Part XXIX

As I use my livejournal for little else except for movie rants and decided to switch over here, I thought I'd recruit some older posts so as to show a history. I'll bother with new ones as they come to me.




(**note: my opinions about Watchmen have shifted since this post. I liked it less the more I thought about it. Now I'd label it "okay, I sort of liked it, but not really that much.")

From March 8, 2009:

"Finally got to see it and just got back from the theatre.

The verdict?

I liked it. I really did like it. It is nowhere near as good or as resonating or as astounding as the graphic novel (not to build up the novel too much, despite my love for it), but it is certainly enjoyable. It's incredibly difficult, imo, to compress Watchmen into an under three hour film, but I think they managed pretty well. And, to be frank, it's kind of nice that I don't want to watch all the little things. They add so much into the graphic novels, all the smaller supporting characters, but when you're watching a movie, they're just distracting, so it is kind of nice that they were reduced... although I am a bit disappointed by the shortening of Rorschach's history. I thought the casting was all really good (Nixon's nose was really distracting though), the script was incredibly faithful to the novel, and I liked that the costumes were updated (I'm sorry, Ozymandias' costume, for one, would have been SO campy on screen... as would had everyone else's really). The music was generally cool but some of it was a bit weird. "Hallelujah" playing when Laurie and Dan get it on in Archie was really bizarre to me. But, overall, I thought it was good.

Of course, this is coming from the perspective of someone who has read the novel. I totally understand if people who have not read the novel, or who go in expecting it to be on par with the novel, don't like it, or even hate it. I saw it with two other people who had read the novel and two who haven't. Rachel, who hasn't read the graphic novel, hated it, for instance. There were a lot of little things that weren't really explained (Bubastis, for one) and just too much that couldn't be put on screen in a single movie that made it hard for non-fan viewers to really relate to it.

In the end, I think that, for fans who want a nice little complement to the graphic novel, who would like to see a film version that, while not as good, is still good enough to watch, Watchmen is the perfect creation. However, if you wanted to make a film that made the story more accessible to people who haven't read it, this isn't the best example (although it does a better job than, say, some of the Harry Potter films for explaining most things). If anything, I hope this prompts all fans who see it with their non-fan friends to say, like Jen insisted to Rachel, "well, read the graphic novel. It's better explained and just better overall."

I enjoyed it. I might not bother seeing it again in theatres, but I'll probably buy it when it comes out on DVD. I think it would be nice to watch when I'm just not feeling up to committing to rereading the graphic novel (it's like why I own the Harry Potter films... only, I like Watchmen the film better than the Harry Potter movies)."

Stealing From My Livejournal Part VII

As I use my livejournal for little else except for movie rants and decided to switch over here, I thought I'd recruit some older posts so as to show a history. I'll bother with new ones as they come to me.




From July 18, 2008:

"SO I saw The Dark Knight at midnight (closer to 12:30. Normally I love previews but a) IT WAS THE DARK KNIGHT and b) they were boring previews, except for the Watchmen preview... ooh shiny...) last night and the spoiler-free version of my reaction to the movie is pretty much incoherent babblings about how amazing the movie is and how absolutely freaking brilliant the Joker was.

Now for the spoilered version of my reaction...
*****
*****

I read in Entertainment Weekly as we were building up to the premiere about the Joker prancing around the street in a nurse's outfit. I read that, did a double-take, and then grinned wildly. The thing about the Dark Knight, the most surprising and fun thing, is that there is more to it than just in the preview, which is incredible because the preview is already so much. Don't get me wrong, there were things I didn't like so much, which I will get to, but overall, the movie was so incredibly GOOD. And as I will tell everyone and anyone for the rest of my life, Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is, in my opinion, one of the best acting jobs ever performed. Fuck you, Academy, I don't care that he's dead, at this point in the game, Heath Ledger's performance has earned him the Best Supporting Actor fifty thousand times over. Jack Nicholson's Joker? Screw him, not nearly as brilliant.

See, when I first saw Joker on the screen, I was so excited, but because of the hype, just like everyone else. But by the second or third appearance on the screen, it wasn't about the hype anymore. I wanted to see him because he was so great to watch. The Joker is my favourite villain now, that perfect character that is performed so well and has the most simplistic motivations that make him all the more interesting. And the Batman/Joker relationship itself is just so magnificent and interesting... he's such a great archnemesis. And the script was so good, and I was so incredibly jealous of the writer, especially for the Joker's lines. He must have been such a great character to write.

As for other brilliant things, Christian Bale was, of course, great. He and Heath worked together so flawlessly in their scenes that I never wanted them to end. All of the acting was good, even the tiniest part in the movie was performed well. But I was so gleeful when Rachel Dawes was killed off. It's not that she was an annoying character yet, but that she would have become such a burden had she continued to be used. I am very glad that she's gone (not in the least because this could totally make room for Catwoman to waltz into the next movie, cough >.>).

Now... Harvy Dent. Aaron Eckhart did a very good job acting-wise, I thought. He wasn't the best performance on screen, of course, but he managed quite well against the brilliant performances left and right and did a good job himself. Unfortunately, it was his character that bugged me at times. Mostly, I'm just a bit upset at the sudden demise. I'm not sure how I could see it happening much differently, and he might not be dead, but regardless, it was a small bit of disappointment that I felt when he just came as a villain and went as a villain, especially since he had no time to shine in his own right with Joker being Joker left and right. Also, his face. The CGI was showing off a bit too much and it lost a sense of realism in the way his voice and eye were not affected by the major facial changes going on there. This notice I blame on Nicole, since she's the one that paid it attention, but regardless, I was expecting something closer to the Tommy Lee Jones' version in Batman Forever. It was more theatrical, but the face itself would be more tolerable to my tastes, at least. >.<


I've gotta go see it again sometime soon. :)"