Be Afraid, Summer Box Office. Be Very Afraid.

There's going to be a lot of 3D movies trying to earn your money at the local multiplex this summer, but you'll have some other choices, too. One of them consists of a ton of '80's, '90's, and ought's action stars teaming up to kick your butt.

The Expendables stars, in varying degrees of involvement-- and I am not making this up-- Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, Randy Couture, Steve Austin, and Jason Statham. You might want to read that list again.

I also found out that the lovely Charisma Carpenter, of Buffy and Angel fame, is in the movie. Hey Charisma, glad to see you're getting work. Do you have the kids this weeend, or do I?



This really doesn't seem like a fair fight, all of these guys against one little box office.

Mom and Dad, I Have Something to Tell You...

No, not what you think. But I did watch the second Twilight film, New Moon, last night.

Um, there were girls there. Real ones. So that makes it okay. I saw it with a group of friends, and some of them were girls. But I still refuse to see these movies in theaters, no matter how much I want to be a movie critic. The only thing that could drag to a theater to see one of these in public is a smokin' girlfriend, but Jessica Alba and I are broken up right now.

So anyway, I was thinking about... holy crap! Did you see Taylor Lautner as Jacob in this thing? Look at him! He's like 12 but has the body of a Greek god. No wonder tween girls love these movies.

By the way, it was hard for me to watch you in that movie last night, Ashley. Come back to me. I miss you.

ValkyrieSDF1

Movie Review: Kick-Ass

Tarantino-vile and largely entertaining, Matthew Vaughn's (Layer Cake) Kick-Ass is a funny and action-packed super hero spoof. The film is fundamentally an action comedy, with offensive language and blood splattered about the hilarious and jaw-droping gags. In the midst of the ridiculousness mangled bodies lies a super hero movie that suddenly looks very outdated.

In the film, teenager Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) loves comic books and hates society's apathy towards crime. He decides to become a super hero, Kick-Ass, roaming the streets of New York City and fighting muggers and the like. He is almost killed in fights more than once, and his acute lack of super-powers forebodes a short career. However, he has help soon as the well-trained Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) and her partner, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), start taking out gangsters in a serious way. They have a vendetta against mobster Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), whose son, Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), becomes Red Mist, another super hero, to befriend Kick-Ass. Most of this drama unfolds over the internet, through things like Youtube. All the while, Dave is trying to deal with being a loser of a teenager, trying to spend time with his friends and win the heart of Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca), a girl who believes he is gay.

Kick-Ass fails as the commentary on super heroes, and the possibility of real-life super heroes, that it sometimes believes itself to be. Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), based on a juggernaut of a graphic novel, already covered that territory: people dress up as heroes because the costumes are a sexual fetish, people fight crime because they're driven maniacs, someone with real super powers makes costumed heroes irrelevant, costumed heroes die when shot. Watchmen analyzed the phenomenon within the context of an alternate-reality United States, one rife with political turmoil; Kick-Ass simply wants us to watch our characters kill and be killed. And the film fails in the same way that many felt Watchmen did: the real people who try to be heroes do, in fact, pull off superhuman feats, therefore equalizing their story with the average comic book instead of keeping it about comic books. Hit-Girl is 11 years old, but she defeats a cemetery's worth of grown men while jumping around like a foul-mouthed, purple-haired Yoda.

Thankfully, Vaughn stays away from the obnoxious filmmaking so prevalent in today's action films. This wasn't made by Tony Scott. When a strobe light effect is created, it isn't because the editing is so fast that the viewer can't tell what's happening, it is because there is actually a strobe light being used for tactical advantage by a character. The movie, which is based on a comic series by Mark Millar, is relatively derivative, from the tight spandex to the use of iconic music from other films, including Danny Boyle's Sunshine (2007) and 28 Days Later (2002) and Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965). And, in the spirit of anime, Hit-Girl drops the f-bomb, killing grown men while wearing a skirt. Yes, she is sexualized at one point in the film.

So I liked the film, but it isn't for the faint of heart.

By the way, there are some mainstream critics that have written, "Kick-Ass kicks ass!" and crap like that. They get paid for this stuff! Really??!! I mean, really? Where'd they get that one?

This Guy was Better than Ridley Scott

Shoot, here's a post that's actually about movies.

Ridley Scott is a master craftsman because of his ability to, as he explains it, realize a vision on film. I love a few of his films, most notably Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator. Blade Runner is probably in my top ten movies of all time.

But that guy up there is John Martin Aloysius Feeney, a.k.a. John Ford (1894-1973). Ford made stuff like Stagecoach and The Quiet Man and How Green was My Valley. John Ford crafted lyrical poetry, and he did it with such surety that he could actually put his hat in front of the camera when he knew he had the footage he needed but was unhappy with the time it took for the cameraman to stop rolling.

Ridley Scott has been known to shoot about 5.3 million miles of film for every scene. Think about that.

And these are just the two gentleman that come to mind. I'm not picking on Scott; there are plenty of good and bad directors with both of these reputations.

Here We Go

Hey, both of you who will ever read this, I'm just getting started. I love to write, but I don't do enough of it. I've got to write more often to exercise this lazy brain of mine.

Yeah, I'll often be discussing cinema and it's slow, younger brother, "Hollywood Cinema." Just kidding; Hollywood features a ridiculous amount of talent, and it always has. The point is that I'm the type of person who watches DVD/Blu-ray commentaries and reads entire books about one film. If you're not, then you're probably at the wrong blog.

The ultimatum is this: my blog will be about movies and videogames and whatever else I feel like writing about. You're going to hear a lot about the X-Files book I'm trying futilely to write. And you get to do it all in glorious, proper/grammatically correct English.

Peace,

ValkyrieSDF1