Kick-Ass

It is of no particular use to discuss Kick-Ass, far ahead of the pack of what will eventually be the most debated films of the year, with anything approaching the false objectivity of holistic criticism. You know the sort, the reviewing style in which, one hopes, the critic does write about his or her own response to the film among the more objective and studious observations, albeit without the use of the dreaded 'I' as if writing from the darkest nightmare of Ayn Rand. Kick-Ass, based on Mark Millar's gonzo (is he ever anything else but?) comic series about teenage vigilantism, announces itself as a love-it-or-hate-it picture from the start, generating such a forceful schism between vitriolic rejection and open adoration that it appears to be the geek version of Antichrist.

At least Lars von Trier's helter-skelter mind- and soul-fuck had something to say, though I'll be damned if I quite know what it is yet. The appeal (and point of contention) of Kick-Ass is that it does not seem to have anything to say at all, though its most vocal defenders insist that the naysayers simply didn't "get" it. But is there anything to get? Mark Millar's comic, written along with the movie script, follows an altogether unremarkable young man, gifted with neither powers, intellect, sophisticated gadgetry nor even a solid physique who decides to become a superhero just to give his life some purpose.

Vaughn and Jane Goldman's adaptation, however, takes a left turn in quick order that throws this premise completely out the window. On his first night out in a wetsuit costume, ho-hum loser Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) attempts to stop a carjacking and gets a knife to the stomach for his troubles. It's a moment that distills the difference between fantasy and reality, a rude awakening for the kid who thought his antics might get him some popularity. Then, everything changes. Doctors place so many metal pieces in Dave's body to strengthen his bones that even the kid remarks his similarity to Wolverine, and the attack fried his nerve endings, allowing him to absorb large amounts of abuse without feeling pain. Granted, it's not flight or laser vision, but that shift changes the entire dynamic of the film: it's no longer a story about an average kid trying to be a hero but an empowered teen who's simply untrained and rough around the edges.

So, Dave now experiences some success as Kick-Ass, not foiling the beating of a man on the street so much as transferring that beating onto himself and withstanding long enough that the attackers simply leave and bystanders with cell-phone cameras turn the hapless, baton-whirling teen into a sensation. And then...what? Dave, purposefully made as banal as possible to strip him of any attribute that might serve him in his night job, does not resonate for the exact same reason. He has a crush on the popular girl, Katie (Lyndsy Fonesca), hangs out with his two wittier friends (Clark Duke and Evan Peters, adhering to the rule that all adolescents travel in trios) and fantasizes about his buxom teacher. That's about as far as we go with his character, even when rumors arise in school that Dave's constant bruises and cuts are the result of him being a gay prostitute, a rumor that, of course, brings him closer to the in-mandated-need-for-a-gay-best-friend Katie.

The only characters of any true interest are Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage, spouting a hilarious Adam West impersonation) and Hit-Girl (Chloë Moretz). Big Daddy and Hit-Girl are, as Dave notes, "the real deal," taking vigilantism to shocking heights with madcap killing sprees executed with precision. The two have an actual story and motivation, unlike Dave, who routinely steals attention away from the gonzo pair for his insipid journeys through the motions of comic book tropes, never conveyed through action but spoken aloud and immediately undercut by another bit of dialogue, empty boasts of self-awareness. Dave's relationship with Katie, with its usage of tired situations that read like Three's Company leftovers that climax in a Big Misunderstanding scene which manages to fly in the face of what meager characterization exists between the two. When Dave first sees Hit-Girl and Big Daddy in action, he realizes how out of his depth he was to pretend to be a hero when this finely conditioned vigilantes roamed the same streets. If only Vaughn agreed with the protagonist; Millar purportedly intended the two to be the main focus of the story, but altered his approach as an unremarkable teenager made for easier identification than such extreme characters. Yet the audience can identify with Big Daddy and Hit-Girl more readily as they have some sort of personality.

Kick-Ass even lives up to its promise of giddy mayhem when Vaughn cedes the floor to the destructive tag-team. Moretz completely steals the show as the profane and hyperviolent Hit-Girl, with her hot pink wig and arsenal of blades and pistols. Capable of portraying both the unstoppable assassin and the adorable, if ludicrously maladjusted, 11-year-old girl inside the costume, Moretz gives one of the most memorable performances by a child in recent years; no wonder, then, that she's been tapped to play the vampire in the (wholly unnecessary) American remake of Let the Right One In, a role that gave audiences the other great young female performance of recent cinema.

But even her terrific presence is undone by the extremity of her actions. Unlike most of the film's critics, I find nothing particularly offensive about most of the film's ultraviolence. That's actually the problem: Vaughn so stylizes the bloodshed, with the typical slow-motion and fast editing that directors continue to mine from The Matrix, that it has no meaning. Death has no sense of finality in Kick-Ass, save the times when, perversely, it is at its most absurd. The hordes of thugs Hit-Girl cut down do not register a second thought, but a man shoved into a giant microwave(?) offers at least a moment of reflection for the audience, before Vaughn then plays that moment for laughs. Sin City had the same cartoonish violence, but it also had an emotional core that Kick-Ass lacks and so desperately needs. In one scene, the only truly serious one of the film, Vaughn veers so close to genuine meditation on the price of vigilantism, the blind quest for revenge and how the evil that exists in the real world is no better than the exaggerated archvillains of the comics that he runs in the opposite direction as if afraid of his own intelligence. Kick-Ass' final act replaces the wheel-spinning repetition of the first half with the utter insanity that it only hinted at previously. But the payoff fails to live up to the hype, moving even farther away from any sense of relatability until one cannot even compare the violence to that of a video game; video games have progressed too much to insult them so.

I feel like I'm spinning my own wheels now, but the inexplicably (yet inevitably) positive reaction carries with it the sort of mind-boggling defense that makes the film impenetrable. This film has no point, not in the sense of anything so high-minded as "theme" or "subtext" but in the sheer absence of any reason to watch it. "But it doesn't need a reason," shout its defenders, "It's fun!" Setting aside personal reactions to the film's supposedly enjoyable elements, this argument holds no water for two important reasons: 1) these same people are calling Kick-Ass a satire, or at least subversive -- an understandable mistake, as the brain searches for meaning when none is immediately apparent, as it is certainly not here; Un Chien Andalou is so timeless precisely because Buñuel and Dali intentionally robbed the short's incomprehensible images of even symbolic value. 2) Since when is it artistically bold to make a stupid movie? I am so sick of this asinine illogic, the notion that it takes courage to aim low, as if the cinematic landscape is not already littered with pointless, plot-less behemoths that snake their tendrils into your wallets. It's that line of reasoning that keeps hundreds of intelligent films out of the vast majority of American theaters, and God only knows how many scripts from being developed. And don't tell anyone who doesn't like a film that they just don't "get" it.

Christ, even the filmmakers have insisted that they've made something smart and unique. Matthew Vaughn said that Kick-Ass "has broken every rule." What rule did it break? A child uses the c-word. Goodness gracious. She also kills, and anyone who thinks that a schoolgirl wreaking havoc on men is fresh must think that Japan's only cultural export is a large number of America's best baseball players. Vaughn didn't stop there, going so far as to cite each aspect of production as unique, touching upon "the way it was made, the way it was written, the way it was financed, the way it was directed. We didn’t do anything by the book. Maybe that’s why it feels so fresh.” Let's break this down: Kick-Ass was written as its source material was being written. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke did the same with 2001: A Space Odyssey and made two fascinating but vastly different takes on Clarke's vision, each with their own merits. Vaughn just simplified Millar's wryer and more decadently cynical take on the premise into something more fit for mass consumption. Too many films have been self-financed to pause for a second on his second point, and Kick-Ass isn't even the first self-financed, hyperviolent blockbuster meant for the instant gratification of a wide audience; I am of course speaking of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. As for direction, Kick-Ass steals so many cues from The Matrix and from Vaughn's old collaborator Guy Ritchie (including Ritchie alumni Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng and Dexter Fletcher, playing Italian wise guys because why the hell not) that the only artistically bold choice of the film was claiming originality. Perhaps Vaughn meant that last point literally, that the manner in which he shot the film was different. Maybe he suspended himself from the ceiling upside-down while he was looking through the viewfinder.

His assertion of Kick-Ass' "freshness" underlines the film's failure. It's trying to have its cake and eat it too, politically incorrect just to drum up some controversy and interest even as it insists that its madness has some method. I spent so many drafts and rewrites addressing points I disliked and then re-addressing them to deal with the perceived catcalls of "that was the point!" to come that I nearly gave myself a migraine, so let me instead save you the trouble of reading an even longer, even more circular diatribe by saying this: I don't care whether Kick-Ass was supposed to be stupid. It has nothing to give its audience; it can only take two hours away from them. Shocked laughs give way to the realization that so little was actually funny, and the protagonist quickly becomes an unfortunate obstacle between the audience and the father-daughter duo that offers the only consistent entertainment. Kick-Ass is supposed to be about an aimless teen and his aimless plan to be a hero, yet even the plot abandons him when Big Daddy and Hit-Girl come along with a possible narrative to latch onto. Their story, by the way, is the exact sort of hero origin tale that Dave Lizewski adamantly states he does not have, and it's one more reason this faux-subversive comic book flick fails to break the rules it thinks it can shatter with its carnage. Kick-Ass wants to be dumb in a smart way, and it makes itself into an idiot in the process.

How to Train Your Dragon

It is not enough to say that How to Train Your Dragon is the finest picture to roll out of Dreamworks Animation's studio, particularly given their nearly decade-long bath in the slop trough with a series of increasingly banal sequels and failed attempts at launching new franchises (who could forget Shark Tale, other than the people who saw it?). But the studio finally followed through on the initial promise of their early features -- Antz, the underrated Prince of Egypt, the first Shrek -- with 2008's Kung Fu Panda, and now they've put out a film that easily ranks among the finest achievements in contemporary animation, as well as one of the few delights of this young year.

One of those "the title says it all" flicks, How to Train Your Dragon is a high-concept family comedy executed nearly without flaws. It presents the small Viking village of Berk, situated on a craggy rock that barely yields enough tasteless crops to feed the populace and their sheep. Complicating matters is the routine invasion by dragons, who scorch the spare fields and seize livestock for their own gullets. Every Viking in the hamlet is raised to hate and kill dragons, and everyone excels at it.

Everyone, that is, except Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), son of the clan chief, Stoick (Gerard Butler). In a demimonde filled with bulky warriors, Hiccup is a scrawny geek, eager to please his peers and especially his father but unable to join in the fighting. So, he builds contraptions to compensate for his utter lack of muscle mass, and during one raid he uses one of his weapons to shoot down a Night Fury, an incredibly agile type of dragon so deadly that no one has ever managed to kill one. When he tracks down the wounded beast, however, he cannot bring himself to slay the poor thing, even though it would catapult him into fame.

Dreamworks, as the other major 3D animation studio of the last decade or so, always finds itself in competition with Pixar, which is like forcing the Police Academy films to compete with Dr. Strangelove. Where Dreamworks has a leg up, though, is in the company's more lenient attitude toward realism. Pixar movies occasionally hit a snag when the precise construction of their worlds come into conflict with the exaggerated character models, but Dreamworks is so inherently goofy that it gives itself a broader range. With Dragon, the studio finally takes advantage of this. The Night Fury, Toothless, looks strikingly different from the other types of dragons seen throughout the film, including a bulldog-like reptile and a two-headed beast, one of which emits inflammable gas that the other sparks. The equally outlandish Viking models, from Stoick's friend and Hiccup's watcher Gobber (a very game Craig Ferguson) to the sexy young brute Astrid (America Ferrara), who appears to have the same physique as Hiccup but can hurl axes and swing swords with the adults, stress the animators' attempt to detach us from the (often ridiculous) need for reality in the most surreal form of the most surreal medium of art.

They succeed wildly. Dragon's opening sequence is one of the most dynamic action pieces to grace a modern animated picture, so visceral that directors Chris Sanders and Dennis DeBois structure one shot in such a way that it appears as if a handheld camera was documenting the action. They also give enchantingly anthropomorphic traits to Toothless without losing his sleek, beautiful form (memorably, the animator turn his reptilian slits into heart-melting doe eyes). With this film, Dreamworks breaks wholly from the lame pop culture references and limp sight gags that propelled their limp, deflated mid-Aughts works: the humor comes from the situations and the characters, and these people feel so real that at some point you stop wondering why the Vikings speak with a smattering of Scottish and American accents led by a young'un with a nasally Canadian whine. Tedious as celebrity stunt casting is, these actors become these cartoons because they're allowed to speak lines that give themselves, and each other, depth and identity.

Most importantly, How to Train Your Dragon captures that feeling of uninhibited flight better than any other film that comes to mind. The montage of Hiccup and Toothless coming to trust each other and learning to fly together is nothing particularly original in construction, but in execution it becomes as spellbinding as the flying scenes in Avatar and magical as anything in Pixar's canon. By damaging Toothless' tail fin and rendering him incapable of flight on his own, the writers create a symbiosis between the dragon and Hiccup, who designs a replacement flap that he controls, thus giving their bond an extra dimension and their aerial acrobatics a mutually invigorating experience that is magnified on the audience. Whether gently soaring among the clouds or banking and careening in rapidly edited chases, the flight scenes are gripping, transporting and undeniable proof in the power of animation to transfix crowds of all ages -- I heard nary a peep from the engaged children in my theater, and the most enthusiastic response I heard leaving the auditorium came from an elderly couple behind me.

As with all the other movies currently slapped with a 3-D filter, one can easily enjoy the majesty of How to Train Your Dragon in two boring old dimensions. Yet I was struck that the most memorable and lasting image to take advantage of the 3-D, compared to its usual role in adding a cheap, hollow thrill to action scenes, involved Hiccup holding out his hand for the first time to pet Toothless. The directors used the gimmick to call attention to the emotional and thematic crux of the film: by showing how pre-conceived notions vastly differ from the truth and how they often lead to trumped-up fear and disgusting violence, How to Train Your Dragon suggests that the next generation might just be a little less violent and a little more willing to learn about someone or something before acting. What a fantastic message (and a fairly understated one, for a children's film), particularly in a time of increasingly extreme rhetoric being casually used in America based on fear and ignorance. Furthermore, Sanders and DeBois weave this theme into much of the film's other dynamics, preventing the contentious father-son relationship between Stoick and Hiccup from becoming too staid and adding a layer to the budding romance angle between Hiccup and Astrid. Funny, touching, insightful and as thrilling as the best of animated features, How to Train Your Dragon bypasses the hackneyed soundbite of "Fun for the whole family!" by reminding us that any animated film worth its salt should always fit that bill.

Year One

Year One, Harold Ramis’ new, inaccurately titled comedy, suggests the pairing of the neurotic, sensitive straight man and the fat, loud-mouthed schlub is as old as history itself. Perhaps that’s why Jack Black and Michael Cera are playing to types so rigid they might as well be cast in stone.

If you’ve watched the trailer for the film – and you doubtlessly have, as it was everywhere – then you already know the plot: Black’s Zed and Cera’s Oh (get it?) live in a village in what is certainly not the first year of human existence, a village apparently in the Garden of Eden even though it’s clearly not, and they pine for Maya (Olivia Wilde) and Eema (Juno Temple), respectively.

One day, Zed eats the forbidden fruit, and soon the two friends set out to explore the world as they pledge to return as heroes to win their loves. Along the way they stumble from one Bible story to another: they meet Cain (David Cross) as he slays his brother (Paul Rudd) before stumbling across Abraham (Hank Azaria) just before he sacrifices his son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Eventually they make their way to Sodom, where the people all inexplicably speak with British accents.

After suffering through the lame hunter-gatherer jokes and the lazy Biblical references for 40 minutes, I confess I had high hopes for Sodom, which is a sad reflection of mindset at the time. Maybe in that den of unadulterated sin Ramis could at last unleash and really go for the blasphemous jugular, I thought. But no, it biggest payoff is a line like "You know what the best part of Sodom is? The sodomy," which might have been funny the hands of an anti-comic like Norm MacDonald. Delivered the uncomfortable David Cross – who has a look on his face the entire film that suggests he agreed to be in it as a fan of Ramis without reading the script – however, only accentuates its laziness.

Anyone going into this film expecting even a hint of the Ramis of old is in for a rude awakening, which is all the more bewildering given the wealth of comic talent both in front of and behind the camera. Ramis wrote the script with two Office scribes, and he collected a cast chock-full of comic heavyweights to back him up. Even if the leads are stuck in a rut, they're bankable comedy players, and David Cross is one of the finest comics of this generation.

With all that talent, how could he come up with this? Keep in mind: Harold Ramis is the person most responsible for the rise of chaos and revelry in comedy. He introduced raunch to the mainstream with his script for Animal House and his partnerships with Bill Murray represent, for many, the standard of cynical, skewed comedy. Judd Apatow in particular owes his career to Ramis, which might explain why he would finance such a terrible script. Then again, maybe it exerted the same strange influence over him as it apparently did the others.

It doesn’t help that Cera and Black are playing their old shtick: Cera is ironically detached, while Black doesn’t read his lines so much as boisterously proclaim them like a drunken William Shatner. Occasionally, he simply devolves into noises and funny faces. Why not just jangle keys for us, too? I miss the days when Jack Black had a handle on his manic energy, when he funneled it into an unassuming man who could suddenly burst into a rage over the most trivial of subjects. That character was funny in High Fidelity, even the over-the-top School of Rock. Now, he's just as sad self-parody, shouting these terrible lines in the hops that he'll make them amusing (he received his master's degree at the Dane Cook School of Comedy).

And as shoddy as the script is, Ramis’ direction fares no better: for some reason, he devotes most of the shots of this epically scaled comedy to close-ups, as if he was desperate to get a reaction, any reaction, out of the bored actors. He's never been the greatest director in the world, but he knew a thing or two about placement and how to set up for a joke. I saw short films made by high-schoolers at a school festival that had a better sense of direction that a man with 30 years of experience.

I take notes when I go to the theater, obviously so I don't have to remember every little thing when I get back home to write. But after about the halfway mark of this film, my scribbles devolved into such chaos as and entire page with the word "Why?" pasted all over it. I offered theories as to why and how Ramis could have fallen so far; the sanest of the bunch simply reads, "Have aliens killed Harold Ramis and worn his flesh to undermine the comedic bedrock of America to weaken us for eventual invasion? (possible)." Several pages I tore up on the way out, for fear that their content might be incriminating in some states. At no point did I manage to convince myself that a single moment was funny.

Year One is clearly shooting to be a piece of satirical blasphemy à la Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but it can’t even hit the simpler parody of History of the World Part I: it’s filled to the ceiling of its PG-13 rating with sodomy, circumcision and gay jokes – Olvier Platt’s turn as a high priest makes Ken Jeong’s mincing mobster from The Hangover look like a character from The Wire – yet Ramis is just wary enough of incurring any protests that he plays it frustratingly safe. You can't half-ass blasphemy: if you're going to mock the Bible's inconsistencies and absurdities, you better be ready to go all-out, not to turn them into sad, repetitive gags.

Yes, for all its gross-out gags, the only bold aspect of the entire film was the decision to include a blooper reel, as the thought of watching the crew having a good time with this after torturing us for 97 minutes is just insulting. At least the cast has the decency to look as bored in these candid moments as they do in the final product. It is truly the Paris Hilton sex tape of blooper reels.

In his now-legendary review for North, Roger Ebert listed director Rob Reiner's previous achievements as "incantations" against that infamous turkey. If that offered even a moment's consolation, I strongly suggest that anyone unfortunate enough to spend $10 on this piece of trash repeat "Ghostbusters, Stripes, Animal House, Groundhog Day, Caddyshack" ad nauseam. Better yet, lock arms with your miserable brethren, in the hopes that, collectively, your tribal chanting can drown out the primitive nonsense of this tripe. Make no mistake: Year One is an abominable failure, and the nadir of Ramis’ career. He should be grateful that McG ruined the Terminator franchise just a few weeks ago, as that's the only thing keeping him from having the worst film of the year.