Take Names.

About a year ago I took an interest in comic books. It didn't really last long and it only started because I read Watchmen and brashly assumed that there would be other books that might meet that standard of quality. I was wrong, but I did observe an interesting phenomenon spending so much time talking to strangers in the comic book store. Obviously there's only so much you can mine out of the superhero genre before it's totally tapped, but these people go back to the comic store every week and buy more comics supporting an industry that's thrived for almost a century. The limited story possibilities lead to a lot of formulas and retreads in the comic world, to the point where almost nothing is interesting or original. Only when someone like Alan Moore writes a book, not out of unconditional affection for a character but out of the creative aspiration to do something interesting with the medium do we get anything interesting. Comic book fans, therefore, tend to lead an existence of bare incident, where everything is preordained and they don't even expect the entertainment that they invest so much in to surprise them. Take All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder for instance. If I had to guess at Frank Miller's feelings towards comic book fans, it would be that he went into the industry optimistic that he could shake things up and move comics away from their formulaic qualities by introducing a darker imagining of Batman, but all this did was change the standard Batman comic into a gravel road of violence and homoerotic frankness. Depressed and/or a little bit blinded by his success, Miller spent the intervening years applying his skills to graphic novels that he at least had artistic control over. When asked to return to Batman and write something with universal appeal, though not as a continuation of his Batman series, he went balls-out, playing fast and loose with canon and turning Batman into a malevolent thug and having him abuse the fuck out of Robin and Alfred. It was genuinely interesting, well-written, subversive and offensive in the way that good satire should be, but comic fans lost their shit. Knowing they could easily go back to the warm comfort of lukewarm writing, they instead decided to buy the book in massive quantities and complain endlessly that their patron saint, Frank Miller, had abandoned them. And he had. Still has. The demands of the comic world are too shallow for someone with creative ambition to stay in the industry more than a few years without becoming resentful. (There's an argument for Frank Miller being one of the best living satirists here, but it's not an argument that's terribly pertinent to Kick Ass).

That's the feeling I got from Kick Ass, the new film from Matthew Vaughn, who still hasn't convinced me that he should be helming feature films or if he should be chased through the streets and punched to death by a dumpster. It's the most standard formula, dressed up and spun around and fed tequila shots a bit, but in the end it's a perfunctory action film with very little to distinguish itself from the dozens of similar films pumped out every year. Actually, I take that back. This film is more bland and standard than almost any major action film, because they at least have the decency to shake things up even a little bit, but Kick Ass is dicey and poorly executed in ways that the most atrociously bland movie one could assemble wouldn't be.

The film concerns a teenager named Dave played by Aaron Johnson, who's going through the "why aren't I a superhero?" stage of puberty that comes after the pubic hair but before the nipple worms, but he takes it a step further and actually dresses up as a superhero, buys himself some batons and manages to get himself knifed in broad daylight the first time he tries to fight some crime. When he recovers, he dresses up again and quickly encounters a group of men beating the fuck out of some pussy. Dave steps in and a brilliant action sequence ensues. It's exciting, tense, perfectly staged and scored (to a Prodigy song called Omen) and Johnson gets a little speech that really builds up the audience's emotional involvement in the scene and gets them hopped up and ready for a triumphant, crowd-pleasing action scene and then...it ends. Like that. The bad guys just walk away. It was a tremendous disappointment that set the tone for the rest of the film, and really, after all the hype about how it was going to be porn for action film fans, I wanted to push an active volcano into the theater and erupt it all over your seat. YES, YOUR SEAT AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. The only truly excellent action scene is a short one that falls in the middle of the film and doesn't add much to the plot, but it's shocking for its frank use of violence, whereas earlier in the film people were getting legs sliced off and things like that, which really took away from the "normal people as superheroes" angle, and it was nice to see an action scene that wasn't cartoonish but contained some shocking violence. Oh, and it's on Youtube. So you can send me whatever you were planning on spending on a ticket. Paypal is okay, but I'd prefer cash in an envelope left under a tree in the park. You know the place. The one where you left your girlfriend's ransom money last summer. I MADE HER INTO A HAT. I believe the success of the scene has a lot to do with its status as a throwaway scene, most likely inserted into the film to keep it moving along at a steady pace and not really subject to Vaughn's recurring aesthetic. It's simpler, and it works a lot better for that.

The film also concerns a few other heroes, specifically Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz) who introduced retardedly late in the film so that they won't outshine the main character for the entire film. Without those characters, not only would the studio not have its retarded marketing campaign, but it wouldn't have a film. The entire film is so dependent on them to work and so disinterested in Dave that the entire thing could have not only been successful, but been greatly improved by the exclusion of Dave, who only seems to have been included to give the 18-35 demographic an easy point of reference. His arc is done after he meets Big Daddy and Hit Girl, when he realizes that he's fooling himself and that he'd rather be a Myspace celebrity (really, Hollywood? Myspace?) and the film suffers greatly from his stupid narration. While I've never seen the original cut of Blade Runner, I'd imagine that the narration sounded like this, underlining every little thing that happens, spelling out motivations and themes for stupid people, and generally being a useless asshole.

Most people I know were pretty into the Hit Girl thing, but I don't see how a little girl killing people and saying fuck is very original. You guys should come hang out at my parents' house or something. At least Moretz plays the role with straightforwardness as opposed to the jokiness that I thought she'd employ, and it gives her a bit more credibility as a character who's meant to be a human being made out of flesh and blood and not titanium alloy and wizard poop, which is what Vaughn seems to have been going for.

So what did I think? It sort of sucked. It missed almost every possible opportunity and even Nicolas Cage wasn't that good (which, going by the Cage Curve, should earn him an Oscar). The humor, which really got hyped up by the ad campaign, really fucking bugged me. Most of the jokes were totally throw-away or "little girl says fuck". The only thing that made me laugh was the guy in the back who thought the movie was fucking hilarious, and when a cinema audience on a Tuesday night is more interesting than the movie, go fuck yourself.

4/10

Love on the Battlefield

I'll thank every God ever worshiped for giving me a weekend where I can first visit all the pitfalls of blockbuster filmmaking and become filled with the bitterness and distrust that most critics feel towards these films on one day, and on the next I can see a film that reminds me of everything I love about big films and why my eternally losing battle to champion these films is worth the gunshot wounds and flashbacks.

As I made staggeringly, irritatingly clear in my piece on The Princess and the Frog, I've got a thing for animation. It offers its filmmakers complete and total control over every visual element of the production and a talented filmmaker will use that level of control to create a landscape to compliment and deepen the audience's understanding and emotional involvement with the story and characters. A live-action film can do this, but the best few are rarely even close to as successful as the most mediocre animated films. And while it's more upsetting to see a creative team fail and squander that opportunity, it's not a commentary on the quality of How to Train Your Dragon, but rather a general handjob I give out to animated films just for being animated.

In the past I've avoided Dreamworks productions because they fucking suck (any of the Aardman Animation productions being the obvious exception). I liked Shrek when I was ten because I was ten, but beyond that I have no affection for their films, which have always been the commerce-obsessed cousin of Pixar, the one who always hangs out with Pixar at family reunions, but who Pixar really can't stand. They use cheap, gaudy gimmicks like casting celebrities just to put names on the marquees. Who casts Ewan McGregor for his voice? Or for any other reason?

That is one of the very few things I can hold against How to Train Your Dragon, a splendid motherfucking film for the whole family. It weaves the story of Hiccup, a skinny, anachronistic teenage outcast in a viking village plagued by dragon attacks. In this world, a viking's life is dedicated to dragon fighting, something Hiccup's frail little girl-arms were not slopped into existence for. He's instead become an apprentice blacksmith, something he is casually outclassed at by the one-armed, one-legged Gobber. Hiccup's routinely disappointed father Stoick leads the vikings and, thanks in no small part to Gerard Butler's naturally hostile voice, always sounds like he's ready to drop Hiccup and his chicken-legs into a vat of lava for viking soup. Hiccup employs his lamentable engineering prowess to wound the most dangerous of all dragons and to prove his success to his skeptical fellow vikings, goes out to put his prey in a sack and skin it into a fashionable belt. Being the girly boy-lover he is, Hiccup's first instinct is to befriends and exchange a few knitting patterns with his prey, a dragon named Toothless whose ability to fly Hiccup has destroyed. As the shroud of mystery lifts around Toothless, Hiccup begins to understand the woefully misunderstood dragons, never once exploiting their trust for a surprise strangling.

I won't defend the film on the basis of a plot outline because it's a genre film, where the true value is found in the details and in this case it's the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless, which builds from the ground up and takes the entire length of the film to develop in its entirety. It's a rare thing to see a film aimed at children with so much patience for its characters. Not even Ratatouille, which had a similar relationship between its two protagonists, built its story on the spine of a bond growing and strengthening. The animated "performances" for the characters are first-rate and the film would lose half its impact without them. While Hiccup is strongly written, interesting and well animated, his arc is mostly the rack upon which we hang the plot and is a lot more straightforward than Toothless's. Toothless is a totally mute character whose every ounce of character depends on animation, not droning exposition, and the animators sustain a level of mute emotiveness found in only the best animated films animated by the very best animators. He'll almost certainly be the finest animated character to be found in a 2010 film.

As for those genre sensibilities that drive the narrative, the story makes several advanced leaps that I didn't expect from the moment the conflict or thread was introduced. In fact, a brief aside: right off the bat I was enthralled with this movie for--what else?--its action. The opening action scene is likely to be on my list of favorite action scenes of the year, featuring some voice-over narration explaining the world and conflict while keeping the visuals swift, kinetic and exciting. I grew a bit worried, however, when they started to introduce threads and conflicts that will obviously fit in to the narrative in the most played-out, cinematic way possible. For instance, the obligatory love interest, Astrid, whose charmingly anachronistic ensemble could introduced to the fashion world as "viking-chic" and is marketable because it includes Ugg Boots, is introduced in front of an explosion in a slow motion moneyshot establishing her as the chick in the movie. Again, I expected a typical "Oh she hates me, oh we have some stuff in common, oh let's resolve the conflict together and close the movie with our first kiss hooray the nerd got the hot chick" arc, but it was far less typical than that. Much like Hiccup's relationship with Toothless, it builds from the ground up and the narrative never betrays its characters. While it ends the way you expect, their relationship remains combative and truly hostile. When I say "hostile", I don't mean "playfully hostile" like we've come to expect of movies, I mean genuinely hostile. She insults him and belittles him publicly and really despises him, and their relationship is the devolution of that relationship and the ascension of a relationship built on a foundation of respect, and from there a small pubescent spark forms. It's shockingly genuine, it's just that it's played out in a stylized world.

I love the way conflict is introduced and resolved in this film, and I love that the narrative and works for the characters, is driven exclusively by the characters and evolves out of the characters desires and actions. My only major complaint with the film is a little late-second act conflict dump. It leads to a pretty standard "clear-cut good guys vs. clear-cut bad guys" climax, and while it's visually stupifying and rousing and exciting and climactic and all the things I hoped it would be, it's also disappointing in its standardness. The whole film has been characterized by understanding for all its different characters and a disregard for typical conflict setup that the climax rings a bit hollow and hypocritical. We're supposed to root for the destruction of the antagonist when this whole film has been building our respect and attachment to the dragons. It's a little revision to the thematic palette that I did not appreciate, but god DAMN it was pretty.

Oh yeah, the whole film is ridiculously pretty. As pretty as, or even prettier than any of Pixar's efforts, thanks to The Roger Deakins, who consulted on this film as he did for Wall-E. The film's colors and cinematography is the other 50% that gives it the emotional heft that Dreamworks' films have been missing for so long. Let's hope this gets remembered Oscar time. If Avatar can get a Best Cinematography Oscar, I don't see why How to Train Your Dragon can't.

One last thing: I love the title. It's charmingly simplistic in the face of the film's thematic complexity. Hiccup surpasses the notion that he's "training" toothless after maybe their second time together and their relationship being a genuine friendship has become sort of forgone. When the title card appears just before the closing credits, it's almost more of a question: How to Train Your Dragon? With compassion and respect, that's fucking how.

9/10

Hate Him Back

There's a fork in the road of responsible criticism. There may be no way for me to know that Louis Leterrier was trying to make a bad movie, but I suspect he was, and with some subtlety. But does Clash of the Titans' badness transcend the traditional definition and put it in a class of the bold and unique? No, not at all. So I can saunter down giving it props for achieving its goals road or I can amble down state road fuck this movie. Either way, I imagine this entire review will be me wrestling with my opinions, dumping an arbitrary numerical score at the bottom of the page and taking a nap, because all roads lead to napville. I'll give Leterrier this much: the badness of Clash of the Titans is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is Sam Worthington's bizarre performance, ranking among the weirdest things born of laziness I've ever seen in a production of this size.

I'll give you guys a quick once-over with the plot, and you tell me what it sounds like. Innocent pile of mashed potatoes living an idyllic life with his super fantastic family is thrust into a situation where the good people of the land are facing a magical nemesis of God-like strength and who they cannot hope to defeat. For poorly explained reasons, our hero can do what thousands of trained, organized men cannot and break into the villain's house, jump him on the toilet and throw the elderly butler down two flights of stairs on the way out. On the way, he encounters dangerous beasts and servants of the villain with huge, glaring weaknesses that they're just begging you to exploit, and acquires many divine tools and weapons, one being a lightsaber, that help him out of overly specific situations.

For those of you who stay a step behind, that's also the plot description for all the Zelda games. Part of what makes this such a fascinating piece of shit is that it's a movie made for people who don't like movies, and would rather spend their time playing video games. Though the execution of this is sloppy because, like all video games, it's only possible to create awkward, stilted characters and narratives out of interactive media, I'm frightened that this will actually work, either now or in the immediate future, and that this is the trend that my beloved blockbuster will follow for the next decade. Not that my relationship with blockbusters has always been a good one. I'm not unaccustomed to bags of oranges reorganizing the layout of my stomach organs or finding myself in a club bathroom snorting cocaine off the ass of a willing woman, but this is a step down a path I'm not willing to follow, especially if Clash of the Titans is any indication of what to expect.

For instance, Sam Worthington was also in the much better Avatar last year where he also played a character whose middle name was Tabula Rasa. In Avatar, Jake Sully was a simple character who went through a simple arc and was like that so that any schmuck could relate and James Cameron could fuel his money-powered robohookers. In Clash of the Titans, Perseus is a personalityless blob because he's a player-controlled character and you want the player to project their own personality onto the character. The writers try to sidestep giving him human characteristics by making him stand for ideals that he has no basis to believe in, but everybody claims to believe in. In one scene he stands up to Zeus of all fucking people and tells him that he will not join the Gods because man stands together and their powerful sense of morality will prevail in the end. He makes a whole speech about brotherhood, clearly forgetting that the first fifteen minutes of the movie established him as sort of a shut-in who just hung out with his immediate family all the time. Yeah, his dad seemed like a pretty good role model, but his whole family was just four people, and they were all killed by the fifth person Perseus ever saw. He doesn't know shit about humanity, unless his fishing rod picks up public access and he's been watching soap operas on a pool skimmer.

So Perseus, as written, is a terrible character, but while the character is bad in an interesting way on paper, Sam Worthington's performance gives it an entirely new dimension of badness. If you remember the beginning of the Zelda games with any clarity, you remember that you always start as a nubile innocent, generally a child in tights whose route to the potion shop always involves skipping through a field of flowers, who never harms a thing and who has a song and a smile for all the creatures of the earth. But when that same player controlled character looks like a five o'clock shadowed, cigar chomping Sam Worthington, you've taken a candy-colored fun slide into a lysergic fever dream. Or maybe a Scandinavian art film. But it only ever gets stranger. For instance, the character and the performance are casually anachronistic, specifically in the face of elements of the production that actually give a shit. Like the silly ancient Greek hairstyles the entire cast sports, except for Sam Worthington who apparently buzzes his hair in the mornings. Or the Greek accents most of the cast makes a passing effort to adopt, except for Sam Worthington who perpetually sounds like he's on the lookout for a mob of kangaroos whose pouches he can hitch a ride in.

When I first heard about this project I got pretty excited. An action film set in Greek myth? I think there's an untapped vein there (though I have a new one to get excited about), and when Liam Neeson was cast as Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades and Danny Huston as Poseidon, I thought this could be an incisive, well-acted film with a strong action filmmaker calling the shots. All three of those excellent actors are wasted in this film, though. Liam Neeson gives it a shot but can't act through all the effects and deliver the broad performance the script calls for, Ralph Fiennes, the best "villain character actor" we have in American commercial cinema (except maybe Mark Strong these days) shuffles around wheezing but otherwise acts exactly like Ganondorf, and Danny Huston, who has one line, actually manages to make it out of the film without a scar on his resume. The only person I actively liked in this film was Mads Mikkelsen, a brilliant actor in the European arthouse who played Le Chiffre in Casino Royale and quickly became my all-time favorite Bond villain. His presence was a small consolation, but the man deserves better than this, like a job at the county fair.

I suppose the last six paragraphs I wrote could be rendered moot if the film delivered on the basic levels it's meant to, but it doesn't. I almost missed the slow-motion copper dude porn of 300 during Clash of the Titans' action scenes: at least you could see what was happening in those. People bitch about shakycam ruining movies and giving them a headache (pussies), but they're cool with something like this, where the action is a series of things flying by the camera too close for us to tell what the object actually is, cut together with a maddening disregard for things like blocking and topped off with a shot of Sam Worthington standing on a pile of corpses playing air guitar.

I find it hard to believe that Louis "Hose Fighting" Leterrier directed Clash of the Titans and that movie where Jet Li played a kung-fu fighting dog. You know, the one with Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins, the one that got the art crowd to pay attention to martial arts movies for a minute. I thought The Incredible Hulk was pretty mediocre, but I was still enthusiastic about this guy. His directorial choices are baffling here, though. His production design is awful; one scene, for instance, looks like 10% of the original Dagobah set was salvaged, filled with green floodlights and stuffed into frame. It shows a jarring lack of care when all the CGI shots are framed and composed so carefully and the live-action shots are stationary cameras on a flat angle encompassing the whole set so that the actors can wander around during dialogue. That's called a play, it looks boring on a big screen and more green floodlights won't change that.

It also has some of the worst CGI I've ever seen, so no mild consolation for those of us who like to absentmindedly stare at CGI. Many of the CGI shots are textureless, and even more have a an ugly sheen to them, specifically Zeus. I saw it in 2D, but I wonder if this is an effect that the 3D upconversion had on the film. Zeus has an awkward flatness to him when he's glowing, as if he's meant to be popping out and the people responsible for the upconversion used that scene's lighting as an excuse to really fuck with the depth.

So it's bad, yeah. But it's certainly interesting. I wasn't angry walking out of it like I was walking out of Alice in Wonderland. I was pumped up and benign, excited to discuss its tremendous failures with my friends. For now, it has the unmistakable gloss of the CGI boom and is something to be looked at with contempt. But someday, when it has aged badly, it may make a good midnight film.

2/10