Todd’s Movie Blog

An eye catching post title, huh?  It comes from Roger Ebert’s review of Kick Ass.  He finds the movie morally reprehensible (which interestingly enough he also said about every Friday the 13th movies) due to having an 11-year-old girl beating up and killing bad guys, and then getting beaten up herself (I wonder if he will feel the same way about a 77-year-old Michael Caine gunning down drug pushers in Harry Brown?).

Now he states that he understands that the film is a satire, but doesn’t get what the film is satirizing, probably because he can’t get past the undoubtably horrible images of a child being beaten.  To be fair I haven’t seen the movie myself yet (tax day having been this week), so I can’t give a fair assessment on what Ebert saw.

However I have read the synopsis and what I get from it is that the morally reprehensible image of a child giving and receiving pain, is showing just how messed up the image of Batman and Robin would be in real life, remember that originally in the comics Robin was about ten to twelve years old.  And the movie really plays up the Batman connection, Nicholas Cage’s costume, he speaks in an Adam West style of voice, and one ad actually has the villain say they need to take out the guy who dresses like Batman.

So maybe there is an actual valid point behind the character of Hit Girl, and the film makers are really critiquing superheroes.  Or maybe it’s just a way to stir up controversy to boost ticket sales, I know one person at work was horrified when she learned about all of the swearing Hit Girl does throughout the film.  Hard to say which is the truth, might even be both.  Satire is such a difficult thing to really interpret and understand sometimes.  Perhaps I will have a better grasp of what the film makers were trying to do after I have seen the film.

I was watching an interesting documentary the other day that got me thinking that I really don’t get it anymore.  It was His Name Was Jason, a look at the long lived Friday the 13th franchise.  Being a teenager in the eighties, I of course watched them all on cable when in high school, and then in the theaters in college.  Was it for tense suspense scenes or interesting characters?  Not really.  Back then I watched the films for two reasons, to see what outrageously gory death scenes they would think of this time, and more importantly, somebody going topless.  As the nineties progressed my interest in gory effects has faded (have never seen a Saw movie and don’t plan on seeing one in the future), and as for gratuitous topless scenes, though still enjoyable, I can’t bring myself to sit though a film I have no interest in just to see a quick flash of nudity.  Must be something about being forty….and the internet (Wonder if Al Gore ever saw that coming when he “invented” the Web?).

Anyway, I have seen all of the films up through Freddy v. Jason, it’s the completist in me.  So I was curious about the back stage origins of the series.  It was interesting seeing interviews with producers, directors, make up effects artists, actors, and celebrity fans talking about the different films, what they enjoyed and didn’t.  And like a Friday the 13th movie there was a death scene from one of the films every ten minutes and gratuitous nude scenes sprinkled throughout.

But then everyone started really getting into this topic that pulled me out of the film and left me scratching my head for the rest of the interviews, feeling like a true outsider.  Everyone started going on and on about the subtle emotional nuances of the different actors who have portrayed Jason, one Jason portrayor comparing him to Frankenstein (though not specified, I assumed he meant Karloff’s interpretation).

Now no offense to Kane Hodder and the other actors who have slipped on the hockey mask, but I don’t think I ever saw Jason as a real character in the films, he was just the mechanism used to kill the characters in the film, an object as animated as the machete he usually carried.  All the talk about his psychological motivations ranging from abuse, abandonment and being ostiscized by society as a child had me wondering if I was missing something obvious right in front of me.

I never thought of the films as having depth of meaning or characterization.  They were just summer popcorn fare.  A quick ninety minutes of mindless action, you sat down, turned your mind off and just enjoyed the make up effects and brief nudity.  I guess that is the difference between beng a casual viewer intead of a die hard fan.

Sorry about not posting during my usual time last week, but this thing happened and I got caught up in it.  Basically my NetFlix streaming disc for the Wii came last week and I have been doing nothing with my free time except streaming movies.  It is awesome!  The picture quality is unbelievably sharp.  There has yet to be a lag time that I have noticed due to bandwith issues.  The whole thing is just too cool.

Want to watch a movie?  Scroll through your choices and then hit play and wham, it starts playing.  Want to skip ahead, pause for a bathroom break, or stop it and come back later right where you left off?  No problem.

And I have been going nuts, watching everything from The Dark Corner to Billy Jack, from Dirty Harry to SNL: the Best of Christopher Walken (I got a fever and the only cure is more cowbell!).  Heck I even watched stuff I already have on DVD, like The Big Sleep and episodes of Firefly. How crazy is that?