Today’s guest post was written by EP
So I actually read one of those pre-teen girl magazines for the first time, and it was just WRONG. There was actually a 14-year old girl writing in for advice on how to properly give blowjobs to her boyfriend. When I have a daughter, I’m raising her on comic books and video games.
-Mike Krahulik (Gabe), of Penny Arcade, sometime in the early Oughts, explaining the entire motivation for this particular movie. Sadly, his original quote is lost in the mists of the early decade’s newsposts.
Your standard conservatives are usually not movie critics. (Breitbart is an honorable exception.) This holds double for libertarians, triple for paleocons of the more cultured, Pat Buchanan school, and quadruple for all you guys coming in from survivalist communities in the Ozarks. (We’ll be glad to have you and your shotguns around when the zombie apocalypse hits, though!) Generally those of us on the right-ish end of the spectrum prefer fighting over first principles and statistical trends in human behavior over watching and critiquing what Hollywood produces any day of the week. Who cares what the liberal media want to say to the sheeple, amirite?
This is, in general, both advisable and productive. However, in rushing to condemn all of Hollywood, one misses the good stuff. And occasionally, the good stuff can be incredibly, awesomely, and indescribably good. So I’ve taken up the rather inadvisable task of doing (sigh) a movie review for this site and its esteemed creator. Your responses will determine whether I keep doing it.
Earlier in the year, I saw Legion, noted how every single element in it was part of exactly the same female supremacist Hollywood twaddle that had been so exhaustively described by EW, Welmer, Roissy and the like, and decided to start watching movies from that perspective. And Kick-Ass is like the anti-Legion. It’s even an almost anti-Mother’s day movie, as it specifically celebrates everything about fathers, sons, and male acquaintances of the friend and co-worker variety, and gleefully showcases all the worst aspects of female nature when it’s not killing them offhandedly. I’m not saying it’s the perfect man movie, but it’s as near as you’re going to get in the theatres right now. (Really should have come out around Father’s Day instead of Mother’s day, but Hollywood release dates is what they be.)
Let’s bullet point it! And by the way, SPOILERS BELOW!!!!
-Our protagonist’s mother dies of an aneurysm in the opening scene. Protagonist notes that “as it happened, life simply goes on.”
-Hero’s father is a beta provider of the ‘barely there’ variety. Still portrayed positively.
-Nicholas Cage plays a neurotically obsessed father who trains his little girl to kill criminals Old-Testament John Woo style. Portrayed positively.
-The little girl absolutely idolizes her father, with very, very, good reason, as it turns out.
-Hell, even the bad guy is portrayed as a positive father figure, though more in the alpha thug than beta provider style, naturally.
-Alpha thugs actually act like alpha thugs. And get killed like alpha thugs.
-The hot girl the hero pursues goes through a textbook bad-boy defending script when she hears of his presumed death-by-superhero. Specifically: Cries, then says: “I thought it might be my fault!”
-The hot girl, in fact, does every single slut-rationalization hamster dance as is possible on screen.
-Almost all the motives, problems, and unexpected twists of actually trying to be a vigilante are addressed, visualized, or at least mentioned offhand. The question is less about how unbelievable the stunts are than why we tolerate having every other action movie hero do these stunts without questioning them.
-The teenage beta ‘losers’ who try the superhero thing are still portrayed as heroes even when they screw up, simply because they actually did something rather than sitting on the sidelines.
-The waif-fu killer girl is somewhat regrettable, but it’s hammered into our heads that all the awesomeness came from her father’s strict training. Most of which on screen involves teaching emotional control under pressure, the very first thing you’d want a girl to learn before giving her easy access to an arsenal of knives and guns big enough to run Zimbabwe for a year.
-There’s also a great scene where a particular Rent-A-Slut slowly realizes: “Aw crap, they gave the girl a double naginata and an order to kill everyone in the room; that means I can actually die too!”
-The little girl’s mother simply overdosed on pills when her dad got sent to jail. Father rather blankly says that ’she couldn’t handle it.’ Girl more correctly notes that her mother ‘died for nothing.’
-People who do wrong things are neither ignored nor ruthlessly condemned by the plot when they do wrong things. They actually have the fact that they’ve done something wrong sink in and deal with it accordingly.
END SPOILERS!!!!
This particular adaptation of a Mark Millar comic book was far better than that Wanted thing about bullet-curving wax-healing types that came out a few years ago. (The actual Wanted comic book, when I read it in the Barnes and Noble under the Freedom of Information For Broke Writers Act, could have been ghostwritten by the disgruntled-er Spearhead posters and Roissy’s entire comment section.)
I’m told that Kick-Ass had a lot of trouble finding a producer, and given its ridiculously honest (by Hollywood standards) portrayal of modern womanhood in between its endless celebration of nerditude, fatherhood, and male leadership, I can see why.
See it now before Iron Man 2 obliterates all previous comic-booky movies. You will regret it much less than many other things Hollywood makes. (I guess if you wanted a sweeter, more socially palatable and family-friendlier version of gender realism, you could always see Date Night. After you bought yourself a machiatto and a bikini wax, sissy.
