Kick-Ass -the movie

[KEND]

Any of you familiar with this
London Times on line Mar 13 2010
Kick-Ass: Superheroes are back
... but they are weirder and more dysfunctional than ever before
Dominic Wells )
“OK you c***s, let’s see what you can do.” As a catchphrase this may lack the elegance of “we’ll always have Paris”. But come the release of the latest comic-book adaptation, Kick-Ass, it’s destined to take its place alongside those immortal words in movie history.
What gives the line a peculiar and extra-shocking kick is that it’s uttered by a ten-year-old girl (pictured right), shortly before she slices a gang of criminals into thug sushi with Ninja swords. Studios refused point-blank to touch this toxic mix of under-age swearing and violence, so the British director Matthew Vaughan, who made his name producing Guy Ritchie’s early films, raised the money himself.
The result is a disturbing triumph that will either revolutionise or kill off the whole superhero genre.
The brilliantly simple premise of the film, based on the graphic novel by the young Scot Mark Millar, who united James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie on Wanted, is this: a teenage boy with no special powers other than stubbornness and a high pain threshold decides to don a makeshift superhero costume and fight crime. Why, he asks, do thousands of people want to be Paris Hilton and no one wants to be Spider-Man?
BACKGROUND
His first attempt at crimefighting ends in disaster, but he perseveres, is caught on a camera-phone and posted on YouTube, meaning instant celebrity. He is in over his head on a foolhardy mission when he is saved by a ten-year-old, Hit Girl, and her father, Big Daddy, two real superheroes. Or are they as deluded?
Controversial though it will certainly be, the film is made with absolute passion and conviction. Jane Goldman, who is married to the celebrity comics nut Jonathan Ross, wrote the script. Nicolas Cage, who took his surname from a 1970s comic character, plays Big Daddy, taking the cue for his voice from Adam West as Batman. Vaughan, who optioned the idea before Millar had even started on the book, consulted the writer at every stage.
When you’ve seen it, it will be that much harder to take seriously any of these mega-buck movies in which lantern-jawed demi-gods dress in tights and a cape to fight for “truth, justice and the American way”.
The golden age
Perhaps every age gets the hero it deserves. You can read a history of America through its comics. Superman was the power fantasy of two nebbishy young New York Jews in the 1930s, when fascism was on the rise across Europe. Batman followed on from the mini- boom he created, with such lasting success that original editions of their comic-book debuts last month sold for a record $1 million apiece.
The Second World War brought forth Captain America, his costume resplendent in stars and stripes, to fight the Axis powers. Other superheroes were soon co-opted into the propaganda war, until the US itself became the world’s first superpower when it dropped the atomic bomb.
The 1950s bred communist paranoia: sci-fi became the rage, its aliens in human form a powerful metaphor for the “red menace”, and the superheroes took to outer space. Meanwhile, the McCarthyite witch-hunts turned their searchlight on the indie horror publisher EC Comics. A congressional hearing demonised comics as corrupter of the nation’s youth and the industry was neutered by the introduction of the stringent Comics Code Authority.
The counter-cultural
This, in turn, led to the unlicensed “underground” comics of the 1960s — LSD-fuelled counter-cultural tomes filled with sex and violence that nevertheless produced great talents such as Robert Crumb. Even mainstream comics changed with the times: Marvel comics discovered teenagers, making Peter Parker a nerdy youngster with relationship angst when he wasn’t swinging from the rooftops as Spider-Man. This approach was so successful that the young company soon rivalled Superman and Batman’s publisher, DC Comics.
The British invasion
Britain remained stuck in Beano and Dandy land until 1977. Punk largely passed America by, but in the UK one of its by-products was 2000AD. This quirky, irreverent, funny, sometimes violent, often brilliant sci-fi comic was never expected to last — the title may have seemed impossibly futuristic at the time, but clearly hadn’t foreseen a future in which the comic would still be around today. Many of the great innovators in comics have cut their teeth on this weekly, including Alan (The Watchmen) Moore and Millar, before being signed up in America. In the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, British comics got ever-more political, though readers never warmed to the sermonising.
The future
Now comes Kick-Ass. It has already spawned a sub-genre: NBC, the TV studio behind Heroes, is producing a pilot called The Cape, about an ordinary guy who decides to dress as a superhero; Woody Harrelson has a similar role in the Canadian film Defendor (see overleaf). It is an idea that alludes to our era of heightened paranoia about terrorism, when the old certainties of good versus evil, of superbeings heroically biffing the superbaddie to a tweety-bird-haloed daze, no longer seem to apply. Hit-Girl and Big Daddy break the cardinal rule of superheroes, one which even the Dark Knight follows: never to take a life, no matter how low. Hell, they positively revel in doing so.
Kick-Ass is also very pop-culturally literate and squarely of the internet age. The teenage hero’s masked alter-ego, Kick-Ass, acquires fame through YouTube and soon discovers that a MySpace page is an easier way to find victims in distress than pounding the streets: it is the 21st-century equivalent of a bat-signal. Touches such as these make Kick-Ass more than just a violent, cultish action movie for sensation-numbed youngsters. It’s the comic-book tale for our times. And like it or not, it may just be the future.
Kick-Ass is released March 31; The graphic novel of Kick-Ass, and Mark Millar’s Creating the Comic, Making the Movie are published by Titan Books

[zenshiite]

I've never read the comic, but only heard good things about it. I'm definitely interested in the movie.

[Chris Fleming]