Or you can buy The Joy of Trash here and The Weird A-Coloring to Al here and The Weird Accordion to Al here The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s first non-"Weird Al” Yankovic-themed book is out! And it’s only 16.50, shipping, handling and taxes included, 30 bucks for two books, domestic only!īuy The Joy of Trash, The Weird Accordion to Al and the The Weird Accordion to Al in both paperback and hardcover and The Weird A-Coloring to Al and The Weird A-Coloring to Al: Colored-In Special Edition signed from me personally (recommended) over at Pre-order The Fractured Mirror, the Happy Place’ s next book, a 600 page magnum opus about American films about American films, illustrated by the great Felipe Sobreiro over at Kick-Ass is a curdled dark comedy with a handful of transcendent performances that add something new to the superhero genre beyond middle-school bully nastiness. I also liked Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the secondary bad guy, a rich kid who who reinvents himself as superhero Red Mist to get closer to Kick-Ass. There’s a lot that’s right about Kick-Ass, particularly the performances from Cage, Moretz and Mark Strong and Michael Rispoli as the intriguingly pragmatic bad guy and his main henchman respectively. My reaction to Kick-Ass the second time around was pretty much the same as the first time around. The film’s romanticization of Hit-Girl’s violent sociopathy feels not just gross but irresponsible, particularly during a scene where the CHILD dresses up in a Catholic school girl outfit as bait to attract the attention of a potential kiddy-diddler she then executes swiftly and without remorse. It feels like the film is giving the audience permission to think that the potty-mouthed, blood-thirsty vigilante WHO IS MANY, MANY, MANY YEARS BENEATH THE AGE OF CONSENT is, in fact, kind of hot, or extremely hot. A better film would push him to the side or cut him out altogether and focus on the infinitely more charismatic and compelling supporting characters, most notably Chloë Grace Moretz’s instantly iconic eleven year old assassin Hit-Girl and her doting father/mentor in the ways of murder Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage). He is the title character and the lead yet he’s also quite possibly the least interesting character in the film. But Kick-Ass biggest problem is its title character.Īs blandly realized by Aaron Taylor Johnson, homemade superhero Kick-Ass, AKA nerdy high school student Dave Lizewski is a blank slate, a dope, a sorry excuse for a protagonist and a hero. Kick Ass has a lot of problems, beginning with a tone that’s smug, self-satisfied and transgressive in the most juvenile possible sense. Instead it’s self-consciously “edgy”, extreme and in your face the same way a Mountain Dew commercial from the 1990s might be. This is not your daddy’s superhero movie. Kick Ass exists for the sake of empty, facile shock. Studios don’t want to take that kind of chance with marquee names, so R-rated superhero movies have generally focussed on lesser known characters like the various homemade crime-fighters of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s Kick Ass.Ī PG-13 version of Kick Ass would make about as much sense as caffeine-free Red Bull. Superhero movies dominate pop culture but “edgy” R-rated provocations are unmistakably the minority. Even Christopher Nolan’s dark, gritty and violent Batman trilogy was PG-13, as was the even darker, even grittier and MUCH longer 2022 reboot starring Robert Pattinson.Įven after Deadpool’s success, an R-rated superhero movie is a risky proposition. Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at ĭespite the seemingly game-changing success of 2016’s Deadpool, R-rated superhero movies remain an anomaly. The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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