I LIKE MOVIES #10: KICK ASS

Kick Ass was pretty great. Violent. Vulgar. Funny. Nicolas Cage with a moustache. It's the story of a teenager who decides to become a super hero. Donning a scuba suit he takes to the streets to fight crime and gets the snot knocked out of him. But he is optimistic and persists. Along the way he meets other, more organized heroes, gets famous on Myspace, and pisses off some bad dudes.

What is garnering the most attention is the character of Hit Girl. Apparently some people get upset when a foul mouthed eleven year old girl kills a room full of drug dealers. I say, that's what America is all about! The scenes with her and her father, Big Daddy, are great. it's oddly touching watching her make a deal that if she takes two more bullets to her protective vest, without wincing, they'll get sundaes.

And Nicolas Cage delivers another oddball performance. When not fighting crime he has a pleasant, Flanders-y demeanor. But once he dons a costume and adds extensions to his mustache, he murders gangsters and talks like Adam West.

The movie tries to take a "realistic" approach to superhero style vigilante justice but still keeps it within the world of comic books and superhero movies. Our hero gets injured constantly and has more guts and good heart than skills or plans. It's a world where instead of kids trying what they see on TV, they try what they see at the comic shop.

Kick Ass earns its R rating with brutal violence and harsh language but still maintains elements of comedy. It isn't an oppressively dark, violent movie. Imagine the first Spiderman movie written by somebody more horny and cynical. And in that movie Peter Parker meets an incredibly violent vigilante father/daughter duo.

When Kick Ass is blamed for a series of mobster murders, he becomes the target of some really bad guys, not just street thugs. Enter the villain's teenage son as the decoy superhero, Red Mist. I felt like they were trying to put Red Mist on a moral tightrope where we were supposed to wonder where his allegiances would eventually fall. However there was never too much doubt, especially by the end where his character's moral choices could have played out very interestingly. Instead I felt that the last few minutes were some of the weakest of the movie. Hit Girl's attack on the mob boss's lair was great. But then there was some jet pack business that stretched the movie's accepted realms of realism for me.

Kick Ass was a fun take on the Superhero genre and I'll definitely check out a sequel in the future.

Today's arbitrary rating says that Kick Ass gets 12 broken noses, 3 broken ribs, and 16 black eyes out of forty something somethings,

I LIKE MOVIES #8: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL-NEW ORLEANS

I finally got around to watching Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans after missing it in the theater. I can honestly say that it was pretty much exactly what I expected. A Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog collaboration just seems like such a logical idea for some reason. And the outcome was as insane as I wanted it to be.

Nicolas Cage has always been an actor with some subtle and not-so-subtle oddities to his acting. Most of the time he divides audiences into love and hate categories because of this. To his credit though, he can still fill theaters with more mainstream fare while also catering to his proclivities to be all Nicolas Cagey.

Cage has been teetering on the edge of irony for years now and it is only going to take a small push to put him into the spot that Christopher Walken has been calling home for the past few years. I really hope that someday Tom Green directs another movie and that it stars Nicolas Cage. That might sound weird but I swear it makes sense and would be great. They could remake Freddy Got Fingered with Nicolas Cage and I would be first in line.

In Bad Lieutenant, Cage plays a drug addict corrupt cop. It all started with a back injury which led to pain killers which led to a "6 months later" subtitle. He needs to solve a five body homicide while getting his fix, keeping an eye on his prostitute girlfriend, checking in on his alcoholic dad, getting his fix again, dealing with his bookie, and keeping up appearances at work. And getting another fix. There's a lot on his plate.

When one snorts what one believes to be cocaine but is actually heroin it can apparently effect one's judgement. Especially while investigating a quintuple homicide. Hilarity ensues. When Nicolas Cage gets to cut loose in movies, it is generally very fun to watch. Check him out in Deadfall. Hilarious. Bad Lieutenant is no exception. What do you get when you take an already eccentric Nicolas Cage performance and you give his character more crack? You get hilarity.

At some point in the movie, I think it was after one particularly great scene in a nursing home, he starts inexplicably speaking in an almost Marlon Brando impression (?). Either that or he was trying to channel The Penguin from Batman. Whatever he was doing with his voice, he keeps it up for the next few scenes. Between all the Nicolas Cagey stuff, the iguanas, the shakedowns, and the dancing souls we have an excellent oddball, dark comedy.

For those of you who loved that last 20 minutes of The Wicker Man, this entire movie is for you.

Today's arbitrary rating is 12 lucky crack pipes out of 10.