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Kick-Ass Actually Does
This isn't your typical comic book movie
By C. Robert Cargill

One of the great oddities of my job is the act of writing for very different audiences. For example, over at my other gigs Ain't it Cool News and Spill.com, the mere mention of the property Kick-Ass raises eyebrows and elicits excited interest. Based on a comic book of the same name, if the audience reading the review hasn't read it, they are at least familiar with it. But outside of the comic book convention and fanboy set, Kick-Ass isn't yet well known. But it will be, you can count on that. This year's surprise from-out-of-nowhere hit, this comic book movie will soon be on everyone's lips, even if you haven't yet heard of it. And if you haven't heard of it, don't be alarmed or feel entirely out of the loop. The film's title has already proven an obstacle for advertising, as movie theater after movie theater has refused to put up the poster for fear of offending more delicate patrons.

Mark Millar is a Scottish writer who has risen to prominence over the last decade with his gritty series of comic books. First well known for his work on Marvel Comics offshoot universe known as the "Ultimate Universe," he was brought on to write darker, post-9/11 comics set in a universe in which the heroes we've been reading for decades came about after a great 9/11-like tragedy. This altered the history of many characters quite a bit, but allowed Marvel to get back to the core of each character: Spider-man was still a teenager, the Hulk still scary and deadly, and the X-Men still a fringe group on the run from discrimination. And Mark Millar was one of the chief architects of this universe. His stories are always left of center in terms of how radical and different they are. In one limited series titled Red Son he pondered what would have happened had Superman landed on a farm in communist USSR rather than a farm in Kansas -- but retained the same level of patriotism and dedication to goodness. And here, in his own creation, Kick-Ass, he wonders what would happen if a teenage boy living in the real world decided to try to be a superhero. The result is gritty, over-the-top, and often hilarious -- almost a beat novel of a comic book.

That's where director (and longtime producer) Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake, Stardust) stepped in. In love with the comic book, he approached Millar and bought the rights to the comic book whole hog. Free from the meddling of studios, Vaughn raised all of the money himself, made the film on a micro-budget (relative to other superhero films), and turned in an R-rated, blood-soaked masterpiece of violence and comedy. The downside was that he then had to take his show on the road and try to convince the studios that they wanted to distribute an R-rated, blood-soaked comic book masterpiece of violence and comedy. Most of them balked, but Lionsgate stepped up. Vaughn kept all the rights to the film; it is his, so love it or hate it he has no excuses but his own. Fortunately for him, he turned out something of an instant classic.

Kick-Ass is the story of your ordinary, every day, nearly invisible, average geek who decides he wants to try out being a superhero. After his first brawl sends him to the hospital, he discovers he has suffered so much nerve damage that he is mostly impervious to pain. This leads him to becoming something of a local legend, inspiring a number of honest to god vigilantes and the neglected son of a criminal to don masks themselves and invent identities that capture the imagination of the city's populace. Of course, sticking with more of an action movie vibe than a comedic one, this all ends very badly in a series of blood-drenched scenes illustrating just how bad an idea it is to try and play superhero.

Definitely not a family-friendly film, the movie focuses heavily upon the relationship between "Big Daddy" (an ex-cop with an axe to grind on a local crime boss, played by Nicolas Cage in his best performance in YEARS) and his 9-year-old daughter, who he is training to be a revenge-seeking super assassin. While the characters are great and the centerpiece of the film, parents might not want their kids seeing someone their own age or younger brutally murdering thugs and criminals with all the giggling abandon of an episode of Lazy-Town. Hence the R rating. This isn't in any way a true negative of the film, but more sensitive parents should be aware that this isn't your usual comic book movie. This is to comic books what Robocop was to robot movies.

But comic book fans and action lovers will lose their minds. This movie is so unbelievably good that it will defy any of the hype that will no doubt arise from the screening I attended. The audience was so into the film that at one point they burst into clapping along with the music ramping up to a scene of serious, well, ass-kicking. Vaughn, who was in the audience, was floored by the reaction, and it became immediately apparent that this was going to be one of the year's big surprise hits. The hit of this year's Butt-Numb-A-Thon festival (in which it played against Avatar, Shutter Island, and Lovely Bones, among others), this film is something that must be seen to be believed. It will soon be a well-known part of the comic book movie pantheon.

Kick-Ass will finally see release April 16.

Robbery of the Heart
By Jonathan Weichsel

In 2008 a man went on an emotional journey to the land of his youth. This journey was captured by filmmaker Micah Brandt, and is the subject of the upcoming documentary, Robbery of the Heart.

The man is Harry Weichsel, my second cousin. Harry is an outstanding member of his community in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He raised six great children, he started a successful program called Grass Roots Tennis that teaches Tennis to inner-city youths, and is involved in his local government. But he also harbors a dark past. Harry Weichsel is a holocaust survivor.

In 1941, at the age of eight, Harry Weichsel left his home town of Wetter, Germany with his mother. The two traveled through France, war ravaged Spain, and finally Portugal, where they were able to board a ship taking refugees to America.

When Harry first returned to Wetter with his mother in 1992, he was shocked to learn that the old synagogue was being used as a stable to house barn animals. Harry wrote a letter to the mayor of Wetter suggesting a collaborative effort between Wetter and the surviving Jewish families to reclaim and restore the synagogue, in order to turn it into a cultural and learning center. The city of Wetter agreed that the synagogue should be restored, but felt they should take on the responsibility on their own.

The restoration was completed in time for the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Kristallnacht, also known as the night of broken glass, took place on the evening of November 9th, 1938, when the Nazis destroyed Jewish businesses and homes and placed 30,000 Jews in concentration camps. Although he was only five years old, Harry Weichsel remembers the night well. His grandmother hid him under the bed, and he had to stay there all night as the Nazis ransacked Wetter.

The film Robbery of the Heart deals with the surviving Jewish Wetter families returning to Wetter for the reopening of the synagogue as a cultural and learning center on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Harry brought four of his six children, two of his grandchildren, and his sister who was born in America with him on his journey back to Wetter.

When Harry and his family, along with other surviving Jewish families, first arrived in Wetter in November of 2008, they found a close knit, strong, noble, middle class community that was warm and welcoming. Many older Germans spoke out in public for the first time about their experiences living through the time of the Third Reich. Holocaust survivors spoke openly and emotionally about their experiences as well. The children of Wetter learned about the holocaust, and the importance of taking responsibility for the actions of Germany during the war.

But, there was a dark side to the trip as well. Neo Nazis vandalized an old Jewish cemetery, and hung up anti-Semitic signs on Wetter's school and around town.

The town of Wetter responded by holding an anti-Nazi vigil, and declaring their solidarity against the actions of the neo-Nazis.

Harry Weichsel is a resilient, strong man who is proud of his heritage, his family, and where he came from. Director Micah Brandt is a serious, sensitive filmmaker with an intuitive grasp of history. Brandt does an excellent, unflinching job of capturing Harry, his family, the entire town of Wetter, and the emotional, sometimes turbulent 70th anniversary remembrance of Kristallnacht.

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of twenty-five minutes of Robbery of the Heart at the Birthright Israel NEXT Los Angeles annual Film Showcase. Director Micah Brandt also showed me the first ten minutes of the film when we met. The footage looks great, and is incredibly moving, but the film still needs to be completed. If you would like to learn more about the project, including how you can make a 100% tax deductable donation to the film, visit www.reelchanges.org/projects/robberyoftheheart

'THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES'
DECADES INVESTIGATION IN ARGENTINA
By Sean Chavel

A writer works out his beginning of a novel which pop up in vibrant imaginary dream sequences. Two of them are beautiful and ecstatic visions that celebrate the love a man has for a woman or the heart-ripping of letting go of a woman, and the third plunges into the terrible vicious attack of an innocent woman wronged. This is the opening of The Secret in their Eyes, the Argentina import that is the recent Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film.

What the writer is grappling with is softening the blow before he gets to the really nasty but inevitable scene in his book which is based on a tragedy he witnessed 25 years earlier. These opening minutes, nonetheless, grabbed me and wound me up in its multiple threads and layers. For the rest of the film I cared about what will happen to Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), a retired criminal court investigator who is now this aging writer.

Jumping back and forth into the present, we wonder why he never professed his love for Irene (Soledad Villamil), a judge and former colleague who just so happens to be so tied into everything that she too is part of his new novel. Darin and Villamil are so good, and appealing as would-be lover, that we are entranced by the very reflections in their eyes.

The case that changed their lives forever deals with the rape and murder of a beautiful 23-year old woman whose husband devotes the rest of his life for her, which proves undying. The police are baffled by the case, obviously baffled when they carelessly arrest an individual based on absolute non-circumstantial evidence. Months later after the case has been closed as unsolved, Benjamin petitions the judge to re-open it because he thinks he can pin it on one suspect. If only that suspect can be found, as this being a crime of remorse the suspect has fled.

The director of the film, Juan Jose Campanella with his sixth credit, is gifted visually in his ability to set a mood whether it's a sense of brooding or exalting. There is a tracking shot that starts as an aerial over the soccer stadium and goes into the stands and then through the interior walls of a stadium. It should be hailed as one of the most astonishing tracking shots of all-time right up there with "GoodFellas" or "Touch of Evil" but because it's not an English-language film, it could go forgotten.

Without the fancy camerawork, the film could easily fall back on dialogue no problem. The film contains classic interrogation scenes that is so unorthodox in its approach that you wonder if the miracles of reverse psychology tactics are really true. But this also becomes a story of justice versus injustice, so in a way, the movie wants to rip your heart out twice. But indeed it keeps you involved every step of the way.

Tactlessly, I want to bring up a few subtractions that work against the film: I never felt that I really ever breathed in Argentina as a setting (the movie is a tad hermetic with its settings inside the courthouse, and scenes inside the criminal's home), and for a Best Foreign Film winner you always let's admit want to come away feeling that you got a sense of an entire country's canvass.

Secondly, we don't know the dead girl beyond her pictures (we're asked to sympathize with her on the singular note that she's pretty and because it is inherently tragic. We do get a beautiful haunted performance by Pablo Rago who keeps following his duties as a husband long after his wife had already been murdered.

Benjamin is chronicling 25 years of story into his book, but this is just a case of compellingly weaved fiction. The twist ending is good enough for a Korean film (I happen to think Korean cinema is the most creative and richest in the world currently). But I nearly forget that this is Argentina.

THE JONESES
By Harvey Karten

There have been a slew of "happiness" books lately, the best being Gretchen Rubin's "The Happiness Project." Some authors don't all see the road to happiness as one that's paved nice and smooth but they all agree: money, at least beyond a certain family nominal amount, does not buy it since the well-off soon become adjusted to their good fortune, to which one wag once responded, "Maybe money doesn't buy happiness, but give me a million and let me shop around for a while."

In his dazzling debut as a director, the German-born actor, Derrick Borte, who was educated here in the States, puts a stunning visual spin on the old question: the relationship of money to happiness. At first, we in the audience for Borte's "The Joneses," get the impression that living la dolce vita in suburbia blows away the argument put forth by most of these books. We watch a broadly smiling family made up of Steve (David Duchovny) his wife Kate (Demi Moore) and two teen children Jenn (Amber Heard) and Mick (Ben Hollingsworth) enjoying their new digs-a block-long mansion decorated with sleek contemporary furniture, polished wood floor, golf clubs in one corner and a big-screen TV on the wall of another. They have broad smiles when their next-door neighbors, Larry (Gary Cole) and his wife Summer (Glenne Headly), step up with a gift to welcome them to the gated community. It's not long, though, that we find out that the newly-entrenched quartet are not a family at all but a construct of a marketing corporation whose salespeople are trained to get their neighbors so envious of their (mock) holdings that they will buy, baby, buy.

Steve demonstrates custom carved golf clubs to his three new pals on the course, and makes the sale. Kate throws a lavish party to introduce a score of nearby folks to a Cook's tour of their digs. Result? Copies of everything they own are snapped up by the party. What's clear to us in a short time is that Borte, perhaps inspired by themes from such movies as Sam Mendes's "American Beauty" and anti-suburban tracts like Mendes's "Revolutionary Road" (really about people who blame their unhappiness on the 'burbs) and Richard Linklater's "SubUrbia."

Given the scandals with Enron and more recently with the meltdown of banks and brokerage firms brought low by greed, It has become fashionable to attack materialism, though Borte may not be against buying stuff that you can well afford as much as standing opposed to the tactics that corporations use to get people to want to buy what they do not need. "The Joneses" is a terrifically entertaining movie, slick and commercial as opposed to being deliberately grainy for the same of seeming like cinema verité, one that can be enjoyed even by members of the audience who have no problem with rampant materialism and have no great desire to see consumerism satirized for political ends.

David Duchovny in particular turns in a sharp performance as a laid-back fellow who can sell clothes, sporting equipment, cars, TVs, whatever else this marketing company wants him to push, without being high-pressure in the slightest, and he's paired with Demi Moore as his fake wife who insists that they sleep in separate rooms and treat each other strictly like partners in a lucrative business. As a neighbor taken in by their ostensible dream life, their ease and comfort, their chemistry together, the lavish interior design, Larry proves himself to be the big patsy who is taken in by the glitter, buying things he cannot afford simply to please his heretofore frigid wife, Summer.

With Lauren Hutton in the role of KC, the boss, who tracks her employees' sales on a computer graph and judges them strictly and fairly by their production, "The Joneses" takes us into the lives of people whose interests lie almost solely in their possessions-the best golf clubs, the finest hair salons and spas, the most elaborate vacations in places like Kenya. We wonder whether these salespeople read Shakespeare or took him seriously when in his most celebrated soliloquy he has Hamlet noting that "conscience does make cowards of us all." Ultimately, justice triumphs, but not until Borte has given us a sparkling two acts that threaten to become undone when the film turns to melodrama in the third segment, copping out in the final scene.

Film buffs will pick up on Steve and Kate's joy, at least for a while, in the freedom that comes with shedding your real self and immersing into a false identity-as was the theme of Charlie Kaufman's more opaque "Synecdoche, New York." "The Joneses" may not be deep like the films mentioned above, but given a snappy script and a class ensemble of actors, it's a marvelous entertainment, one that could put Derrick Borte in line for awards for debut director.

'DEATH AT A FUNERAL'
THIS TIME IN PASADENA
By Sean Chavel

Some of you might be aware that the new Chris Rock movie Death at a Funeral is a remake of a British comedy - made in 2007. Talk about fast remakes. Dean Craig, the same writer, is credited both times. The entire situation template remains intact, some of the best lines salvaged from before, and retooled for this all-black cast - many of them including Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan and Danny Glover doing their funniest big-screen work.

Watching the same story again I was struck at how some of the big chunks of dialogue worked with just the same, and yet oddly, somewhat better. I liked the 2007 Frank Oz film mildly, this time however, my laughter was combustible. The Uncle Russell toilet fiasco, with the Norman character gets his hands stuck in Uncle's drawers while he is relieving himself, had disgusted me the first time out. Yet somehow I found it really funny this time. Is it because the comic timing between Glover and Morgan is better than the original British actors? The speediness of the editing which doesn't stop for a moment to think?

Perhaps Morgan, a supporting player, has a great horrified look for a comedy as the guy that is in over his head. Rock and Lawrence, as brothers Aaron and Ryan, are the top two guys in the cast but its Lawrence with all the great lines, and he gets to work with a running joke that he doesn't have any movie to contribute to dad's funeral. Other tension amounts because both of them are professional writers, but only Lawrence is published (are they soft-core porn novels, it sounds?). The reverend signed up for the service to hear Lawrence's eulogy - everybody else wants his eulogy, too - and Rock is insulted, repeatedly, because his upcoming eulogy is not wanted.

Peter Dinklage ("The Station Agent"), as Frank, is the blackmailer who wants $30,000 from the brothers so he won't show to their mom (Loretta Devine, "Waiting to Exhale") revealing intimate homosexual photos with their dad. Dinklage, the only consistently working diminutive actor in the movies, reprises his role from the 2007 film. Dealing earnestly with the problem, Rock agrees to shell out the money by check but then changes his mind. Then there is a wrestling match between the three of them. Dinklage gets tied up, with perhaps the plan, to keep him occupied until the funeral is over.

The mixed races relationship between Zoe Saldana ("Avatar") and James Marsden ("The Box") stands out at the funeral, especially after Marsden takes Valium. Only it's not Valium, it was mislabeled in the container by Columbus Short ("Cadillac Records"), a cousin. But there's no prejudice really. Saldana's father just wants her to be with the other white guy, played by Luke Wilson whom might as well be playing average Joe Bauers. Marsden, high on what might be acid, wrecks the initial funeral service and runs havoc in a nude screwball way.

That Valium container gets in the wrong hands again, and when the boys are trying to placate Dinklage, they feed him a bunch of pills and then after a nasty spill, they got a corpse on their hands. It almost makes sense for them to force the corpse in with their father, to nudge them in together for eternity. As long as the resumed service doesn't require an open coffin, they might be able to get away with it. The predicament gets heavier when more and more members of the family find out about it, all implicating each other.

The film is directed by Neil LaBute who has never done this kind of comedy before. Previously he has made some nasty comedies ("In the Company of Men," "Your Friends and Neighbors"), the kind that makes you wince at the selfishness of white collar man. Recently he directed Samuel L. Jackson in "Lakeview Terrace," one of the most underrated thrillers in recent years. "Death at a Funeral" couldn't be more different, but he lets his cast generously engage in their scenes while coherently shuffling back in forth between scenes that are at different interiors and exteriors in the house. This is a movie about a funeral service and two corpses, but LaBute keeps things rolling. 92 fast, surprisingly feel-good minutes.

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