The Whimpers and the Bangs: KICK-ASS 2, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE, ENDER'S GAME

First, the lovely KICK-ASS 2 (2013) nearly drowns here and there coming-of-age platitudes about being yourself and collecting 'wherever outlaws rule the west' merit badges come sailing down the Donkey Kong ladders of life and justifying dressing up in goofy costumes and risking your pretty (masked) face by sticking it harm's way in the name of a safe America. But if like me you loathe the bloodless PG endless ammo expenditure and zero body count issues with things like the old A-TEAM show, the very real (within the context of the film) damage done to property and limb makes KICK-ASS unusual in its gleefully sociopathy- as in the movie is sociopathic not just the characters! Cool, right? For Crom's sake, Christopher "McLovin" Mintz-Plasse is hiring cop-killing badasses from the dregs of his father's mob business to kill nemesis Kick-Ass, gussying them up in costumes with badass names and sending them out to gut people, strangle them, pummel and maul and god knows what else. Meanwhile dull cop Morris Chestnut doesn't want his orphaned (since her vigilante father was killed in the first film) little Hit Girl (the still-glorious Chloe Grace Moretz) doing any more hits and she reluctantly agrees to act like a normal girl, which includes getting date-ditched, humiliated and otherwise bored out of her mind. Dude! Normal suburban life is about the worst thing you can inflict on a fifteen year-old, it makes Morris Chestnut's concerned cop the piece's real villain in my mind. So this is a film about realizing that just because you promise something to an adult you don't have to deliver on it if it goes against your grain, just promise them whatever to get them to leave you the hell alone. And don't hide anything in your room. Searching your kids drawers for drugs seems to be the in thing these days. Kids acting weird? Search the drawers.


 I kept praying Chestnut was one of the cops to be killed during the massive cop slaughter inflicted by 'Mother Russia' - a gigantic female ex-KGB assassin McLovin hires and puts in spandex, figuring with him gone Hit Girl could get out from under his buzzkill sanctimony, and she decimates about six cop cars worth in a few minutes in one of the film's many awesome action scenes. Complain all you want, and some have, even co-star Jim Carey (I think he took his kids, and was shocked at all the beheadings). Another cool aspect is there's another badass female, Night Bitch (Lindy Booth) though a strange rape gag about not being able to get it up is really unsound. What the hell is going on? Is this a comedy or a violent rape-revenge saga? That part I did not care for, nor did I like that Carey's character would be so stupid as to crate his attack dog upon realizing he's under attack. Someone breaks in your house you don't lock up your guns! What the fuck!


But the rest of it is sublimely subversive, whether in a deliberate STARSHIP TROOPERS crypto-fascist way or just unconsciously blind to its own brutality, it matters not a whit. I totally dig the cut of Hit Girl's jib and think Chloe Grace Moretz is the promise of Angelina Jolie's Lisa in GIRL INTERRUPTED fulfilled. I think of Hit Girl as an extension of her awesome vampire in LET ME IN and Jack's nemesis Callie Hooper in the much missed 30 ROCK. Here she has a great scene wiping out a speeding van full of goons while hanging on the roof! Girls meanwhile can vibe on the few shots of our new improved hunky title character's abs.


One last complaint- I didn't like the gag in the ads for this last year wherein Kick-Ass and Hit Girl are riding in a car and he says "we're like Batman and Robin" and she says "Robin wishes he were me." - That annoyed me, why is it assumed she's be Robin? He'd be Robin? It was pretty sexist. But THEN the full conversation in the film turns out to be they're really talking about her late dad - the Batman-esque avenger played by Nic Cage in the first film (See my Last Great Dad of the Seventies: Nic Cage in BAD-ASS)!! Which is fine because he was her teacher, and father. In other words, the film isn't sexist, ageist or height-ist, it was the PR people's manipulation! Why are those dim bulb punters so scared of revolution!?


Speaking of revolution, HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE isn't fun or romantic or at all pleasant --but after a grueling angry week of work (or school) it's certainly cathartic, and in its weird opposite day nervewracking endurance test way, prophetic. Snide observers might dismiss Katniss' saga as just another 'two boys fighting over a girl' trip, but that's just the sideline view. Up close this is an envisioning a grim future of 24/7 media coverage where the slightest slip-up, the failure to smile with casual joie de vivre for the cameras or failure to adequately pretend to be in love with some short dude is enough to ensure your family is tortured and your home fire-bombed. It's ingenious, because HUNGER equates the ceaseless flash of paparazzi, make-up chairs, TV promo circuits endless award shows that is the grueling regimen of our modern starlets (Britney, Lindsay, et al) comparable to the slow torture of a dance marathon (THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY - here) or sexual enslavement in a neoconservative dystopia (HANDMAID'S TALE) or being randomly chosen to kill your classmates on some heavily camera-ready island (BATTLE ROYALE).


Stealing the film from a perennially dour and Oscar-winning Jennifer Lawrence (who's wearing enough make-up for a dozen Cleopatras on a death march backwards through the uncanny valley), Jena Malone scores props as a free-spirit badass. She looks great in her black and silver uniform, or naked in an elevator, or spattered in blood. Donald Sutherland is once again the evil emperor, one of those odd ducks whose failure to grasp fundamental tenets of social psychology makes his tenure as leader very unbelievable since he genuinely believes he can quell a revolution by publicly executing and flogging anyone who makes a Girl Scout sign. Did he learn nothing from the 20th century? He should mass produce that verboten mockingjay symbol as a keychain, and have his jackass TV host (played by Stanley Tucci) use it when greeting the TV audience (in short, comrade, recuperation) and give the people just enough food and televisions to quell their nothing-left-to-lose anger. Draconian brutality never works in quelling revolution, in fact it all but ensures it! And so it is the evil Sutherland's preference for bloodthirsty draconian brutality is off-kilter, as if he's trying to throw us off the scent of the film's own ingenious use of 'the golden trinket' strategy, in this case those 'mockingjay' pendants, which I have no doubt are available for sale next door at Hot Topic as you exit the malltiplex (or online here)

I've generally loathed the glam French Revolution fashions of the series, and the D.W. Griffithianly hammering on the dividing wall between the champagne and canapés and the peasants starving and flogged in the outer boroughs--it's all so ORPHANS OF THE STORM!--but there are moments when Elizabeth Banks as the agent-PR maven looks mad hot in her gold and this go-round she gets a few scenes to act in, as the needless cruelty of the Sutherland character finally wises her up to the evil she's part of --and the build-up in hype to the latest battle royale is fascinating both within itself and the more metatextual analysis of the Hunger Games marketing juggernaut (Gross: 400 million and counting!)


 In that sense of course, Woody Harrelson as the drunken older brother type advising our girl how to blend in, make friends, and learn to think outside her box, is one of the few 'understandable' adult characters in this or any of the series currently marketing themselves to teens. He eats when food is offered and gamely drinks this wretched dystopia out of focus, freeing himself for better things than sulking. Secondly, the bizarro twist here is that the usual Jake-Edward dichotomy involves being forced to spend all one's time with the dude you don't like yet must pretend to love, the way, say, an actress does or a closeted gay person. Having been on all sides of that equation, I can assure you the unrequited granite-jawed shortie with the emasculating name of Peeta has the catbird seat, the saintly piner role, which Lacan and Josef Von Sternberg sanctify with their analysis and imagery and the whole idea of needing to fake one's love affair gets a nice echo in the accidental slip of the name of some girl named Alice from Malone's lips - in short this might be the most trenchantly well camouflaged tale of class resentment and closeted gayness since the endurance test season two of AMERICAN HORROR STORY!


(check out this great paranoid rant about the Girl Scout / Katniss salute on the Dismantle the Beam Project!)


ENDER'S GAME (2013): what I like about this one, first in a series it no doubt hopes, is the care and time spent with getting the glistening eyes of the space bug exactly right and the way Asa Butterfield as Ender is himself is so spooky, a kind of Hannibal Lector-for-good recruited by Harrison Ford via the old LAST STARFIGHTER tactics and put in charge of a drone armada to fight a bunch of STARSHIP TROOPER-esque space locusts. But unlike the bland 'every lad' in STARFIGHTER or the hunky ciphers in STARSHIP, Ender's not some gung ho drone or awkward doormat. He can defend himself and underneath his nervous ecotmorphology and liberal guilt lurks the heart of a carnivorous killer, but inside that is the old liberal guilt. His nebulous doubt about the rightness of the past battle sung so highly of in future Earth's annals (were the bugs really that big of a threat? who shot first? Haven't we ever tried to communicate with them?) are played up but we never really get the full story or HEARTS AND MINDS effect before the reverse of the climactic battle of BREAKING DAWN smashes through our screens and from there they start setting up the hoped-for. The film's structure ingeniously keeps the space war stuff on the screens (knowing we've seen it all before) and secondary to the Enterprise-ish minutiae of commanding a row of similarly young and gifted kids sitting at drone computer screens, in other words, what the military is doing right now! THE LAST STARFIGHTER really is coming true!

Real life drone pilots at their gaming consoles

Like CATCHING FIRE, ENDER ends with a hopeful cliffhanger. If you want the sequels, then my friend you have to invest in the marketing, get the DVD, see it again on the Imax, commit to it, for it only earned, so far, a paltry sixty million, little more than half its budget. I wish my interest in seeing sequels to under-performers like JOHN CARTER and THE GOLDEN COMPASS could bring them forth, but then again I don't have either on DVD. I know I should but... you know -- it's a lot of emotional baggage to deal with, a lot of responsibility befriending the kid no one else like. I read all the original John Carter Warlord of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs novels as a kid, that shit was my Twilight, my Hunger Games. I read all of Burroughs'Warlords of Mars series, the Tarzans and even Carson of Venus; Robert E. Howard's Conan; Moorcock's Elrik; and Fritz Lieber's Fafhr and the Gray Mouser. And the best part about all of them? No fucking kids in any of them, no 'average teen' hero for us to 'identify' with. In those books we were still allowed to identify with the badass adult, the ones who could kill the oppressors of his conscience without PC moral hand-wringing. We need those kinds of adults in our science ficiton, and more bitches like Hit Girl and Jena Malone's foul-mouthed marauder in Hunger Games 2. We need more heroes ripping their opponents' heads off and blowing up the school rather than showing misplaced mercy like those liberal bleeding hearts Ender, Katniss, and Morris goddamned Chestnut. We must fight the Chestnut's call to safety. Already he's gone back and digitally removed all the cigarettes, replaced the guns with flashlights, removed the nudity and much of the cursing. Stop him before he jabs his safety-first overhead florescent light dagger into the dark heart of myth!