Kick Ass

First Hit: An oddly funny and intensely dark action oriented film that is compelling to watch.

My interpretation of the previews was that this would be more comedy than anything else. I was wrong.

This film is also dark and intense. The beginning sets this tone with a young man standing on a very tall building spreading the wings of this superhero costume, the voice over has you believe the voice and person on the building are one in the same. The voice over is talking about the phenomenon as to why more people haven’t tried to become a superhero.

Meanwhile, in the street below, people are standing looking up at the young man as he spreads his wings and jumps off the building. As he speeds towards the ground the crowd gasps and is enthralled. Watching, we all expect him to turn up and either glide or fly to a landing. Instead he just continues straight down crashing head first on to a taxi. Shocking, yes but that isn’t the end of these sorts of scenes.

This film follows the journey of a self proclaimed nerdy young man named Dave "Kick Ass" Lizewski (played by Aaron Johnson) attempting to find his own place in the world by becoming a super hero. Although Dave gets his ass kicked on his first outing as Kick Ass, it gets filmed on mobile phones and these exploits go viral on the internet. He becomes a hero with his own website and emails flood in asking him for his assistance.

In another parallel story, Damon Macready aka Big Daddy (played by Nicolas Cage) and his daughter Mindy aka Hit Girl (played by Chloe Moretz) are practicing their ability to kill and maim efficiently and accurately. They seize on the new wave excitement that Kick Ass is bringing and join him on one of Kick Ass’s attempts to bring justice.

However, what happens is that Big Daddy and Hit Girl (she’s 12 years old) waste the bad guys in a way that shocks Kick Ass. The real goal of Big Daddy and Hit Girl is to kill the town’s mobster and his minions because they killed Big Daddy’s wife.

It is a wild story by Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn and made even more intense and visual by Vaughn’s direction. It is comic book, it is outrageously violent (Tarantino like), and it is touching.

Johnson is really good as this guy who can look nerdy and cool all at the same time. The cool kids see him as nerdy and the nerdy kids see him as cool. As Kick Ass he’s perfect. Cage is his usual wild eyed, yet caring father who is a little twisted. Moretz on the other hand is amazing. She carried off the look and feel of a girl doing all the things that she does as Hit Girl. Crouching behind a foyer sculpture stand she looks frightened like a 12 year old, yet when she steps out to kill 7 men shooting at her, she is a superhero and looks it.

Overall: A very entertaining film, but there are shocks and therefore this isn’t your typical film and it is rated R for a reason.

Date Night

First Hit: This is a funny film and the actors work well together.

Tina Fey and Steve Carell work very well together. The energy between them and their relative sense of humor make them well matched as a couple in this unbelievable story of a "Date Night".

Phil (Carell) and Claire (Fey) Foster play a married couple that is very much into their family routines and roles. He works as a tax accountant and she a real estate agent and they have two children who like to wake their parents up early in the morning.

They have regularly scheduled date nights which lack excitement as the go to the same restaurant, eat the same food and return early for, maybe, some sex. Fearing they might be losing the fun aspect of their relationship, they decide to go to the city and have dinner at a hot new restaurant.

Without a reservation they are shoved off to the bar to wait for an open table by a sarcastic maître-de. When the “Tripplehorn’s” don’t show up for their reservation Phil decides to say “we’re the Tripplehorn’s" and get seated. Some gangster types usher them outside and before they know it, the Foster’s are caught up in a extortion ring.

Carell is good as the husband that feels a little controlled by his more than competent wife. Fey is very strong as Carell’s wife and has a way of creating wonderful humorous situations without making it look pressed. Her glances, reactions, and physical actions are in sync and gives her acting the appearance of being easy. Mark Wahlberg plays a studly, unshirted former client of Fey’s who assists the Fosters in their plight. His demeanor and smooth acting were perfect for the part. And an uncredited Ray Liotta as Joe Miletto the bad ass gangster is good. Shawn Levy is very good at bringing out the natural comedic flair of both Fey and Carell.

Overall: This was a funny film although the premise was unrealistic.

City Island

First Hit: Wonderfully written and acted film that’s filled with lies and truth.

I’ll believe that you are who you say you are, if you believe that I am who I say I am. This is general tacit agreement we humans have with each other.

That statement captures the first two thirds of this film. This is the film "Greenberg" wanted to be, introspective, well acted and funny. The Rizzo family is in full bloom in this picture.

Vince (played by Andy Garcia) is a want to be actor who has a long career as a corrections officer. He also has a son from a previous relationship which his family doesn’t know about. He is married to Joyce (played by Julianna Margulies) who is angry and is a telephone receptionist.

Their children Vinni (played by Ezra Miller) and Vivian (played by Dominik Garcia-Lorido) have their own secrets. He has an obesity fetish and hers is that she is a stripper and not in college as her parents think. They live in The Bronx but on a little island called City Island which has its own peculiar characterization.

The family is loud and their over dinner conversations are a riot of jabs and barbs. Everyone smokes cigarettes and everybody conceals their habit from one another. Vince says he is going out to play poker when in-fact he is taking acting lessons. He doesn’t tell Joyce about his lessons because he thinks she’ll laugh at him and thinks he’s a fool for trying.

Joyce is suspicious that Vince is really having an affair instead of playing poker and because no one talks to each other honestly, the illusion grows. Vivian is stripping because she lost her scholarship in college for smoking pot on campus. She’s trying to make enough money to go back to school.

Lastly Vince discovers his first son Tony (played by Steven Strait); the son no one knows about, happens to be in his prison. He gets him released under his supervision and takes him home to meet the family he doesn't know about. 

As the film reaches its chaotic climax, the laughs, truths, and realizations are vivid, well characterized and felt by the audience.

Garcia is absolutely great. This is the best I’ve ever seen him. Margulies is good as Garcia’s spousal foil. Strait is solid as the lost son. Miller and Garcia-Lorido fill their roles very well and keep the story alive and moving. Raymond De Felitta wrote and directed this film with perfect little touches which laid down the ground work so that each character was fully fleshed through scenes of interesting conversations and actions.

Overall:  This was a wonderful film about the truth setting people free.

Greenberg

First Hit: A mildly entertaining film with one wonderful performance and one mediocre performance.

Ben Stiller plays another version of Ben Stiller. Comparing this to Woody Allen, who tends to play a version of himself in films, I am more intrigued by Allen and am usually bored by Stiller. Seeing Stiller playing another version himself was disappointing because he came off as self absorbed and not intellectually stimulating enough to warrant this sort of exposure.

Here he plays Roger Greenberg a guy who has just been released from a mental hospital in New York and has decided to stay at his brother Phillip’s (played by Chris Messina) house in California. Phillip and his wife Carol (played by Susan Taylor) have a nanny Florence Marr (played by Greta Gerwig) who becomes Roger’s contact point while he stays in their home for a month or so.

Roger is prone to fits of defensive anger and rudeness. He thinks he’s right and expresses his rightness regardless of how it may affect others. Roger is alone, lonely and generally depressed. The problem with all this is there’s little to indicate how or why he ended up in a mental hospital or what created this self absorbed person.

Conversely we have a small number of scenes with Florence at the beginning which give us a very clear picture of who she is and how she operates in the world.

So is this excellent acting by Gerwig and poor acting by Stiller? Or is this poor story development? My bet is that it is a little of both but mostly because Stiller continues to be Stiller and he just isn’t that interesting and is unwilling to embody the character he is playing.

Stiller is mediocre as Roger. Gerwig is wonderful at Florence. She was totally believable and made this film worth watching. Noah Baumbach had a good cast (except Stiller) to direct and this might have as interesting as “Margot at the Wedding” and “The Squid and the Whale” but fell short.

Overall:  This is worth watching on video but only if you have some time to kill.

From Paris With Love

First Hit: Although not an intelligent film or full of interesting plot twists, I enjoyed its silliness, self depreciating humor and suspenseful attempts.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays James Reece an attaché to the US Ambassador to France. He doubles as a special agent doing some low level work like switching license plates on vehicles of suspected individuals or by planting bugs in an office.

Reece is involved in a serious relationship with a French woman named Caroline (Kasia Smutniak). One evening he gets a call from his special agent boss who tells him he’s been promoted and will work with a partner named Charlie Wax (played by John Travolta).

He picks Wax up at the airport where he is giving the customs people a hard time about cans of energy drink. This scene is where Wax provides the audience a look at his character; bold, brash, single minded, and seriously violent. This takes Reece by surprise but as he spends time with Wax there is an understanding that Wax is clearly on a mission. 

The trail Wax is following begins with drugs and drug dealers and ends with a possible terrorist plot to kill a US delegation and involves Reece's girlfriend. Plausible? Probably not, but the fun of this film is the bold brash ways of Charlie Wax.

Travolta is funny and mostly unbelievable but this wasn’t supposed to be a real life story. Meyers is OK although he looked 18 years old in a couple scenes but in other scenes he looked more age appropriate. The story line is not plausible or really serious, almost comic book in nature but that is what made it fun to watch.

Overall: It was amusing, implausible, seriously violent, and makes fun of itself. A romp which had me laughing more than once.