Taking aim at the best and worst of movies and television.
The line snaked down Congress Avenue, far around the block, and then all the way around the next block for Kick-Ass, the official opening night movie of the South by Southwest Film Festival. Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake), this movie seems to be have been conjured up in a factory run by and for attendees of this film festival.
Raucous comedy mixed with over-the-top violence?
Profanity-spewing adolescents who don superhero costumes?
Nicolas Cage behaving weirdly in a supporting part? . Check. Check. And Check.
The premiere of Kick Ass speaks to the changing face of this entire festival, which just a few years ago kicked off with Robert Altman’s elegiac final film, A Prairie Home Companion. Since then, however, the choices seemed more and more pitched to the fanboy set, those endearingly werid and wacky, mostly male filmmakers who lap up everything crass, outlandish, and comic book-y.
Last year brought high-profile screenings of the violent Seth Rogen comedy Observe and Report and the Sam Raimi splatter-fest Drag Me to Hell. In addition to Kick Ass, this year’s line-up also includes a documentary about George Lucas’ testy relationship with Star Wars geeks, and a sneak preview of footage from Robert Rodriguez’s Predators. There is still plenty of traditional film festival fare -- on Saturday morning, for instance, I wandered into a documentary about a war crimes trial in Sierra Leone -- but the main events are more and more focused on nerdy spectacle.
There are worse things, of course, especially when the spectacle is as well executed as Kick-Ass. Based on a series of comic books by Mark Millar, the movie follows an awkward teen, living in a rough-and-tumble modern New York City, who decides to transform him into a superhero, with comically disastrous results. But when he teams up with a vengeance seeking ex-cop (Cage) and his brutally efficient pre-teen daughter (Chloe Moretz, who wears a bright purple wig and indeed kicks some serious butt), the trio finally starts to bring some peace and justice to town.
It’s hardly a classic, but it walks an effective line between funny and nasty -- and, of course, the audience seemed to love every minute of it. It will open commercially on April 12.
