Hit-Girl kicks ass, Chloey sucks it

[ed_rex]

A dance of slicey death
(with apologies to Eddie Campbell)

Hit-Girl takes a licking.

Chloe cuts with a knife.

  Old books can be indecent books
  Though recent books are bolder,
  For filth (I'm glad to say)
  Is in the mind of the beholder.
  When correctly viewed,
  Everything is lewd.
  I could tell you things about Peter Pan —
  And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!
       — Tom Lehrer, "Smut"

 

There is a possibly apocryphal story that at a certain point in his career, Picasso (or maybe it was Dali) grew so cynical about his own fame that he took to selling blank canvasses alongside his paintings. The story resonates, because I remember seeing a Picasso at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Admittedly I was a callow youth and might have missed some brilliant subtlety in that enormous canvas, but what it looked like to me was nothing more nor less than a joke at the expense of whoever would be willing to pay money for such a sloppy monstrosity. It looked to me like Picasso had slapped the canvas with a house-painting brush until it was mostly filled by artless black lines and white spaces.

As I said, it might be that I missed some deeper layer of meaning but I suspect not. I've seen that Picasso damned well could paint when he was of a mind to, and I didn't see any evidence that that painting was one of those times.

That canvas is why I am so ready to believe the story about the blank canvasses. The fine art world is such a confidence racket (see Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word if you haven't noticed it for yourself) why wouldn't a succesful and cynical artist test it to see just how gullible it could be?

I've seen a couple of movies recently which brought to mind the above anecdote, as well as the fable of the emporer's new clothes.

One is an art-house film, directed by one of Canada's regulars at Cannes, at director whose movies win prizes but sell few tickets. The other is a crass and violent film that made Roger Ebert "sad" and which has also appalled all sorts of people who haven't seen it.

One film boasts leaden dialogue, the other reparté that, if not quite Shakespearean, still sparkles by comparison; one boasts an utterly forgettable score of sacharine strings that bear no apparent connection to what is occuring on-screen, the other a soundtract carefully chosen not just to accompany but to augment each scene; one film opens with a narrative voice-over which is almost immediately forgotten, the other begins with the voice-over and — succesfully — maintains it.

One is (or pretends to be) a study of sexual obsession and a portrait of a family threatened by the estrangement of man and wife and by a sexually powerful interloper (which also gives the director the chance to get his actresses naked and to make out with each other though — since this is Art — neither of them appears to have any fun doing so.

The other is an unabashed fantasy of violence and vengeance, a portrait of a nerdy teenage boy who dons a costume to fight crime (and who mostly gets brutally beaten for his troubles) and of an 11 year-old girl who lives out her father's fantasies and really does succeed in slicing, stabbing, gutting, shooting and otherwise slaughtering a veritable legion of bad-guys, all while cursing up a blue storm (yes, folks, even the dreaded C-word).

No prizes for guessing which film I think is worth your time.

Warning: Come-on: Swearing and gratuitous nudity behind the fake cut to my website.

Comments

Kick Ass did Kick Ass

[beable]

I thoroughly enjoyed Kick Ass.

I've been wanting to see Chloe - largely because Amanda Sigfried did such a wonderful job being Lilly Kane in Veronica Mars, so your news that it sucks is very discouraging.

Re: Kick Ass did Kick Ass

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

It's very nearly impossible to talk about that damned movie without that particular word-play, isn't it? I was determined not to do it myself but (obviously) the urge was inescapable.

I didn't know Amanda Seyfried at all, but I don't condemn any of the actors for that movie; the dialog really was universally awful.

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

Hmm, your review of "Kick Ass" makes me think of Quentin Tarantino movies which revel in violence without attempting any moralistic or satirical justification, although he came close to pretending to do so in "Inglorious Basterds". I think that insofar as Tarantino is very aware of what he's doing, creating something that will entertain you for two hours, as opposed to changing the world, and very clear about it, it works very well.

D'oh!

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

It's strange that Tarantino didn't even occur to me until you mentioned him. I'd say the director of Kick-Em definitely shares at least a cinematically kinetic aesthetic with Tarantino.

Incidentally, didn't Tarantino write (but not direct) Natural Born Killers? Oh wait, never mind. Wike says "story credit" and that he "wished the project well". So the satire there probably can't be pinned on the big T.

[steelcaver.livejournal.com]

This convinced me to see Kick-Ass.

Excellent ...

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

Ya hear that world o' publicists? Young Geoffrey's reviews get results! So start flooding me with ARCs and movie tickets, and dinners at fine, fine restaurants. (As Mr. Egoyan can attest, though, I don't promise a positive outcome; life's a gamble.)