Steven M. Finkelstein

The idea with Kick Ass, as I understood it going in, was that it was based on a comic where the premise was something to the effect of “what would happen if a kid without any super powers tried being a superhero?” The protagonist, a nerdy high school type and comic book aficionado, orders a scuba suit and a couple of batons, and takes to the streets to fight crime. So far so good. In his first encounter with a couple of toughs, he is stabbed, then, bleeding profusely, wanders into an intersection where he is hit by a car that looks to be doing about fifty. Here’s where all the realism ends, and also where the movie loses just about all of its credibility for me. The kid recovers fully; in real life, if we are in fact going for “real life” as a premise for this comic and movie, he simply would have died. Instead, he’s basically fine. In fact, he thinks it’s a good idea to go back for more, and the next time he manages to fight off four muggers by himself, despite the fact that he’s supposedly never had any martial arts or combat training of any kind. A passerby takes camera footage, posts it online, and bingo, Kick Ass is born.

This is a movie that thinks it’s real, real clever. It’s passing itself off as kind of a “going against type” super-hero flick, but aside from the fact that the premise, after the first ten minutes or so, doesn’t hold water, a typical super-hero flick is exactly what it turns into. Kick Ass is recruited by a pair of real superheroes, ex-cop Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) who looks like a cut-rate Batman, and Hit Girl, his foul-mouthed daughter who has no compunctions about shooting, stabbing and otherwise putting the hurt on thugs, all while swearing like a sailor. They’re waging a vendetta against the criminal syndicate responsible for the death of their wife and mother, respectively. Why do they sign up Kick Ass, seeing as he has no superpowers or abilities? Beats me. A bit later another wannabee hero is thrown into the mix, Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasey), who turns out to be the son of the mob boss upon whom Big Daddy and Hit Girl have sworn revenge.

My biggest problem with this movie I already mentioned; it’s the fact that it’s supposed to be banking on “realism;” the superheroes don’t have powers, and they fight crime with weapons and wits. But if this were really true to life, Kick Ass would have simply died after being stabbed and run over in the first few minutes. Then it’s supposed to be an anti-superhero movie, an alternative to the X-Men and Spidermen of the world…but then that’s exactly what it turns into when Big Daddy and Hit Girl show up. It becomes exactly what it’s trying to play off of. I don’t know if the comic book was the same, since I’ve never read it, but in any case…maybe I wouldn’t have had as much of a problem with these issues, were it not for the way the whole concept was being presented. I suppose I could just dismiss all of my earlier gripes, and enjoy this on a very much surface level, but I don’t think that approach would do much good either. Aside from everything I just mentioned, the movie is incredibly derivative. We get, just off the top of my head, a line from Scarface, one from Batman, the mangling of a line from Spiderman, and the theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Oh, and three, count ‘em, three Pepsi product placements. Ugh. Over it all, we get narration from Kick Ass that gets tedious after about fifteen minutes. The action sequences are nothing that I haven’t see in, well, several other superhero movies. The only “novelty” is that some of the ass kicking is being done by Hit Girl, a twelve year old shooting up baddies while calling them cunts…is this supposed to be shocking? I’m sorry, but I’ve long since been desensitized to profanity and violence.

Bottom line, all of this has been done before. If they hadn’t tried so hard to make this so tongue-in-cheek, I think I would have had a much easier time swallowing it. As it is, this movie is mired in the very mediocrity of the average, ho-hum super-hero genre that it’s trying so hard to parody. It’s not awful, but you’d be a lot better off renting one of the “real super-hero” flicks Kick Ass ends up being in the end, despite its best efforts. My rating: 5/10

Lately, there have been some articles in the newspapers about nuclear disarmament, and how, gradually, the U.S., along with other countries that have nuclear capability, are going to be scrapping their weapons and getting rid of their weapons grade uranium. At the same time, Iran, and its psycho president, Ahmadinejad, have continually ignored the demands of President Obama and Hillary Clinton that they stop enriching uranium. It’s a disturbing situation, when you think about a nut-bar like Ahmadinejad having nukes, despite the fact that he keeps insisting that’s not what the uranium is for; he’s obviously lying, and anyone who thinks differently is a fool. Here’s the thing, though. Obama and company can keep on threatening sanctions and embargoes, but at the end of the day, it’s got to come down to two choices, words or actions. Words haven’t worked, and the only action that is really going to get Ahmadinejad’s attention is to invade Iran. Obama won’t do it. Not unless he really has no other choice, and things are nowhere near that point yet. With the big O’s popularity in the tank right now because of Obama Care, he’s going to try and avoid just about anything that’s going to piss off the general public any more than they already are.

But America is a country that likes to have its cake and eat it too. Yes, it’s dangerous for Iran to have nukes. There are plenty of militant crazies over there, and we wouldn’t want them to have that sort of power. But are we really going to kid ourselves and say that there are fewer militant crazies right here in America? We’re a country of “let might make right,” to some extent. We’ll do anything we can, short of invading Iran, to keep them from getting nukes. But are we willing to give up all of our own? We say that we’re “scaling back” our stockpiles. But will we disarm every warhead, even if every other country in the world, not just Iran, has agreed to do likewise? Don’t count on it. America thinks that we know better than everybody. Because of that, any leader this country has- black,white, male, female, Republican, Democrat- will want to hang onto that ultimate power. Our excuse would be, “well, it’s because there might still be some country out there that has nuclear capability that we don’t know about. We still need to hang onto a few warheads to protect ourselves, in case we’re attacked!” Hillary Clinton was asked, just a few days ago, if we would respond with a nuclear strike if an enemy used a chemical or biological agent here in the U.S. She was noncommittal, but basically she was saying we wouldn’t rule anything out. She knows good and well, just like the President does, just like any citizen with any common sense does, that if we had proof that some country…like Iran, just as a for instance…was directly responsible, we’d launch nukes at them in a hot second and blast them back to the stone age. That’s just the simple truth.

We talk about disarming, but I don’t believe we’ll ever do it ourselves, not totally. There is that paradoxical saying “if you want peace, you must prepare for war.” And with nuclear weapons being the “final solution” available at this stage of history, we would never, ever give up that power. Not completely. We’ll keep on talking about Iran, and we’ll keep threatening them. But even though Ahmadinejad is a power-mad dictator and a religious fanatic, I still have a lot of respect for the guy. He’s basically telling Clinton and Obama to go fuck themselves, and can we really blame him? We’ve got the best toys in the sandbox, and he wants some for himself. Are we really that high and mighty, that full of ourselves and sure of our own superior knowledge and wisdom, that we can say “we can have nukes, but no one else can?” We’re hypocrites, and that’s something that I hope isn’t lost on Hillary and Barack. I mean, does it make you feel any more comfortable knowing that the U.S. has these weapons? We’d never use them on another country without irrefutable proof of their wrongdoing, would we? Right. Just like we didn’t invade a country that our commander-in-chief told us was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

Wow. Holy God in heaven did this ever suck. Granted, I saw this atrocity on bootleg DVD rather than on the big screen, but you could have had a screen a mile wide and it couldn’t have saved a film with virtually no redeeming features. If you’ve seen the 1981 version of Clash you should have a general idea of what’s going on, but if you haven’t, fear not. The plot, such as there is of it, can be strung together in a few minutes of dialogue that alternates between campy and idiotic, and never comes close to achieving the level of epic it strives for. Perseus (Sam Worthington, also seen in Avatar and Terminator: Salvation) is thrown into the middle of a war between the Gods, featuring Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades, and men, featuring a bunch of interchangeable idiots with spears and shields. If you’re looking for mythological accuracy, forget it. It’s sort of like all of the better Greek myths were thrown together into a Boggle cube and shaken up, then tossed out across an hour and forty minutes of screen time with the hope that something compelling would come of it. And a vain hope it is, because even the three or four major battle scenes, which, lets face it, are the only reason you’d go to see something like this, were better done in Lord of the Rings, Pirates of the Caribbean, or even Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There’s so much that bothered me here I’d be up all night if I listed everything, so, in no particular order, here’s what boiled my brain inside my skull the most: Perseus starts out as a fisherman, unaware that Zeus is really his father, and then, after literally a one minute lesson in the use of a sword, masters the weapon to the point that he’s twirling it around like he’s been a soldier all his life. Fiennes and Neeson are appearing in their second movie together. The first? Schindler’s List. Why did these guys agree to sign on for this project? Was it the money? Whatever it might have been, I’d be ashamed to show my face around Hollywood ever again after being associated with this train wreck. Zeus decides at the end of the film to release the Kraken, the sea monster from Norse mythology that last appeared in the Pirates trilogy. Did they just decide to completely ignore the fact that the creature never had anything remotely to do with Greek legend, or did they just see it in Pirates and think, hey, you know what? That looks pretty cool, steal it!

Bottom line? This was a catastrophe of epic proportions. Sam Worthington I thought did a serviceable job in Terminator: Salvation. I thought he didn’t do anything wrong in Avatar, just didn’t add anything significant. Here, it’s just laughable when he delivers his lines with a scowl, trying to add some intensity to a film that was destined from the first five minutes to be on Mystery Science Theater 3000. This really wasn’t the next best step as he tries to firm up his standing as one of the new Hollywood action go-to guys. The action sequences and creatures are similar to what we’ve seen in multiple other films over the past few years, but so much better elsewhere. And the dialogue is so bad that, set against the heroic battle music in the background, I really have to search my memory for another film as unintentionally funny. Sometimes you just get a flick that’s doomed from the very beginning, and this was one of them. A movie this bad could have easily spelled the end of  Greek civilization, or any other. My rating: 2/10.

Well, we do winter right, here on the East Coast. We had three major blizzards over the past four months, and also one of the rainiest months of March on record for NYC. But it’s over, for now, and when I went outside today it really seemed like it had skipped spring and gone straight on into summer. It was about eighty degrees, the sun was bright enough to hurt my eyes, and there were the tinkling bells from an ice-cream truck rumbling down the street. And, like I usually do at these times, my mind started drifting away from the cities and out into the woods…looking to camp, role on the grass, get filthy, listen to some music, and drink till I pass out. Then get up and do it again. It’s coming up on festival season, and besides that, there’s about a million and one things right here in the city to do in the next five months or so. We’re getting to the best time of the year, that includes Memorial Day weekend, July 4th, and my birthday, the spring-summer months with their days that stretch off into eternity, where the cold gusts of the winter wind are a distant memory.

Of course, when you work 43 hours, five days a week, 53-55 hours if you count the commute, it’s a little hard to enjoy such things. If you’re getting up at six in the morning, then the brilliant days happening outside, and all of the things that you could be doing, are just a cruel tease, especially when you’re working a job that you find so unfulfilling. I’ve been thinking recently about quitting. It’s not just because the weather is getting nice and I want to go goof off and go camping and to festivals and ball games and concerts either, though I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t a part of it. I need more time to work on my writing; I’m banging away on the fourth novel, as I’ve mentioned here on the site before, and it’s damn hard to work up any momentum when I can only steal a few minutes for it here and there. It’s frustrating, and I know that at some point, it’s going to become necessary to get a longer stretch of days that I can devote to the new project, not to mention working on new short stories, sending stuff out to lit mags to try and rack up more publishing credits, looking for an agent again, reformatting the screenplay…the list goes on and on. But it probably wouldn’t be in my best interest to quit this job now, the one that, let’s face it, boring as it may be, isn’t the worst one that I’ve had in my life. In addition to the steady paycheck, there’s the issue of health and dental coverage, which is, of course, so crucial at any age. I’d be a fool to give it up…and yet, at some point, I need more time to work on the writing, and on promotion. That’s just reality. I’m not going to be a security guard forever.

Questions abound. I will quit…I think it’s a matter of when, not if…but I need to do it at the right time, for the right reasons. When it happens, I need to do it with the understanding that it’s not so I can grow my hair out, have Jack Daniels for breakfast, and find some event in the city- ballgame, parade, concert, whatever- to keep myself occupied. When it happens, I need to be disciplined, and I’ll need to use my time wisely. It’s time that I’ll be quite literally paying for. I’m an adult now, like it or not. I demonstrate it to myself in a variety of ways every day, some of them quite unexpected. Not long before my twenty-ninth birthday, I find myself more mature and more mindful of the future than people I know who are several years older than me. That’s not me bragging, it’s just how it is. I’m not the same person that I was ten years ago, or five, or even two. My priorities have changed; what hasn’t is my determination. But all of that being said, my id, the component of the psyche that wants to eat, fuck, fight, and get stoned, is just as healthy as it ever was, even if my body is a little more beat up every year. The id wakes up and stretches as the winter snows melt away, and it’s ready to be reckless and wild again. I just need to find a happy medium between pleasure and responsibility.

There are people I’ve seen that are slaves to their id. They do what they want, when they want, and in some ways, I admire them for it. But there’s something inherently selfish about these people; in most cases, since they indulge themselves, it’s themselves that they most care about. I used to be like that, but I’m not anymore. Then there are the people that I see on Park Avenue when I go in to work. They’re dressed to impress, with five hundred dollar ties and hundred dollar hair cuts. You put them out in the woods in flip-flops and a pair of shorts and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.  I’m not, nor have I ever been that way, and I’m so very glad of that. I don’t think a point will ever come that I’ll find myself completely at one extreme or the other. I’ll just walk the line between pleasure and duty, and I would advise others to try and do the same. With the days warmer and so many things in the mystical, magical city of New York to take advantage of, why not indulge every once in a while? And then, when you’re done indulging, go back in to work. I might be there…or then again, I might not. It all depends on whether the id has won out that day.