Kick-Ass

Spanks - 5

Director - Matthew Vaughn

Writers - Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn

Starring - Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Mark Strong, Lyndsy Fonseca, Nicolas Cage & Chloe Grace Moretz

Release Date - 16 April 2010

MPAA Rating - R

Kick-Ass is the first superhero/comic book movie to be released this summer movie season. However, Kick-Ass is not your typical superhero film. Most superhero and/or comic book movies are rated PG-13 or even sometimes PG and Kick-Ass is rated R. Like any superhero movie, it isn't to be taken seriously.

The film is based on comic written by Mark Millar and is set in a world without superheroes. Dave Lizewski, a normal New York City teenager who hangs out reading comic books has always wondered why nobody has ever become a superhero. He makes a costume, makes a MySpace page and sets out to save New Yorkers and calls himself Kick-Ass. When Kick-Ass tries to help his school crush by telling a drug dealer to leave her alone he meets Hit-Girl and watches her kill all the "bad guys" in the apartment, and gets pulled into something way over his head.

There is a lot of controversy going around about the large amount of violence, gore, the bad language and Hit-Girl. Unlike Batman or Iron Man, the violence is not toned down and is very bloody. Every major character "curses like a sailor". The biggest of them all is the character of Hit Girl played by Chloe Grace Moretz. This is because of the language she uses (words like the ones that rhyme with sock and hunt) and the gratuitous violence (guns, knives, swords fights) and body count that her character racks up (I lost count at 6 and that was in Hit-Girls first scene) because she was 13 years old at the world premiere.

If you are not a fan of violence or bad language, this movie is not for you (go see Date Night instead). Controversy aside, since people just love to complain at everything on TV and on the silver screen, the film is funny, entertaining, and action packed. It is everything you can ask for in a superhero movie and Matthew Vaughn has done it better then most. Just remember, as Chloe Grace Moretz said "It's a movie and it’s not real"

Knowing

Spanks - 4

Director - Alex Proyas

Writers - Ryne Douglas Pearson, Juliet Snowden, Stiles White, Stuart Hazeldine, Ryne Douglas Pearson, Alex Proyas & Richard Kelly

Starring - Nicolas Cage, Chandler Canterbury, Rose Byrne, D.G. Maloney & Lara Robinson

Release Date - 20 March 09

MPAA Rating - PG-13

Knowing is a disaster movie with a twist. It isn't straight forward like Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow. It actually makes you think about what might happen next and it wasn't easily predictable like most. Some previous trailers for the film made it look like the normal disaster film, which I think turned off the people I saw it with. The film has a lot of mystery along with it, "The Whisperer People" are one example.

The plot follows John and Caleb Koestler. Caleb gets a page of numbers when his schools time capsule is opened. His astrophysicist father figures out the numbers are the date of disasters over the past 50 years and how many lives were lost. The numbers list three events that have not yet occurred.

The plane crash scene was shot beautifully and in one continuous take. It gave me the feeling like I was there with Nicolas Cage. The subway scene was done even better. It is one of the most realistic disaster scenes ever shot. Proyas held nothing back developing the scene.

The people I saw it will did not like the ending. I thought the ending worked very well and can't see an other way it could have ended. This again could have been because of the way the film was marketed early on.

If you go see Knowing, do so with an open mind and expect it to be different. If you don't, you will walk out feeling like my friends did and hate it.