If you’ve had enough of the earnestness of Tobey Maguire’s Spiderman or Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, relief is at hand. Aaron Johnson is Kick-Ass, aka Dave Lizewski. As a nerdy high school student, his main superpower is his invisibility to girls. He can’t fly, he can’t leap tall buildings, he doesn’t do kung fu. He has lots of good intentions, but these mostly serve to earn him a good kicking.
What he does as part of the ensemble of Kick-Ass is to incorporate the sex-deprived high school nerd movie into the superhero movie. The superhero element is provided by Chloe Moretz, the 11-year-old actress who plays Hit-Girl, the daughter of discredited cop Damon Macready (Nicolas Cage), who wants to get revenge on the mobsters who set him up.
The two story lines join up when Kick-Ass inadvertently becomes a celebrity after a video of him getting beaten up by a bunch of thugs goes viral on the Internet. He is the voice of the city’s conscience despite his almost complete inability to fight crime. Hit-Girl and her dad come to his rescue after he has taken on more, yet again, than he can chew.
More by accident than design, Kick-Ass is targeted by a drug syndicate headed by Frank D’Amico (Mark Stong), whose son Chris (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) uses a superhero persona to lure Kick-Ass out into the open. The boys are all comic book fanatics, so there is plenty of opportunity to reference a wide range of superhero stories. It plays knowingly off these references, spoofing the heroes, but in the manner of the Scream franchise, which tackles the horror genre, Kick-Ass makes fun, while also showing respect, and a genuine interest, in the genre.
It is also quite clear that Kick-Ass has gone out of its way to shock, and exploits Chloe Moretz’s youth perhaps a trifle cynically. Although only 11, she uses the taboo “C” word once and the “F” word repeatedly, but does so with such a wonderful mix of posing and innocence that it is hard to resist laughing out loud in delight. After all, it’s not as if we really believe that 11-year-olds don’t know such language. She also gets to shoot a number of mafia goons in the head. The truly remarkable thing is that in the hands of director Matthew Vaughn, Moretz manages to still come across as an appealing little girl.
And indeed, Dave Lizewski, for all his fantasizing about his English teacher’s breasts and Internet porn proclivities, is, in fact, something of a superhero — he wants to go out there and make a difference, something that sets him apart from almost everyone else he knows. Vaughn has managed to incorporate the world of MySpace and online news in a very sophisticated fashion, passing judgment on a public that has become totally voyeuristic and undiscriminating in its eagerness to watch the latest clip on YouTube.
Vaughn has forced together a number of very incongruous elements. There are plenty of plot holes, but that is never really the point. The narrative is ridiculous, but Kick-Ass has such enthusiasm for what it is doing that it is hard to quibble over such minor faults. The director creates an energy that pulses through the film, jumping startlingly yet rhythmically from toilet humor to tight action sequences, from superhero 101 and military hardware fetishism to Superbad-esque adolescent sexual exploration. It is quite a ride.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s