A little more pie-in-the-sky than I would have been, but accurate

The morning after we saw Kick-Ass, I finally sat down to read Roger Ebert's review, selecting his most hyperbolically low rating as a good indication of what the general temperature was among the people who didn't like the film. For the record, I loved it, but not so dearly as I can't admit it has flaws, or that it was, at times, rather uneven. So I wanted to see what he and others thought that kept them from enjoying the movie. That was Sunday.

Today is Wednesday, and I still do not understand why this film provoked such an negative reaction from him. ( Pearl-clutching confusion below, some minor spoilers for Kick-Ass. )

Pink Raygun has an article up about how disingenuous is the furor over Hit Girl. I think the most brilliant portion is this, which touches directly on the parts of Ebert's review that actively squicked me out:

Ebert goes on to say that “Big Daddy and Mindy never have a chat about, you know, stuff like how when you kill people, they are really dead.” You know what? That’s a conversation that real daddies should be having with their real children. That’s not the film’s job.

That's just it. Whatever else you might think about the premise of that post (about how the outrage would not exist were this a foul-mouthed little boy killing people), that much she gets exactly right. It's not a film's responsibility to teach your kids that what they're seeing is meant to be over-the-top and, therefore, comedic. (I must stress here that I'm not attacking people for not finding it funny. There's a difference between being unamused and being affronted.) It's such a bizarre demand from a reviewer that a film espouse within its diegetic space a morality of which you approve. Dirty pool, Ebert, my lad.

Why do I bother writing when they do it better?

I think if I made my opinions on this post three times as long, I'd never express myself half so well as this post on Hit Girl at Jezebel. Just...wow.

One of many very important parts of her incredibly well thought out analysis:
But I do like [Shit Blows Up And A Lot Of People Die] movies as a rule, and so do about a gazillion other people, so it's probably safe to assume that liking them does not actually make you a bad person who struggles to be compassionate and non-violent in real life. It just means you can suspend your better nature for a short time in order to watch a lot of intense, terrifying shit happen to (and because of) a fictional character, provided you know that character has the intellectual, financial and physical resources to wind up safe and triumphant, and that the fictional people who get slaughtered along the way are all A) evil and B) trying to kill the hero first. Hit Girl is clearly shown to be such a character, fighting such characters. So if you can't stomach this well-established formula with her at the center of it, the obvious question is, are you usually willing to suspend empathy because of the character's resources and the good/evil thing and the knowledge that it is fiction, or because the hero usually has a dick and a deep voice?

And this, definitely this:
I like that I walked out of there with a gut reaction of "That was awesome!" immediately followed by an intellectual reaction of, "Damn, it's fucked up that I thought that was awesome." That tells me I just saw something new, if nothing else. And on further reflection, the new thing for me was not a violent, remorseless, brutalized, potty-mouthed child but a female action hero with all the agency and skill of a man, whom the audience is not supposed to want to fuck. That is a pretty awesome thing, even if it is also frankly pretty fucked up that I thought that movie was awesome.