Kick-Ass is not what you’d expect.  If you’re burnt out on the almost-assuredly mediocre superhero genre, and the state of today’s comedy scene (die Michael Cera, die!), Kick-Ass will reboot your faith in dying film types.  We’ve seen the story in all sorts of superhero movies, but it’s generally secondary to a larger storyline: kids want to become superheros but are overshadowed by the real deal.  Never taken seriously, they either channel their rejection into super villainy (Jason Lee [die!] in The Incredibles) or they convince the superhero through an egregious display of character (read: tears) that they, indeed, are ready to tackle the world’s baddies.  Kick-Ass doesn’t bother with any of this nonsense.  It’s a super-violent, super-vulgar, well-casted romp through the underbelly of (glam) crime and the difficulties and pressures of vigilante justice sans superpowers.

The movie follows the path of Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), who buys into the idealism of superhero morality and decides to don his own alter-ego: Kick-Ass.  Dave’s real identity is comparable to Clark Kent, a high school loser whose friendship with his romantic interest is held together solely by the fact that she, Katie Deauxma (Lyndsy Fonseca), thinks he’s gay.  Kick-Ass gets off to a rough start, but soon enough he’s fighting crime with the best of them, and against the worst of them; somehow, he gets entangled with the mobster Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), whose thirst for blood is rivaled only by that of some of the movie’s other superheros.

The funniest characters by far are  Damon Macready (Nicholas Cage) and his daughter Mindy (Chloe Moretz), a duo with a bone to pick with D’Amico.  The Macreadys have spent most of their lives preparing to take down D’Amico to avenge the death of their wife/mother, and they don’t pull any punches in doing so.  Despite Mindy’s small stature and unassuming superhero name (Hit-Girl?), she and Daddy really kick some ass.  They team up with Kick-Ass himself to serve D’Amico his fair share of justice.  The result is a bloody and funny mess.

Without giving much more away, I want you to go see Kick-Ass.  You may have seen a preview or TV Spot and said, “meh,” but this movie is not what it seems.  The advertisers want to draw you in by showing you an identifiable cast, and then when you see that the movie isn’t what you thought it would be, they want you to get on to the Kosmo and write a review which praises the shit out of it.  Damn, I’m playing right into their hands.  Kick-Ass has the most profanity I’ve heard in a movie since Magnolia and is the most violent movie I’ve seen since either Kill Bill vol. 1 or Saving Private Ryan.  Don’t worry though, the blood and guts are humorous.  For instance, some guy is microwaved to death; another has his leg severed by a blade.

I’m conflicted about Nicholas Cage.  On the one hand, if he hadn’t run out of money and needed to act in the worst movies ever, such as Knowing, Next, or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, maybe I wouldn’t have seen Kick-Ass.  He and Christopher Mintz-Plasse are the two big names in this movie, and I’m not sure if the latter is much of a draw.  Both of them did a good job too; they aren’t nearly as aggravating as they have been lately.  Chloe Morentz, whom my friend mistook for Abigail Breslin (an unfortunately common occurrence), was also very funny; she probably deserved an Oscar nod for 500 Days of Summer (jk…kind of).

Kick-Ass was a good time.  It’s a movie that took itself a little more seriously than it should have but pulled through in the end.  The ultra-violence and profanity saved it from tedium, and the over-the-top action sequences made it one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen all year.  Definitely recommended.

Conservative - 1. disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change. 2. cautiously moderate or purposefully low: e.g. a conservative estimate.

Rep. Patrick McHenry

The last time I checked, Representative Patrick T. McHenry (R – N.C.) had an (R), not a (D), which means that he’s part of the GOP, which means that he’s conservative, which means that he applies to the above definition.  So why has he introduced legislation which would change the way our money looks?  That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, despite two foreign wars, student protests over public education tuition increases (32% in California!), a crippled economy, and a tsunami scare in Hawaii, Rep. McHenry has found time to draw legislation which, if passed, would replace President Grant’s face with President Reagan’s on the $50 bill.

Why, you may wonder?  Because presidential scholars rank presidents, and the order in which they come out always, Rep. McHenry says, places Reagan higher than Grant.  Do you know who else is usually higher than Grant?  Grover Cleveland.  Grover fucking Cleveland.  He’s on the $1,000 bill, but the U.S. Treasury doesn’t print that one anymore.  John Adams also consistently outranks Ulysses Grant, one of the Founding Fathers, as does James Monroe and John Quincy Adams!  Click here for an entire listing of relevant presidential rankings.

The people who are on our currency in circulation are: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, and Benjamin Franklin.  On coin: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, FDR, George Washington, John Kennedy, and Sacagawea.  Notice anything?  How about those most responsible for our economic well-being appearing the most frequently?  Thomas Jefferson, appearing both on currency and coin, almost singlehandedly doubled the size of the United States with one of the shrewdest (and most racist!) purchases in all of history.  The economy that those GOP members are so desperately trying to defend was created by Alexander Hamilton, one of the non-presidents on currency.  Abraham Lincoln, while not an economist by any means, made a series of decisions which saved what-would-become the world’s most powerful economy from an incredible schism.  If economic prudence is the merit by which one is immortalized on currency, then we should just put a picture of Social Darwinist Rockefeller with the tagline “everyman for himself” on every bill.  Or pictures of slave-traders.

I remember sophomore year of college when I had to read a book by David Harvey called The New Imperialism. In it, Harvey argued that the United States had created a new empire which was based on unspoken, yet interminably strong economic dominance of foreign countries.  Not only has the “third world” come to rely heavily on the United States, our foreign influence (Pepsi plants, outsourced tailors, and so forth) runs more deeply than the ferocity of those cries of “domestic jobs” and “Americans first.”  I think this is neoliberal policy and I think it was aggrandized by the firebrand Ronald Reagan.  Actually, David Harvey wrote another book called A Brief History of Neoliberalism and I think Reagan was on the cover…

This isn’t new, by the way.  There have been proposals to put Reagan’s face on the dime, the $20 bill, and even the $50 bill five years ago, none of which have been successful because his policies are “still controversial.”  That’s a light way of putting it.  I imagine that those impacted by neoliberal economic policy, such as young Bangladese children, would feel just about the same way that American Indians felt when in 1928 Andrew Jackson’s face was put on the $20 bill.  Wait, didn’t he march thousands of American Indians to their deaths because of congressional pressure?  Didn’t the economy crash the year after his face was put on the $20 bill?

Rep. McHenry has more to worry about in North Carolina than what the $50 bills he carries around are going to look like.  How about the budget shortfalls expected for 2011?  In any case, this is stupidest, more absolutely irrelevant thing to spend time and money on.  I want the guy who led the army that defeated slavery to stay on my $50 bill, not the guy who created economically subjugating policy abroad.