The Philippine Online Chronicles

The word awesome is thrown around these days as an easy referent to something that is good; it’s the new “cool,” or, if we are to take my own cultural background’s lexicon, it has replaced words such as "rad," "dope," "ill," and "sick." But we forget one of the word’s roots, awe, meaning that to be awesome is to have the ability to inspire jaw-dropping awe. The movies to be discussed in this twofer are awesome, one fulfilling the new definition as something hip or cool and the other one truly inspiring awe through its filmmaking just as much as through its narrative.

Kick Ass

We start off with the awesome as in cool Kick Ass. The first of this summer’s superhero flicks (and a rather wise choice to release before Iron Man 2 rolls out), it supposes a world where there are no superpowers, but there are definitely some seriously bad guys. Whether these bad guys be the dudes who mug you in the street, or the big bosses running crime rings a la Kingpin, the title character played by Aaron Johnson says that someone has to come in and stop them. And he asks how come no one, out of all the people who have ever read comic books, has ever thought of dressing up in a costume and fighting bad guys.

His friends explain to him that it’s psycho and if someone ever did that then they would probably get their ass kicked, which is what happens to our titular hero in his first outing. But a steady YouTube/MySpace following inspire him to go on with his quest to fight crime. And though he is clearly an amateur, not displaying any fighting acumen whatsoever, he manages to win people over and get them to support him, becoming something of a cult hero. He does run into some real (non-superpowered) heroes, in the form of Hit Girl and Big Daddy, and he sees how it’s really done. All the while the big crime boss played by Mark Strong lurks, wanting to do away with the heroes.

There are a lot of elements to Kick Ass, and it’s very clear that there was an attempt to fit a lot of material into the frame of a feature-length film (the basis of this being an eight-issue comic book). As a result there are so many things at play. We’ve got the high school awkwardity, the grappling with self and identity, the love interest situations on the side of Kick Ass. And on the side of Hit Girl and Big Daddy we’ve got a very interesting back story told through a pretty novel technique, as well as some very good scenes between Chloe Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage who here hams it up to great effect. There are ideas of online fame, a good amount of humor that’s just as well shot as the great action scenes, and some other, small elements thrown in.

To have a movie packed with so much stuff is usually a good thing, if the film can find a balance for all these things. But Kick Ass struggles at times with pacing and tone, with some parts rushing past and others kind of hanging for a bit too long. Similarly, we’re supposed to assume that this world is similar to our own, but not as realistic as say, Nolan’s Bat-verse.

Thus there are times when things seem cartoonish, to the point that even some of the violence and killing that Hit Girl and Big Daddy do are supposed to seem funny or at least kind of desensitize us to the violence that is being committed. Make no mistake, those two have no moral qualms about taking lives, and when they get to work things get pretty gory. But then at times we are meant to take the violence seriously, and without giving anything away there are some scenes in which the violence is pretty gut wrenching. There’s an inconsistency in tone here, as the film’s tone changes through its various parts.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t watch it. On the contrary, despite the overloaded nature of it, despite this inconsistency in tone, the movie is so spirited and just plain so much fun to watch that you can’t help but liking it for what it tries to do. It tries to give you a fun story of superheroes, playing with a lot of superhero clichés, mocking some and paying homage to others. The movie knows how to get its laughs, and though Cage gets top honors for his self-aware sappiness (a favorite detail of mine, Bale’s Batman makes his voice gruff so that he sounds different while Cage’s Big Daddy talks in Shatnerian stops and starts), Mark Strong is just as fun to watch as he similarly plays it up as a big bad crime boss.

And the action is great. Okay so Kick Ass sucks at combat and you’re kind of cringing throughout because you’re expecting him to get his ass kicked, but the scenes with Big Daddy and Hit Girl are pretty amazing to watch. And when Hit Girl goes all Trinity on the bad guys, it’s impressive. Moretz is a firecracker of energy here, delivering believable punches along with her unbelievably sappy lines that are nonetheless filled with ass-kicking conviction.

I don’t think anyone’s going to be giving Kick Ass any filmmaking awards, but it’s clear that it is a great popcorn flick, something that would definitely become a lot of people’s favorite movie. It’s got humor, action, a great premise (thanks to Millar and Romita Jr.) that works effectively on the big screen, and a great sense of fun. It sets out to tell a fun superhero story, and though it’s far from perfect, it succeeds in being entertaining and making you feel like it earned your time and pesos, and I wouldn’t mind forking over some more time and money to see this again.

Shutter Island

On the other hand, I am hoping that despite its unusual release timing, Shutter Island gets some Oscar love. Martin Scorsese is at the top of his game here, and moving into territory that he hasn’t explored in quite a while. The last Scorsese film that comes to mind that explored the thriller was his remake of Cape Fear.

Based on a Dennis Lehane novel (his other work being the basis for the great films Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone), Shutter Island is no remake, but it does definitely wear its Hitchcockian influences proudly. From the opening, ominous tones of dread that accompany the first images of the prison/mental facility/island, one can’t help but recall Bernard Herrman’s classic scores that helped set the tone for Hitchcock’s movies. And the other nods abound, from simple yet evocative and allusory camera movements, to framing and images that give you that good old suspense feel.

This doesn’t mean that the work isn’t Scorcese’s or that he takes too much from Hitchcock. Good artists borrow, great artists steal. And in this sense Scorcese shows himself here a master thief, taking all of these things and making them clearly his own, telling a powerful, gripping, maddening story of suspense and psychological horror.

Leonardo DiCaprio, in yet another amazing performance for Scorcese (and one wonders if this intense performance will finally earn the man one of those coveted statuettes) plays Teddy Daniels, a US Marshall who heads to Shutter Island to investigate a missing patient, among other things. Along with his partner, played by Mark Ruffalo, Daniels delves deeper into the island facility’s secrets. But as Daniels digs, he begins uncovering his own past traumas, which include the death of his wife in a fire and his experiences as a WWII soldier discovering the horrific concentration camp in Dachau.

Hallucinations and fever dreams that Daniels experiences while on the island make for visuals that are indeed awe-inspiring. They are beautiful: the cinematography, the framing, the way that the images are constructed and move. One can’t help but admire the vividness of the images, and the great touches such as the ash that is constantly falling around Daniels and his wife (played by Michelle WIlliams). At the same time these can turn horrific, suddenly frightening at the mere turn of a phrase or a swing of the camera. It is this great tension, between beauty and horror, that powers a lot of the images in Shutter Island, as well as the film’s ability to create a general sense of uneasiness. You always have the feeling that something bad could happen at any moment.

And in the contained nature of the story, with everything happening either on the island or in Daniels’s subconscious, there is a feeling that things are always closing in, tightening. Furthering this feeling are some fantastic scenes where the viewer gets Daniels POV shots of dark corridors with nothing but the sounds of footsteps, dripping water, and what could be breathing or something else in the background. Claustrophobia mounts constantly, and even when you do get out of those confined spaces, you’re still stuck on the island and still stuck with Daniels and all the trauma that he’s trying to contain in his head.

It all makes for great psychological horror, which is so hard to accomplish. It’s easy to come up with horrific images. One can rattle off any number of horror scenes that have stuck with us, that have been scary. Similarly, there are innumerable freaky kids in horror flicks. And the lazy filmmaker will just pile these on top of each other, letting the visceral shocks do their job. But Scorcese imbues each of his horrific images with such meaning that the horror of them last with us far longer than the shock of the sudden opening of a dead child’s eyes ever will.

Shutter Island is not a movie that aims for the quick freak out, nor for blood and gore of a lot of contemporary horror. There is blood here, lots of it, and gore too, but these are not what create the horror. The fear here comes from great performances, by DiCaprio, by Ben Kingsley who plays the facility's head psychiatrist, and by new Freddy Kreuger-Jackie Earle Haley in a gripping, heart-pounding scene. It comes from well-staged scenes and jarring, horrific, and yet often beautiful visuals. It comes from the film’s story and how it develops. It comes from the deft hands of Marin Scorsese and how he creates this island, this world which we inhabit, where madness is the norm. And most of all, it comes from the idea that we, with our own personal traumas, could just as easily as any of these characters slip into a similar madness.