13 FOR HALLOWEEN #4: ParaNorman

This one almost wasn’t on my radar. Or, at the very least, had been relegated to “add to rental queue” status. Peak time cinema tickets being so stupidly pricey that me and Mrs F going to see a film on the big screen is currently pricier than actually buying the damn thing on DVD a few months later or, if it’s in 3D, actually buying the damn thing on DVD and still having change for a bottle of wine, I don’t tend to go to the cinema much nowadays. It has to be something good. Something I really hopped up for. Something that’s an absolute must-see.

I’m still smarting over the money I spent on ‘Prometheus’, and all I can say is ‘Skyfall’ had better be a billion-fold improvement on ‘Quantum of Solace’.

But I digress. Last week, driving home from work, traffic was solid. Having spent half an hour getting nowhere fast, I doubled back and tried another route. Bad move. If anything, the gridlock was even worse. We inched slowly along the boulevard, a sign directing us to the access road to the Showcase multiplex. Mrs F suggested: “Wanna go to the cinema?” We parked up, hoofed in, and asked for a ticket for whatever was showing in the next ten minutes.

Hence: ‘ParaNorman’.

The plot, in brief, concerns Norman (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee), a young kid who’s bullied at school and despaired of by his parents on account of his ability to communicate with the dead, and the thankless duty, passed onto him by his eccentric uncle, of placating an angry spirit who threatens to return from the dead each year on the anniversary of her execution as a witch. A duty he’s unable to complete thanks to the ministrations of snivelling bully Alvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the ramifications of which are immediate: the dead rise from their graves and all hell breaks loose.

At an early stage in the proceedings, there’s an extended scene where Norman tries to wrest free a book gripped in the rigor mortis ridden hands of a corpse. Slapstick humour and tombstone humour combine in what is genuinely funny and icky in equal measure. And even as I was laughing, I was acutely aware that a bunch of kids – very small ones – were sitting a few rows behind me.

I thought of those kids (interestingly, they didn’t make much noise during the movie – and that includes laughing) during several John Carpenter references that niftily worked in. Went over their heads, I reckon. And I thought of them again towards the end of the film. Norman is faced with the spirit of the executed witch – she’s an eleven year-old girl. Just a kid, like Norman. A kid cursed with the ability to speak to the dead. Like Norman. And just as Norman is bullied, she was executed. Directors Chris Butler and Sam Fell depict the girl’s spirit as literally incandescent with rage. Norman’s attempts to ameliorate her anger make for a tense scene.

‘ParaNorman’ is essentially about the vulnerability of children and the stupidity of adults. Mob mentality and an inability to listen are the hallmarks of virtually all of the adult characters. There’s a telling scene in which the townsfolk set on a group of zombies – in a reversal of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and pretty much every other zombie film you can think of, it ends with the zombies barricaded inside a building and the living clamouring to get in. But these zombies are freighted with guilt and want to make amends rather than terrorizing the living. Again, ‘ParaNorman’ goes into deeper and more poignant territory than I was expecting.

Of course, there’s an honourable tradition of animated films ostensibly aimed at the kiddie market being better and more intelligent than most mainstream adult-centric fare. But ‘ParaNorman’ strikes me as being a little darker, a little more thought-provoking than the norm. It certainly has one of the most put-upon protagonists of any children’s film I’ve seen – poor old Norman gets the shit end of the stick right up until the end when his unwanted gift finally allows him to emerge as the hero of the day. That’s another tradition of animated kiddie fare: the happy ending. In ‘ParaNorman’ it’s hard-earned and all the more welcome as a result.

Kick-Ass

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedy / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 26 of 100

The brilliance of ‘Kick-Ass’: where to begin?

Do I talk about Matthew Vaughn’s diversity as a director, how he makes it three in a row after ‘Layer Cake’ (one of the few bona fide standouts in the slew of post-‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ Brit-crime movies) and ‘Stardust’ (an exuberant take on Neil Gaiman’s novel boasting Robert de Niro’s best turn in ages as a cross-dressing sky pirate)?

Do I talk about the cluster of terrific supporting performances, including Mark Strong, Dexter Fletcher and Robert Flemyng (who are rapdly shaping up as the Matthew Vaughn Regulars), as well as featuring a hallelujah-praise-the-lord-he’s-back-on-form Nicolas Cage?

Do I talk about how the film simultaneously celebrates and satirises the comic-book superhero genre, effortlessly walking a high wire between funny-as-fuck set-pieces and darker, more brutal moments?

Or do I just mention Hit-Girl?

As played by Chloe Moretz (twelve at the time of shooting), Hit-Girl is American cinema’s newest icon. Simple as that. The movie might be called ‘Kick-Ass’, after the alter ego of high school nobody and wannabe hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), but it’s Hit-Girl’s show all the way. And how could it not be? When you’ve got a twelve year-old assassin who casually drops the C-word before launching into some John Woo-style balletic action and taking down a room full of bad guys, it’s kind of hard to top.

Which isn’t to denigrate Johnson’s portrayal of Dave/Kick-Ass. Channelling nerdish delusion, heroic stupidity and hangdog melancholy in roughly equal measure, the only reason he never quite defines the movie is the sheer weight of expectation. Like I said, the very title is ‘Kick-Ass’, and yet the character – deliberately so – is reactive rather than proactive. Kick-Ass desperately wants to be pro-active; wants to be a superhero; wants to stop crime and win the girl and make the world a better place. It’s when he finds himself entangled with the considerably more disciplined, experienced and unflinchingly hardcore team of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl that (a) the reality of his ineffectiveness comes home to him; and (b) he inadvertently exacerbates an already hyper-tense situation.

The precise mechanics of the plot require little discussion. Narratively, ‘Kick-Ass’ doesn’t break any new ground or pull off any surprises. The late-in-the-game introduction of Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s strutting, show-offy Red Mist pans out so predictably you can almost chart it on a graph, peaking with the glaringly obvious and sequel-baiting last frame.

I’m noticing a trend on the internet to negative reviews of ‘Kick-Ass’, the most commonly cited criticism being that it never gets as down and dirty and subversive as the graphic novel its based on. In particular, the mainstream reviewers’ assertion that Vaughn’s film is a faithful adaptation of said source material has come in for a specific hammering, with many bloggers pointing up the differences. From what I understand, though, graphic novel and film were being developed in tandem – akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyseey’ and Stanley Kubrick’s film version – and therefore both versions diverge in some places and demonstrated complete fidelity in others. Ultimately, again like Clarke and Kubrick’s sci-fi opus, Matthew Vaughn’s film and Mark Millar’s comic book are two takes on a shared vision; they differ, but complement each other.