so we havent talked about this film yet, kick ass stunt coordination by brad allen, former jackie chan stunt team member.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krOzVRj9z88
also check out this article with a high lighted trailer of one of the character hit girl..
and if you havent guessed it by now this movie will be rated R.
I had seen the comic in the comic store a ways back, heard some buzz about it, but never bothered to pick it up and read it. Looks like an entertaining movie.
Based on the trailer, I think alot of people will see it as a more comical, realistic, but far less stark, twist on Watchmen.
Would you rather be Brad Allen or “one of Jackie Chan’s trainers”?
Almost put this in Celebrities studying martial arts. Maybe Chloe will get there if she keeps it up.
Chloe Moretz Connects the Dots
Hometown: Atlanta
Movie: Kick-Ass
For Fans Of: Drew Barrymore, Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman
This spring, a purple-haired Chloe Moretz will flip, somersault and knife-fight her way across the big screen as Hit-Girl in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass. But the 13-year-old actress’s acrobatics (for which she attended almost a month of circus school in Toronto and lessons with one of Jackie Chan’s trainers) are no match for the tiny vigilante’s vocabulary. In one scene, Moretz’ character asks her on-screen father, played by Nicholas Cage, “Can I get a puppy? A cuddly fluffy one.” He falls silent, incredulous, until she spurts, “I’m just ****ing with you, Daddy. I’d like a Benchmade model 42 butterfly knife.”
Hit-Girl may have an R-rated, carnage-driven persona, but Moretz has a history of bringing to life characters that would be difficult for an adult, much less a tween. She gave compelling dating advice to Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character in (500) Days of Summer, channeled a spiteful child-ghost in The Amityville Horror and played a nine-year-old suffering from a brain tumor in The Eye. Her deadpan comedic timing and restrained earnestness carry her beyond the realm of baby stars aping grown-ups for effect; the girl can really act.
Her secret, she says, is connecting the dots between herself and her characters. “Even though Hit-Girl is this crazy vigilante, she’s also a 12-year-old,” Moretz explains. “She loves purple, she loves wearing costumes. She doesn’t know any better. I connected to her by realizing she’s just a kid, like me.”
Still, Moretz insists that, off-screen, she can’t access Hit-Girl whenever she’d like. “I’m stronger and a little more physically fit from the role,” she says, “but if I was in a restaurant that got robbed, I would scream and cry and call 911.”
[QUOTE=doug maverick;978249]so we havent talked about this film yet, kick ass stunt coordination by brad allen, former jackie chan stunt team member.
and if you havent guessed it by now this movie will be rated R.[/QUOTE]
The Hit Girl Trailer was really something.
Although I am not completely comfortable with a girl that age using that kind of language…she definitely sells the character and the ACTION!
Holy crap…she is really impressive!
Did Brad Allen choreograph the scenes? Because they definitely Kick-Ass 
Mclovin Fu
Anyone read the comic?
Christopher Mintz-Plasse on ‘Kick-Ass’
Peter Hartlaub, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic
Friday, April 9, 2010
After Christopher Mintz-Plasse got cast in the iconic role of McLovin in the 2007 movie “Superbad” - using an image from his camera phone because he didn’t have a professional headshot - even the actor wondered if he was going to be more than a one-hit wonder.
But good jobs have kept coming for the 20-year-old, including a memorable supporting role in “Role Models,” and now “Kick-Ass,” an action comedy about an unassuming high schooler who decides to become a costumed hero. Mintz-Plasse plays Red Mist, the son of a mob boss. Also featured are Nicolas Cage and young Chloe Moretz as a father/daughter crime-fighting team featuring 11-year-old Hit Girl, who executes several extremely brutal and satisfying beat-downs during the movie’s second half.
We spoke with Mintz-Plasse last week during the WonderCon comic books, fantasy and motion picture convention in San Francisco.
Q: “Kick-Ass” is filled with an awesome level of carnage that you don’t usually see in comic book movies about teens.
A: It almost didn’t get made. (Writer/director Matthew Vaughn) had the script written, and nobody wanted to touch it. They wanted to change the Hit Girl character to be, like, 25 years old. They were scared of the violence. … He went out and funded it by himself - got Brad Pitt and a couple other friends to fund the movie. We had no idea if anybody was going to pick it up. Matthew kept joking on set: “This is going to be the most expensive home movie I ever made.”
Q: You definitely have the best costume.
A: The first time I wore it, the costume was a lot of fun. I looked so bad-
ass. I’m taking pictures and sending it to my friends. “Look at this … leather suit. I’m a superhero!” Then about three weeks in, it was a big pain in the ass. You wear it for 12 hours a day. You sweat nonstop in it. The cape that I was wearing had to be tied underneath the coat around my arm - it got really tight and cut the circulation off and I’d get blood spots. It was very, very uncomfortable. But it looks good in the film.
Q: And the red souped-up Mustang that your character drives?
A: That was actually a lot of stress. I drive a Honda Civic. I don’t drive a stick shift and I had to learn how to drive a stick shift on that car. And Matthew Vaughn was going to keep it when it’s done. He kept threatening: “If you crash that car, you’re going to pay for it.”
Q: You drive a Civic?
A: I drive an '04 Civic. It’s fantastic. When my brother got his car, my grandparents paid for half and he paid for half. They said we did this for your brother and we’ll do it for you. I wanted something reliable.
Q: Do you ever wish you never heard the word McLovin.
A: No, no, no. That was my first role and it got me this role and “Role Models.” I’m very grateful.
Q: But don’t you get sick of people shouting “McLovin!” when they see you?
A: I hate it when people recognize me when I’m driving my car. I was on the phone the other day - which is illegal, I know - and these people pulled up next to me in this massive truck, rims spinning. They see me and they start screaming, “McLovin, get off the f- phone. Get off the f- phone right now mother-. Roll down your f- window man.” My friend in the passenger seat didn’t know what was happening.
Q: You don’t get to kick much ass in “Kick-Ass.”
A: I don’t think I kicked any ass at all in the movie. But if there’s a sequel, knock on wood, I will be a bad guy and hopefully get my big ass-kicking scene.
Q: Thinking of “Superbad” and “Role Models” and this film, your characters always have the best props. Do you keep the stuff so you can sell it later on eBay?
A: No one has let me keep anything from any movie. I’ve never asked, maybe that’s the problem. The first step to keeping something is asking. Everything’s gone, the driver’s license …
Q: You had to give back the McLovin’ Hawaii driver’s license? Did it go straight to the Smithsonian?
A: (Laughs) That would be awesome. … The props people from “Superbad” kept it. It’s somewhere in the world. Who knows where.
E-mail Peter Hartlaub at phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.
some reviews…
Thumbs down from Roger
Ebert found the movie’s carnage and darkness made him sad
By ROGER EBERT | Movie Review
Fri. Apr 16 - 4:54 AM
SHALL I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find Kick-Ass morally reprehensible, and will I appear to have missed the point? Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in. A motion picture camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere. Now tell me all about the context.
The movie’s premise is that ordinary people, including a high school kid, the 11-year-old and her father, try to become superheroes in order to punish evil men. The flaw in this premise is that the little girl DOES become a superhero. In one scene, she faces a hallway jammed with heavily armed gangsters and shoots, stabs and kicks them all to death, while flying through the air with such power it’s enough to make Jackie Chan take out an AARP membership.
This isn’t comic violence. These men, and many others in the film, are really stone cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children that age would be, I dunno, AFFECTED somehow, don’t you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?
I know, I know. This is a satire. But a satire of what? The movie’s rated R, which means in this case that it’s doubly attractive to anyone under 17. I’m not too worried about 16-year-olds here. I’m thinking of six-year-olds. There are characters here with walls covered in carefully mounted firearms, ranging from handguns through automatic weapons to bazookas. At the end, when the villain deliciously anticipates blowing a bullet hole in the child’s head, he is prevented only because her friend, in the nick of time, shoots him with a bazooka shell at three-metre range and blows him through a skyscraper window and across several city blocks of sky in a projectile of blood, flame and smoke. As I often read on the Internet: Hahahahaha.
The little girl is named Mindy (Chloe Grace Moretz). She adopts the persona of Hit Girl. She has been trained by her father, Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage), to join him in the battle against a crime boss (Mark Strong). Her training includes being shot at point-blank range while wearing a bulletproof vest. She also masters the martial arts — more, I would say, than any other movie martial artist of any age I can recall. And she’s gifted with deadly knife-throwing; a foot-long knife was presented to her by her dad as, I guess, a graduation present.
Big Daddy and Mindy never have a chat about, you know, stuff like how when you kill people they are really dead. This movie regards human beings like video game targets. Kill one, and you score. They’re dead, you win. When kids in the age range of this movie’s home video audience are shooting each other every day in America, that kind of stops being funny.
Hit Girl teams up with Kick-Ass (Aaron Johnson), the narrator of the film, a lacklustre high school kid who lives vicariously through comic books. For reasons tedious to explain, he orders a masked costume by mail order and sets about trying to behave as a superhero, which doesn’t work out well. He lacks the training of a Big Daddy. But as he and Hit Girl find themselves fighting side by side, he turns into a quick learner. Also, you don’t need to be great at hand-to-hand combat if you can just shoot people dead.
The early scenes give promise of an entirely different comedy. Aaron Johnson has a certain anti-charm, his problems in high school are engaging, and so on. A little later, I reflected that possibly only Nic Cage could seem to shoot a small girl point-blank and make it, well, funny. Say what you will about her character, but Chloe Grace Moretz has presence and appeal. Then the movie moved into dark, dark territory, and I grew sad.
‘This movie regards human beings like video game targets. Kill one, and you score.’
Wild applause from Mick :eek:
Review: That’s ‘Kick-Ass’ entertainment
Mick LaSalle, Chronicle Movie Critic
Friday, April 16, 2010
WILD APPLAUSE Action comedy. Starring Aaron Johnson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Nicolas Cage, Mark Strong and Chloe Moretz. Directed by Matthew Vaughn. (R. 117 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
“Kick-Ass” lives up to the promise of its title, but it’s better than its title, too. It’s not an innocuous comedy. It doesn’t talk down to audiences. It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.
It’s a comic book action movie, but it’s not just that. It’s also a teen comedy, with the honest outrageousness of an “American Pie” or a “Superbad.” At the same time somebody has been watching Tarantino movies, because “Kick-Ass” has the crazy outsize, cartoonlike violence of a Tarantino film plus the knowing sense of humor. There’s a serious intelligence behind this picture, and that’s especially welcome in a genre usually exploited to attract people either too young to know better or too dumb to care. Intelligence equals risk. It means playing with lucrative formulas in pursuit of an actual vision. “Kick-Ass” takes chances and succeeds.
The story - or rather the jumping-off point for the story - concerns an average high school kid, Dave (Aaron Johnson), who aspires to be a superhero, even though he can’t fight, has no super powers and no disposable income with which to outfit a bat cave. Uh-oh, you might think, this sounds like the recipe for something corny, a gentle comedy about a boy and his dream. Forget it. Five minutes into his superhero career, the same thing happens to Dave that would happen to any defenseless naif who shows up in a jumpsuit and tries to stop a robbery.
“Kick-Ass” is the third film from director Matthew Vaughn (“Star Dust,” “Layer Cake”), whose movies, though very different, have in common a firm command of story. Starting with a high school kid who dresses like a superhero and calls himself “Kick-Ass,” the movie’s world expands. The media get involved. Then the Internet. Organized crime is drawn into the story, and so are Nicolas Cage and Chloe Moretz as a lethal father-and-daughter duo who, in their superhero incarnations, go by the names Big Daddy and Hit Girl.
Cage, who has been focusing in recent years on big-scale blockbusters, finally finds one that calls forth the qualities of intensity and idiosyncratic humor that made audiences like him in the first place. As a cop who has had his life ruined by a mob boss (Mark Strong), Cage is a poignant figure. Yet he’s also quite funny in his Big Daddy incarnation, doing a blatant imitation of TV’s Batman, Adam West.
The violence in “Kick-Ass” is off the charts, but the thing that might make it sound especially appalling is in fact the thing that mitigates it: Most of it is committed by a charming, tiny 11-year-old girl. As Hit Girl, Moretz kills at least 50 bad guys, and it’s all so over the top and absurd that only the most sensitive souls will find it disturbing. Vaughn also speeds up the action during the violence and cranks up the soundtrack, turning each episode into a comic set piece.
Yet however grand and fantastic individual elements may become, Vaughn and Jane Goldman, who collaborated on the adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic book series, keep the personal relationships grounded in recognizable reality. For example, the ridiculous friendship that develops between Dave and the girl of his dreams, because she thinks he’s gay. Or the family dynamic between the suave, ruthless mobster and his wonderfully nerdy son. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who achieved screen immortality as McLovin in “Superbad,” plays the son, and with his cultivated aura of goofiness and misplaced self-satisfaction, he’s made for the screen.
Likewise, though the events in “Kick-Ass” are extreme, we can recognize the violence and ridiculousness, as well the vanity and the craving of the central characters. This is our world, too, but a wild, funhouse version of it - emphasis on the fun part.
– Advisory: This movie contains nudity, sexual situations, extreme violence and drug use.
Well, the GF and I went and saw it today, and both liked it. A lot. Odd, considering when I first saw the trailer, I thought that it looked stup!d. This is one of the few movies where positive movie reviews prompted me to go see it. I actually had more fun watching this than I did watching Avatar.
I can see how Kick-Ass walks a fine line. It looks like a kid’s movie, or at least a PG-13 movie at first glance. It isn’t. Anyone who mistakens it for a family movie and takes the kiddies is probably in for a shock. I can see parent groups lodging complaints against this movie. But IMO, it’s one of the few movies coming out with any originality (or at least a twist to add originality) to it.
BTW, the little girl literally steals the show. And Nicholas Cage, whom I normally don’t care for, did fine in his role, too. All the actors were good, and the lead villain was great.
I read the comic the other day at Borders. Awesome book. Beyond F’d up.
I’m probably going to check out the flick tomorrow. I know the it’s got to be pretty over the top, but at the same time tame compared to the book.
Also, any parent that thinks a movie called Kick ASS is appropriate for the kids, especially one obviously rated R, should have their brains checked.
I loved it! My wife and son thought it was stupid.
Richard
I just saw it, I loved it. Played for laughs, without doubt. In some sense, it’s like it spoofs it’s own source material too. Especially by taking the story in directions that the book didn’t go.
And the controversy surrounding this movie has way more to do with Hit Girl than anything else obviously. The violence isn’t even as graphic as Kill Bill and Ninja Assassin, let alone the graphic novel itself.
Still effing amazing. I had more fun at this than I did at Ninja Assassin, and I enjoyed Ninja Assassin a ton. Also, the theater I was in broke out in applause when the movie ended.
saw it last night. it was freaking awesome, the hit girl character made the movie to me blah blah blah little girl shooting **** up is morally reprehensible and all that. but i liked the subtext of this girl who was “brainwashed” by her father to break down her natural human ability to not kill another human. characters like big daddy and even to some degree red mist are sociopaths. hit girl and kick ass, were just disillusioned kids. the action was great, and zenshiite was correct not as bloody as kill bill or ninja assassin. and i wonder if the character was a little boy and not girl would there have been such a hopla over it. funny thing is my mother would have taken me to see this movie when i was kid, **** we wouldve been first in line.lol
the movie sorta underwhelmed at the box office and the reason why i say sorta is because it was only made for 28 million. and it made 20mil over 90% of its budget back. so while it didnt do the 29mil it was expected to do, 20mil is still good money. and im sure this is going to be a monster on dvd and blue ray. lionsgate should have played to their strength and called it tyler perry’s kick ass. that would guaranteed 40 mil opening weekend.lol
Unreal Movie Review: Kick-Ass
Published by Paul Tassi at 4:15 pm under Movies, Reviews
I’m a 22 year old male, raised on a diet of comic books and violent video games. I grew up wanting to be Batman, but eventually decided it was enough to blow the heads off of virtual terrorists in Call of Duty. I am Kick-Ass, or what the film Kick-Ass would be if it was realized as an actual person.
So why does a movie so squarely targeted at me miss me on almost every level?
:eek:
[QUOTE=doug maverick;1006498]saw it last night. it was freaking awesome, the hit girl character made the movie to me blah blah blah little girl shooting **** up is morally reprehensible and all that. but i liked the subtext of this girl who was “brainwashed” by her father to break down her natural human ability to not kill another human. characters like big daddy and even to some degree red mist are sociopaths. hit girl and kick ass, were just disillusioned kids. the action was great, and zenshiite was correct not as bloody as kill bill or ninja assassin. and i wonder if the character was a little boy and not girl would there have been such a hopla over it. funny thing is my mother would have taken me to see this movie when i was kid, **** we wouldve been first in line.lol
the movie sorta underwhelmed at the box office and the reason why i say sorta is because it was only made for 28 million. and it made 20mil over 90% of its budget back. so while it didnt do the 29mil it was expected to do, 20mil is still good money. and im sure this is going to be a monster on dvd and blue ray. lionsgate should have played to their strength and called it tyler perry’s kick ass. that would guaranteed 40 mil opening weekend.lol[/QUOTE]
Big Daddy is actually a pretty brilliant deconstruction of Batman, and even more so because of the Adam West impersonation that Nicholas Cage did. Plus the costume change from the comic. Sure, his tactics are more Punisher, but there’s a very fine line that seperates Batman from the Punisher. And Batman is sociopathic in his own way. Hit Girl is Big Daddy’s Robin, and frankly it’s disturbing that Batman trained and took into battle against gangsters and psychopathic serial killers a 12 year old boy.
Mark Millar accomplished with his comic, and in this movie especially, something that I think Frank Miller have been trying to do with his All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder series… deconstruct Batman and his fetish for pre-teen sidekicks. In All-Star B&R, Batman revels his beating the tar out of the bad guys. He analyzes and plans all the means of brutalizing crooks. Enjoys it, laughs like a madman. Then he psychologically abuses **** Grayson before turning him into Robin. It just came off ridiculous because of how he went about it and how his previous works on Batman haven’t been deconstructions.
Anyways, yeah… Big Daddy sociopath, so is Batman. And the parallels are spot on and brilliantly realized.
so i watched it, finally
I was underwhelmed by the fight scenes. But I will say that this would make the perfect double feature with Mirageman.
GIFs of the Balisong/Butterfly knife in Kick-Ass
Finally got around to making animated GIF’s for my Balisong in the Movies GIF project.
Kick-Ass Balisong GIF set 1
5 more GIFs here:
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2013/11/the-balisong-knife-in-movies-kick-ass_1.html
Kick-Ass Balisong GIF set 2
5 more here
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2013/11/the-balisong-knife-in-movies-kick-ass.html
Enjoy!