Opening Weekend: Killer girls in 'Kick-Ass' and 'Dragon Tattoo'

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 11:25 AM - 1 Comment

Noomi Rapacee in 'The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo' and Chloe Moretz in 'Kick-Ass'

It never rains, it pours. We complain that there are no good female action heroes, and all of a sudden this weekend we’re being assaulted by two of them—ruthless female superheroes whose only superpower is fearless cruelty and an almost psychotic lust for vengeance. Two seriously screwed-up young ladies avenging violent crimes against their mothers after being robbed of their childhood. And in one case, the killer is still a child. Meet the new breed of female empowerment—Sweden’s Noomi Rapace is Lisbeth Salander, the chilly heroine of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, based on the blockbuster trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson; and America’s Chloe Moretz is Hit Girl, the secret weapon in Kick-Ass, the anti-comic book adventure based on the graphic novel by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.

They’re very different movies. Dragon Tattoo is a gritty procedural epic filmed with a realist style in the stark land of Ingmar Bergman. Kick-Ass is a pop orgy of pulp exploitation that’s set in New York and unfolds as a parent’s worst nightmare. Dragon Tattoo poses as mature drama, Kick-Ass as delinquent comedy. Both dish up visceral brutality and are restricted to viewers aged 18 and over. Of the two, Kick-Ass is more fun. It’s a blast—a smart, refreshing, subversive spin on the super-hero genre. Dragon Tattoo is thoroughly engrossing, and a must-see for fans of the Larsson trilogy. Hollywood is planning its own souped-up American version of the franchise, but it’s hard to imagine anyone capturing its heroine with more fidelity, and ferocity, than Noomi Rapace.

I’ve written about both these films in the pages of the magazine. For my piece on the heroine of Dragon Tattoo, go to: The most seductive predator since Bond. And for this week’s story on the taboo-smashing provocations of Kick-Ass, go click on: Where no movie has gone before. Meanwhile a few more thoughts on these films:

Kick-Ass

The premise: when pop culture is so thickly populated by comic book superheroes, how come ordinary people haven’t tried to emulate them in real life, even if they have no super powers?  It’s an ingenious notion, but every Hollywood studio turned down the script from Scottish writer-director Matthew Vaughn, appalled by the prospect of an R-rated movie featuring a homicidal 11-year-old. This anti-superhero movie now seems poised to kick serious ass at the box office. And that must make Canadian filmmaker Peter Stebbings feel a bit glum. He employed a similar premise for his witty, well-crafted Defendor, starring Woody Harrelson as a bumbling vigilante in a makeshift superhero costume who heads out into the night with only a truncheon—just like the title character played by Aaron Johnson in Kick-Ass. Sadly, despite a winning performance from Harrelson, and a promising sale to an American distributor, Defendor died at the box office. It was, in the end, more  tender character drama than action movie, and that’s always a tough sell.

Kick-Ass, however, is one of those rare meta movies that works like a self-fulfilling prophecy of pop culture. It a tale of an absurdly amateurish superhero achieving unlikely celebrity. And in that sense, despite the adult-rated violence, it’s reminiscent of Ghostbusters. The story contains the pop phenomenon that will become the movie’s own blockbuster success. And although it feeds on all the tropes of comic book adventure, Kick-Ass also comments on them with a dark, subversive wit.

It’s hero, Dave Lizewski (Johnson) is the classic high school nerd, pining for a cute girl who thinks he’s gay, an assumption he’s willing to encourage just to keep her around. Meanwhile, he achieves instant notoriety as his half-baked alter-ego, Kick-Ass, when his shambling heroics in a parking lot brawl are immortalized on YouTube. The story has the token framework of a teen romantic comedy. But this sweet fable is wonderfully upstaged by the more hard-core superheroes that Kick-Ass encounters. Namely Hit Girl (Chloe Moretz), the 11-year-old daughter of an insane ex-cop whose alter-ego is a Batman clone called Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage). Cage is at his oddball best as this avuncular psycho who street-proofs his kid by strapping a bullet-proof vest on her and blasting her with rounds of live ammunition. There’s also a student super-villain, the crime lord’s spoiled son who suits up as Red Mist—he’s played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who will always be remembered as Superbad‘s ‘McLovin’.

Moretz may not be the protagonist, but she’s the movie’s revelation. It may seem perverse to watch an 11-year-old take gleeful delight in stabbing, slashing, and shooting her way through a gang of drug dealers—as if her idea of a play date was an all-out bloodbath. But the martial artistry of her stunts is dazzling. And her character is endowed with such an infectious innocence that there’s something weirdly uplifting about it all. It seems like a small miracle, that a movie so violent and dark can, in the end, feel lighter than air.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Since seeing this movie several weeks ago, I’ve devoured all three books of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, and  my memory of the film  has become somewhat confused with the source. What I can say, briefly, is that the film does a superb job of capturing both the main characters and the Byzantine complexity of Larsson’s narrative, even while compressing and conflating plot points. There are some episodes of brutal and searing violence, but the movie is largely a mystery. Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a  journalist who has just been disgraced in a high-profile libel case, is hired by a member of the Vanger family, a wealthy clan of industrialists, to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of  Harriet Vanger, who vanished from the family’s island home without a trace. To help him, Blomkvist hires Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a tattooed punked-out computer hacker with almost supernatural intelligence and the instincts of a ruthless predator. Like Kick-Ass, this is another movie that traffics in a thrilling role reversal, by letting the putative hero, who is mild-mannered and warm-blooded, surrender the spotlight to a scarred and twisted female avenger with ice in her veins.

Meanwhile, however, there’s a massive plot to get through. It’s no small feat to make the minutiae of archival detective work compelling, as our detectives pour through photographs, Internet files and dusty records, even with the office romance that inevitably ensues. But Danish director Niels Arden Oplev holds our attention by borrowing a device from Michelangelo Antonioni’s New Wave classic, Blow-Up (which happens to be one of my favorite films)—the intrigue keeps circling back to an old photograph of Harriet Vanger that is repeatedly enlarged and re-examined, a photo in which she is being watch by a man in a crowd. The photo’s accidental composition becomes the key to the puzzle, and the director creates graphic suspense from the sheer cadence of pixels.

Without giving anything away here, we can say that investigation soon uncovers a grotesque litany of serial murder, and that’s as far as we’ll go. As the bodies pile up, Dragon Tattoo acquires the conventional rhythms of a serial killer movie, and oddly enough, as the action accelerates, the tension lags. But what makes this serial killer movie unique is the mesmerizing performance by Rapace. Usually a character this twisted would be the villain, not the heroine. There’s also something cooly Scandanavian and deadpan about the inappropriate sexual chemistry between the middle-aged journalist and his femme fatale colleague—which is by no means as creepy as it sounds, in case you think I’m overly identifying. And the movie’s stark locations are as exotic as the characters. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the most successful Swedish movie in history. It’s a long way from the cinema of Ingmar Bergman—it doesn’t even come close. But it does take place on an island, after all, and in its lonely landscape you can still see glimmers of Ingmar’s ghost.

Nutty actor meets ideal director

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 8:10 AM - 1 Comment

On the set of Bad Lieutenant in New Orleans, director Werner Herzog was alarmed to see Nicolas Cage snorting what looked like cocaine. In the movie, inspired by Abel Ferrara’s cult classic, Cage inherits the Harvey Keitel role as a drug-addicted cop. It was only the second day of shooting, and Cage was trying to get into character. “He sniffs from a vial of white powder,” Herzog recalled during a recent interview, “and the moment it’s up his nose, he’s so scarily different I walk up to him and say, ‘Nicolas, what is that you snorted?’ ” As the actor explained in a separate interview, “I couldn’t answer the question because it would have broken all the prep I’d been doing. I had this little vial of something really benign. I would snort that and try to pretend I was getting high so I could play the scene. So I told Werner, ‘It’s coke.’ Just to not break that.”

This is what happens when the nuttiest Hollywood star this side of Joaquin Phoenix joins forces with a European director who has a reputation for being a madman. Let’s compare their mythologies.

Insanity has been good to Nicolas Cage. He’s done his finest work playing obsessed, manic and deranged individuals—the mad lovers in Moonstruck and Wild at Heart, the delirious alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas, the demented twin screenwriters in Adaptation. But Cage has also learned to compress his trademark intensity into one hack role after another, with paycheque performances in formula thrillers, from Gone in 60 Seconds to National Treasure. Then again, the man has some crazy bills to pay. Hit with US$6.6 million in unpaid taxes, he saw his two New Orleans mansions auctioned off last week after foreclosures. And his Michael Jackson-like extravagance is legendary. Cage’s purchases over the years include two castles, a dozen mansions, two yachts, a jet, some 50 cars (including a half-million-dollar Lamborghini), a pet octopus, two albino king cobras—and a dinosaur skull that he bought for US$276,000, outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio.

Herzog is notorious for a different kind of excess. When shooting Fitzcarraldo (1982)—starring Klaus Kinski as an obsessed colonist who built an opera house in the Peruvian jungle—the director risked life and limb to haul a 350-tonne working steamship over a small mountain in the Amazon. And in making Rescue Dawn (2006), this “method” director shed 35 lb. to show solidarity with his star, Christian Bale, who lost 65 lb. to play an emaciated prisoner of war. As a director who likes to shoot drama with documentary realism, no wonder Herzog thought his star was snorting real cocaine on the set of Bad Lieutenant. After all, Cage famously ate real cockroaches for his role in Vampire’s Kiss (1988).

But the 45-year-old actor insists he was totally sober on the set, and drew on his experiences with drugs 25 years ago. “I was shocked Werner didn’t know the process by which a film actor uses the imagination,” he says. “It was an impressionist performance, in that I had to look at this landscape of something that happened so long ago and try to recall what that might have been. Werner was saying, ‘Let’s do the bliss of evil.’ But I wasn’t trying to glamorize drugs in any way. I wanted to show the effect they had, the ticks and facial expressions. They can really contort the face.” And the voice. As Cage’s character gets more drug-addled, his voice gets weirdly pinched, until he starts to sound like Jimmy Stewart on helium.

Let off the leash in this darkly comic film noir, Cage delivers one of his wildest performances in ages, as a homicide cop with a lucky crack pipe who hallucinates iguanas while trying to solve a mass murder. In Herzog he has an eager accomplice, a director fascinated with men who lose their minds in jungles real or imagined. “Sometimes I would nudge him to the brink,” says Herzog. “But I didn’t have to push him. When he sees me next to the camera, he knows he can go to the outer limits. He can turn the pig loose.”

Although Bad Lieutenant was touted as a remake, it’s a different script. And while Cage isn’t as nasty as Keitel, he has some great gonzo moments—like when he snatches an oxygen tube from a wealthy matron in a wheelchair, sticks a .44 Magnum in her face, and says, “You’re the reason this country’s going down the drain.” But compared to the protagonist of Herzog’s next film, he’s a pussycat. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done is the true story of an actor in a Greek tragedy who becomes consumed by his role and kills his mother. Now that’s method acting.

Getting off the grid

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 12:37 PM - 0 Comments

Los Viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys)

By now, George and Oprah and the rest of the Hollywood circus have left town, and with them the horde of U.S. media junketeers. They gave us a good ride, showing up with a glut of stellar films to promote. But even the best of them—from Up in the Air to the Road—only took us deeper into the psychosis of our own culture. And they kept people like me so busy that there was no time to get off the grid and explore the wilder extremes of world cinema that TIFF makes available. But finally I’ve had a chance to do that. My journey into wild began with two films by Werner Herzog: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. These are urban American crime stories, and the former features a Hollywood star, Nicolas Cage. But no matter where Herzog shoots—the Amazon, Alaska, Antarctica or Los Angeles, he seems to find the jungle, and madmen who are drawn into it. My Son, My Son and Bad Lieutenant are both murder stories about characters going insane, and they form a good- cop/bad-cop matched set. It’s the murderer who goes crazy in My Son, My Son, which is based on a true story of matricide in Los Angeles by a actor who becomes consumed with playing Oedipus on stage; in Bad Lieutenant, it’s the cop, a crack-smoking maniac played by Cage. Despite the urban settings, in both movies Herzog finds room for a menagerie of exotic animals: fish, snakes, flamingos, ostriches, iguanas, alligators. It’s as if he travels with the jungle in his carry-on. I had the extraordinary pleasure of interviewing the German filmmaker on two separate occasions in the past couple of days. I’ll be writing more about that, and his movies. later. But I feel it’s more urgent to tell you about the most recent film I’ve seen, which may be my favorite of the festival so far—an amazing first feature from the wilds of Colombia called Los Viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys). Continue…

Newsmakers: Moving out

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

(Smirn)off the edge
Did you hear the one about the Russian guy who downed three bottles of vodka, jumped off his fifth-floor balcony, and somehow survived with only minor cuts and bruises? His horrified wife was so furious—berating him while she called an ambulance—that he jumped again. Amazingly, Alexei Roskov is still around to tell his story: “When I came back up and I heard my wife screaming angrily at me, I thought it was best if I left the room again—out of the window.”

Cage’s castle
Looking for extra cash in these tough economic times? Actor Nicolas Cage has the answer: sell your castle. The 45-year-old star of Leaving Las Vegas is now leaving Bavaria, selling the 28-room, 16th-century property he purchased two years ago. “Due to the difficult economic situation, unfortunately, I was no longer able to keep it,” he told a German magazine. No word yet on how many British politicians attended the open house. Continue…

Newsmakers: A is for Atlas

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

Most parents opt for baby names that won’t get their kids teased off the playground, which explains why Ava tops the girls’ list in Canada, while Ethan is No. 1 for boys, according to Today’s Parent. Alas, celebs saddle their offspring with the kind of monikers—Reign Beau or Tu, who has the last name Morrow—that invite no end of mirth and torment.

THE ANCIENTS

Atlas: Anne Heche & James Tupper
Hermès: Actor Kelly Rutherford & Daniel Giersch
Gaia: Emma Thompson & Greg Wise
Homer: Anne Heche & James Tupper
Moses: Gwyneth Paltrow & Chris Martin
Ptolemy: Gretchen Mol & Tod Williams
Sophocles: Actor Jemaine Clement & Miranda Manasiadis

OTHER CELEBS

Dezi: Actor Jaime Pressly & Eric Calvo
Jagger: Soleil Moon Frye & Jason Goldberg
Kal-el: Nicolas Cage & Alice Kim
Tennyson: Russell Crowe & Danielle Spencer
Harlow: Nicole Richie & Joel Madden

ROYALTY

God’Iss Love: Singer Lil’ Mo & Al Stone
Jermajesty: Jermaine Jackson & Alejandra Oaziaza
Marquise: 50 Cent & Shaniqua Tompkins
Prince Michael II: Michael Jackson & surrogate mom

NATURE

Bluebell Madonna: Geri Halliwell
Daisy Boo: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Daisy True: Meg Ryan
Nakoa-Wolf: Lisa Bonet & Jason Momoa
Petal Blossom Rainbow: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Poppy Honey: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Puma: Erykah Badu & The D.O.C.
River: Actor Keri Russell & Shane Deary

GEOGRAPHY

Alabama: Drummer Travis Barker & Shanna Moakler
Bronx Mowgli: Ashlee Simpson & Pete Wentz
Heaven: Actor Brooke Burke & David Charvet
Java: Actor Josh & Yessica Holloway
Kingston: Gwen Stefani & Gavin Rossdale
Mars: Singer Erykah Badu & Jay Electronica
Shiloh: Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt
Sierra Sky: Brooke Burke & Garth Fisher

ASSORTED OBJECTS

Banjo: Actor Rachel Griffiths & Andrew Taylor
Denim and Diesel: Singer Toni Braxton & Keri Lewis
Loden: Actor Peter & Kelly Reckell
Peanut: Actor Ingo Rademacher & Ehiku

JOBS

Deacon: Reese Witherspoon & Ryan Phillippe
Moxie CrimeFighter: Magician Penn Jillette & Emily Zolten
Poet: Actor Soleil Moon Frye & Jason Goldberg
Pilot Inspektor: Actor Jason Lee & Beth Riesgraf
Ryder: Kate Hudson & Chris Robinson

These fiscally prudent celebs are killing us!

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, April 23, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 4 Comments

We knew this recession thing was bad, but we didn’t know how bad until news came in from the forests of Bavaria that Nicolas Cage had been forced for financial reasons to sell his 28-room German castle, Neidstein. Et tu, economy?

While it’s true that Cage still owns several other homes and could, in a pinch, build a spacious bungalow from remaindered DVDs of Bangkok Dangerous, the fact remains that this big-time celebrity is now in possession of only one (1) ornate castle—Midford, an 18th-century fortress in England.

This is tragic news and I’m sure you’re tempted to feel sorry for Cage. We all know what it feels like to be down to our last castle.

Continue…