I went to see Let Me In with low expectations. Like so many, I had seen and been awed by the original Swedish version, Let the Right One In (directed by Tomas Alfredson), whose quiet pacing and lonely stretches of relative silence only made the horror more horrible when it came. An American version, surely, would speed up the pace and overload the naturalistic violence with CGI-generated hyper-energy. On the way to the theater I asked Lisa about this. “I don’t know,” she said, “give it a chance.” “But I don’t want to give it a chance. I want to […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Oct 14, 2010Kick-Ass is Matthew Vaughn’s canny mainstream imagining of John Romita and Mark Millar’s Marvel Comic about a bunch of psychologically damaged homemade superheroes on self-empowerment rampage. Yes, I felt weird watching 11-year-old Chloe Moretz (she’s 13 now) take part in such violent shootouts. I also queasily admired Vaughn’s seemingly casual but ultimately quite calculated envelope-pushing. There’s some brutish B-movie splatter and the C-word too, but this is not transgressive filmmaking. (Indeed, while watching Kick-Ass I kept wishing I was watching the Takeshi Miike version.) Kinka Usher’s Mystery Men, adapted from Bob Burden’s comic, worked a similar concept over ten years […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2010