The Invisible Counterpoint

Kick-Ass 2 When Roger Ebert reviewed the original Kick - Ass , he wasn't primarily taken aback by any one single incident—Hit Girl's being shot, with the audience having to take a moment to remind themselves about her bullet-proof vest, for instance—but by the fact that people behind the movie were so comfortable exploring a whole terrain of something which had pretty much taken him off stride upon first occurrence. He couldn't believe that a movie primarily involving kids could be so comfortable with people dying, being butchered, all over the place, coldly, bloodily, humiliatingly, with this not counting it as beyond fun and games. "This isn't comic violence," he writes, "These men, and many others in the film, really are stone-cold dead. And the 11-year-old apparently experiences no emotions about this. Many children would be, I dunno, affected somehow, don't you think, after killing eight or 12 men who were trying to kill her?" ...

Oblivion How many films exist where there are two worlds a protagonist will exist in—the first, ostensibly superior, almost always cleaner, but really corrupt, and the second, more raw – if not also dingier – but really the last remaining refuge of humane community? Lots and lots, of course, and Oblivion is another, and belongs with probably the whole host of those which don’t really convince that the hero doesn’t actually forego the more appealing world. The two worlds in this film are the first one, where he’s essentially living in a Tony Stark pad, with his very pretty Pepper, who, we note – just as we note with Pepper – comes close-enough to being his age-equivalent. Good for the Tom Cruise in this world, for conquering his fear of intimacy of older women for the pleasure in mature company! He has a hankering for old ways of the past, which makes him not so much sentimental as cherishing, but which could look to become obsessive: witness his whole lake-cabin thing. And ...