KICK-ASS is the new movie that for the first time since DEFENDOR, MIRAGEMAN, SPECIAL and the first part of SPIDERMAN where he wears the pajamas asks the question “What would happen if a comic book nerd dressed up as a super hero and tried to fight crime?” The answer is partly the same as DEFENDOR’s (he’ll get beat up badly, except when he has clubs) but partly different (a little girl will fly around spinning knives and doing kung fu, murdering dozens of people and give him a jetpack and [SPOILERS for KICK-ASS and DEATH WISH 3] he’ll kill a mob boss DEATH WISH 3 style).
Either the movie is confused or just I am, because I really thought this was gonna be about what would happen if people tried to be super heroes in the real world. I thought this mainly because the lead nerd (who buys a mask and scuba suit and comes up with the dumb name Kick-Ass for himself) narrates through the entire movie and explains explicitly and in detail that that is in fact exactly what the story is about. (read the rest of this shit…)
Sorry to be self-indulgent here but I gotta brag about this review I got from The Independent, which is from what I hear an actual newspaper.
I have a hunch the bigger movie websights are about to catch up with us DTV action scholars re: the films of Isaac Florentine. Over there at Actionfest in North Carolina they gave best picture to MERANTAU (which recently got a 
In honor of the historic first ever ACTIONFEST going on right now in Asheville, North Carolina, I thought I should watch a Chuck Norris picture. Mr. Norris is the recipient of the Actionfest Lifetime Achievement Award (and coincidentally brother of Actionfest co-founder Aaron Norris). For their retrospective they’re showing CODE OF SILENCE (Seagalogy p. 13-14) and BRADDOCK: MISSING IN ACTION III. Since I’d already seen CODE and didn’t have time to catch up with MIA 1-2 yet I followed your recommendations and went with INVASION U.S.A. I think the deciding factor was that Drew Barnhardt told me it was “Norris’s 
THE BIG BOSS would be a good one to watch on Labor Day, because it’s a scathing indictment of corruption within the Chinese ice industry. About time somebody blew the lid off that shit. Cheng (Bruce M.F. Lee) gets a job loading big blocks of ice, which the workers don’t realize have bags of coke inside (even though they saw one of the bags when one of the blocks broke open. But this was a more naive time). The foremen are extra-abusive, slapping people around and shit. To be frankly honest I think these particular workers are a bunch of whiners who don’t seem to work very hard, but they’re right to stand up for their rights when a co-worker gets hit or goes missing.
MARLOWE is a 1969 adaptation of the Raymond Chandler story “The Little Sister” that is 
I didn’t think this was a big deal and didn’t want to say much about it, but I keep getting emails and comments making sure I know about this lawsuit against Chief Seagal. So, fair enough. Alot of people seem to be interested in my thoughts so I will address the situation here.
A couple weeks ago the United States Congress finally squeaked through the Baby-Steps To Health Care Reform legislation, a bill that does several good things such as not allowing insurance companies to refuse coverage to people because of a pre-existing condition, giving tax credits to small businesses that provide health insurance for their employees, and letting kids in their twenties stay on their parents’ insurance a couple more years than before. Unfortunately, too many Democrats are in the pocket of the insurance companies and they were too insistent on bending over backwards to find every possible compromise that could conceivably tickle the fancy of a Republican (a year long torture session that netted them a grand total of zero Republican votes) so the reforms aren’t as strong as most people would like. 
Well, you guys know I’m not much of a TV watcher, but I have managed to keep up with JUSTIFIED, the FX show starring Timothy Olyphant as badass deputy marshall Raylan Givens, a character who originated in Elmore Leonard’s 
Remember around the time you first heard about Vin Diesel, you would read all this shit about how he wasn’t just some dumb musclehead, he was a multi-talented enigma, he directed a short that caught Steve Spielberg’s eye, blah blah blah? But then he just did a bunch of action and action-like movies, many of them not very good, turned down the sequels, never got his HANNIBAL movie off the ground, then eventually had to stoop to the Hulk-Hogan-in-MR.-NANNY route to get a hit, and everybody wrote him off?
