The Last Movie I Saw

As may be apparent from past postings here, I'm a long time comics fan. Over the years, the only thing that has changed in that regard is that I outgrew the superhero genre some time ago, though I can still occasionally get a bit of a nostalgic kick from seeing some old favorite either in print or in a movie (Iron Man, for example). My tastes run more to the realistic, autobiographical graphic novels that have become fairly prevalent, and in the case of the more fantasy oriented subjects, I find myself more inclined to enjoy reading about them, as opposed to reading the comics themselves. Along those lines, in recent years there have been some really fine historical/analytical books published (e.g. Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones and Comic Book Nation by Bradford Wright), as well as Roy Thomas' great magazine Alter-Ego and the long running Comics Journal, all of which treat the comics with scholarly, if not academic, respect and erudition. This tendency to take the form seriously, especially with respect to superheroes, would have been almost unimaginable (for a number of reasons) when I started collecting the things almost forty years ago. One of the other notable changes is that the comics themselves have become, at least on occasion, more self-conscious and self-critical in their own right, starting at least by the time of Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight (though the movies made from each, I would argue, fell short of matching the original print versions in meeting their standard of scrutiny of the genre). The new movie Kick-Ass, directed by Matthew Vaughn is kind of in this same vein-- very "meta" in its approach to the whole notion of super-heroics, and rather interesting in the questions it poses about how young people especially relate to the form as they work out their own concepts of good and evil in the world. In that regard, the film makes for a great conversation starter, though in the end, I think it fails to really follow through with a fair examination of the issues it raises. Instead, it falls back onto the sort of "Bam!" "Pow!" "Zap!" histrionics that always marked the climax of old Batman TV episodes (which was self-conscious about itself in a way much different from something like Watchmen, which is to say it played up the parody angle). In the end, I found Kick-Ass fairly entertaining, but more for its lapses into over-the-top "let's nail the bad guy" than for any intelligent commentary on the genre, That's unfortunate, because I think that, if some producer could see beyond raw market research of what sells, it would be possible to combine the two to create something truly classic.