2 IM, 1 KA and 1 SI

4 movies I've wanted to watch once the exam was over. 2 have the same initials in their title.


My ranking:

1. Shutter Island
2. Ip Man 2
3. Iron Man 2
4. Kick Ass


Here's why.


Shutter island was refreshing!

It was clever, unexpected, experimental and truly disturbing. It made use of some very new techniques to portray the perspective of Leonardo's character and I was blown away. Horror movies don't terrify me as much if I know what techniques the director is using and have seen it used before. This movie used such new methods that made the plot absolutely unexpected and thus terrifying.


Ip Man 2 lived up to the oomph of first.

After studying so much about cross cultural psychology (and colonialisation), I found this movie a fine representation of the tension between the East and the West. Western masculinity is about power and brute force. Eastern masculinity is more about self restraint and humility. And the 2 schools of thought went head to head in the ring. Fantastic commentary of the larger issues!


Iron Man 2

It was good, even though I put it at number 3. A lot of scenes in the trailers were not shown in the movie, which made me feel one spoon short of a full meal. But more than that, I enjoyed the fight scenes that Scarlett Johansson was in more than any of the Iron Man fighting scenes. So yeah, I enjoyed this movie, but that was it.


Kick Ass was a disappointment.

This might have been my fault, and I'll call it the Harry Potter Effect. Basically, when a book (or a comic) is made into a movie, anyone who has read the book will have expectations that will never be fulfilled by the movie. It was a fantastic premise, but the focus on sex and violence meant that plenty of character development was lost. The girlfriend, the 2 friends, the father, Red Mist, The drug lord, Hit Girl and Big Daddy, in fact all the characters other than Kick Ass, were flat characters. There was no development in any of their characters from the start till the end of the movie. Absurdity is good, but for it to be effective there has to be a firm grounding in reality. Think Watchmen.


My goodness am I worried about "Y: The Last Man", my favourite comic book coming out as a movie who's release is pushed back to next year (though I'd rather wait 10 years and it comes out like a LOTR than it come out next year like kick ass).


Anyway, if one thing rocked about Kick Ass, it was Hit Girl.

So Kick Ass didn't Kick Ass. Now that, is good news for the upcoming Amber Mander 3.