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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2975 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was reading through some of The Dreaded Jim's archives, and I saw that he recommended a film called Kick-Ass. So I took a look, and... where has this movie been all my life?

Everything is great. The writing is great. The action is great. The music is great. This is the best Hollywood action movie I have seen since The Matrix.

The film is bold and unapologetic, working hard to earn its R rating; characters get shot, stabbed, crushed, and burned. The dialogue pulls no punches, mixing wit and profanity without ever coming across as overly edgy or performative.

My new waifu, Hit-Girl, is easily the best character in the movie; watching her mow down a hallway full of mooks to the tune of "Bad Reputation" is a delight. And that's after she infiltrates the bad guy's base by dressing up like a loli schoolgirl; I had no idea Americans could be so cultured!

The only problem is that the MC, Kick-Ass, is not nearly as awesome as Hit-Girl and Big Daddy, but that's alright; he can be the Ishmael to the latter's Ahab. And, unlike so many spineless MCs, he continually grows as a character; by the end of the film, he has gradudated from using a "gay-looking taser", as Hit-Girl rightly calls it, to dual wielding miniguns while flying on a jetpack.

I just don't understand why Roger Ebert didn't like it.

Roger Ebert had bad opinions about movies. He thought Fight Club was terrible.

I put more stock in Ebert's opinions than I do to the modal critic, but when he got it wrong, he could really get it wrong. He gave Blue Velvet one star pretty much solely because he objected to Isabella Rosselini appearing nude in it for what he considered ignoble aesthetic ends.

As much as I love Fight Club, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge that it has significant pacing problems and the first half is much stronger than the second.

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