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Kick-Ass has been getting a lot of marketing and promotion or maybe I’m just in their target market. I missed the screening and panel for Kick-Ass at South By Southwest but luckily Lionsgate presented another one at WonderCon. All of the stars, Nicolas Cage (Big Daddy), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Red Mist), Clark Duke (Marty), Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Chloe Moretz (Hit-Girl) were in attendance to talk about the movie and answer some questions from the audience. Kick-Ass is about a regular kid with no real problems or challenges in his life who one day decides to become a superhero even though he has no super powers or training at all. It looks hilarious and violent…what more can you ask for?
So why Kick-Ass? When there are so many comic books and graphic novels out there, why did they choose a relatively new story to make a movie? Screenwriter, Jane Goldman, said that it takes the whole idea of the superhero genre from a different angle. Most of the other comics are old so all of the characters have been around for ages. All of the characters from Kick-Ass are brand new and quite groundbreaking. The idea of being a regular kid and wanting to become a costumed super hero resonates in a lot of people. Co-producer, John Romita Jr., said that Mark Miller claims that Kick-Ass is exactly what he wanted to do. He worked out, took martial arts, and planned to buy a costume.
When asked why he chose this movie, Nicolas Cage said that he tries to find scripts that give him a challenge, something he can’t really do in real life. When he saw that he would be shooting a twelve year-old girl in the chest, it made him uncomfortable…so he had to do it. He also likes to stay relevant to the current generation so seeing this script and knowing it would be casted by mostly younger people and target the younger market, he wanted to get in on it.
The most controversial part of this movie will inevitably be Hit-Girl played by Chloe Moretz. In the movie, she’s a bad ass twelve year-old girl who’s violent and vulgar. Jane Goldman said that she really saw Hit-Girl as a strong female character. It’s not very often when you can get a strong female character that isn’t a sex symbol or looked at in a sexist way. Chloe, on the other hand seems like your typical innocent girl. She almost spit out the water she was drinking when a scene of hers played on the big screen where she mentioned a certain male body part. An audience member asked her what her parents thought of the role and she answered that her mother read the script before she did and told her to read it and let her know what she thought. She thought it was an awesome role and the rest was herstory.
I didn’t get to go to the WonderCon screening of the film either, but I will be attending a screening tonight and can’t wait. We’ll have a full review for you guys tomorrow!
Kick-Ass starts kicking some ass on April 16, 2010.
WonderCon is one of the country’s best comics conventions featuring guests and events for comics, movies, video games, and other popular media. This year, WonderCon had presentations by such Hollywood studios as Disney, Warner Bros., Sony, and Lionsgate.Visit WonderCon’s Official Website
The Losers
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Splice
Inception
Disney started their showcase with a first look at Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time starring Jake Gyllenhaal, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and directed by Mike Newell…all three were in attendance to talk about the movie. Prince of Persia is based on the popular video game of the same name. It follows the adventures of a prince who stumbles upon a mythical object which can affect time itself. He teams up with the princess of his rivals to stop a sandstorm which would end of the world. From what they showed and said, it’s definitely an action-packed summer blockbuster but Jerry kept highlighting the points that it would have lots of comedy and romance. Pretty much, it’s trying to have mass appeal and target the largest market possible. It was filmed in Morocco where it was said to be over a hundred degrees every day. Additionally, they sent teams around the world to take authentic pictures and bring back the images to build unique sets. But even with that backdrop, a lot of the movie will be computer generated. The footage they showed looked very common and bland. Granted, it’s still early and the scenes weren’t polished up yet. However, the time travel affects with the sand looked awesome as well as the scenes with snakes…they did some really cool things there. It’s reminiscent of the director, Mike Newell’s work in Harry Potter, very magical. You can expect a lot of free running/parkour type stuff from Jake who literally runs up walls.
Jerry Bruckheimer stayed in his seat as the panels changed because he was presenting his 2nd upcoming film with Disney, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice starring Nicolas Cage and Jay Baruchel and is directed by Jon Turteltaub. Set in modern-day, a college student in New York City finds himself in a magical battle between good and evil. He is destined to become a great and powerful sorcerer trained by an old wizard by the name of Balthazar. On the plot, Jon Turteltaub commented on how fundamental this plot is to Disney and that it originated from a segment in Fantasia. He comically said that obviously they’re not doing a cartoon for two hours of a mop (even though the iconic sequence of the mop is in the film). To me, the footage looked amazing. This is going to be a homerun for Disney and regain them some lost fans while gaining them a lot of new ones from the younger generation who has no idea what Fantasia is and would definitely not sit through it today. You can tell it’s still geared towards kids, but it looks really funny and entertaining…kind of a Harry Potter like feel. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice looks at magic a different way than Harry Potter though. Turteltaub said he wanted to create a very realistic and modern weird feeling as if you were in this world with the characters on the screen and then the magic would enter all of our lives.
Finally, Disney’s last film showcased was a continuation of a little known franchise from Disney Pixar called Toy Story 3. The third film in this series follows the characters as they are abandoned in a day care while their owner, Andy, goes away to college. At first, to all of the toys except Woody, it looks like a paradise but kids love new toys…The director, Lee Unkrich, said that it took two days in a cabin to come up with the story but over two and half years of storyboarding and fine tuning. He felt the pressure of taking this huge franchise and creating a third feature length film every day of the process of making it but it doesn’t look like he failed…every time a new character was shown to the audience, there was a collective “awww.” There’s no doubt in my mind that this film will resonate with the new generation of kids and that the old fans will flock back to see the new instalment. When an audience member asked Jeff Garlin about improvising in the movie he said that when the script is good, he doesn’t like to improvise. He likes to improvise in order to help a movie out but with Wall-E and Toy Story 3, he felt that the scripts were great so that should give you an idea of how good this one is going to be.
