Tempus II from Philip Heron on Vimeo.

I really enjoyed Kick-Ass.  I had low expectations on talent or plot, mainly my interests focused on watching Nicolas Cage nonchalantly kill everyone in his path.  The movie delivered so much more.  My favorite scene is when Hit Girl (pictured) infiltrates the stronghold as a lost school girl.  I give this flick 2 thumbs up!

Last Saturday Justin and I had a great evening out with friends meeting up at the Denton Movie Tavern to see Iron Man 2.  Before getting into anything about the movie, I must take a moment to appreciate the Denton Movie Tavern.  The picture/sound perfectionist in me wishes they had a better quality projector setup, but that is trumped by the fact that you have leg room, get served food/drinks and Justin is content after having consumed the contents of his ‘tanker’.

So onto the movie!  When I first saw a trailer for the movie a few months back, I was giddy.  The release date snuck up on me though, so when our friends asked if we’d like to go to see the movie, I was in a rush to go back and review the trailer and refresh on what I remembered looking forward to.  Luckily, Justin helps in this ramping up process.  I was practically salivating after reading and watching one of the articles Gizmodo.com posted about the special effects (link).   I developed a number of expectations for the movie, but tried to keep myself in check.  Overall, I loved the movie.  There were some scenes where the CG was much more noticeable than others but that isn’t my biggest frustration with the movie.

I think they tried to put too many story lines in and didn’t expand too much on any of them. You had Pepper being the CEO, Whiplash/Ivan Vanko, the Tony Stark meltdown, the new element he needed, the government attempting to acquire the Iron Man weapon, the involvment of War Machine/Rhodes in fights not to mention his trying to keep Iron Man/Stark in check. Those are all the story lines I can think of off the top of my head…and I didn’t even get into the stuff with the Avengers/Shield. If they had chosen to put more into the Avengers/Shield, Whiplash/Ivan Vanko, and the involvment of War Machine/Rhodes/government, we would have had a more cohesive movie with better developed characters and plot.  (I’m a girl though, so I place more value on the character development.)  It is apparent that Stark and Rhodes have a great amount of respect for each other, but our understanding of that relationship is very superficial.  If the movie had expanded on this relationship, I think a byproduct would have been a little more insight on the governments intentions, desire and insistence for receiving the Iron Man weapon.  I would have liked to delve into more detail on the story of Ivan Vanko and how he became Whiplash.  Such as why he chose electrified whips and how he weaponized the Hammer suits in such a short time.  Lastly, I’m somewhat lost on the involvement of the Avengers/Shield.  I know they are working on a string of movies with other members of the Avengers…but how Shield is associated with this and Iron Man’s importance in this story line is not very clear to me.

Overall, I really enjoyed the movie.  With my diatribe above, it may not seem so, but it was worth my time and money to see it in the theatre.  Not to mention that if you stuck around until after the credits, you saw Thor’s hammer.  Needless to say, Justin was a little giddy.

Heidi and I went to see ’9′ with the Wallace’s.  I’m a fan of most anything Tim Burton, so I was excited to see his latest creation.  I was truly enjoying the movie all the way until the end where the ending sucked.   Overall the animation was fantastic and the premise was unique … but somehow it resulted in ghost creatures raining amoeba’s to create new life.  I was pretty lost at that point.  Other than that a post-apacolyptic tale with robots is always a win in my book.