Boring Ass 2 - The Return of Captain Tedium

It may be that I have mis-judged Amanda Pander. Yes, it's true! I may be wrong in my assessment of her as a mealy-mouthed excuse-making jellyfish pwoggie access-blogger. Instead, it's entirely possible that Ms. Pander is really not the cynical pandering demotard asshat I've believed her to be - but rather a delusional true-believing Obot somewhat on the order of the do-nothing know-nothing moron posting as Extweeeeeeeme Wibberal.

Just as Amanda can't understand that her cherished, holy Democratic Party wasn't created for her and really really doesn't give a shit about her - so it seems that Ms. Pander can't understand that comic book movies like Kick Ass aren't made for her and their corporate makers really-truly-honestly don't give a shit about her.

Let me put it this way. If you follow the trail of slime studio execs leave behind them until you actually corner one - and then feed him enough blow to stun a rhino - eventually he'll admit to you that the main reasons he greenlights comic book movies are:

1: They have a valuable built-in target audience.

and

b: They're cheap to produce.

What I mean about the first point is that, sure, you could produce Barnaby Rudge because it has a built in target audience of Dicken's fans - but that's nothing compared to the Clearasil covered masses of sexually confused adolescent boys who have enough disposable income to buy and entire Pacific island chain. The fact that any hack writer can chop a comic book's simon-simple plot into the simulacrum of a screenplay, and that any hack director can pull down a decent salary while letting the CGI crew do the lion's share of the directing for him, only makes the aforementioned coke-riddled studio exec's decision easier.

In short, comic book movies are marketed to fanboys for profit. Period. End-Of-Story. -30- Over-and-out. Full-Fucking-Stop.

Nobody is trying to slip in subversively women-empowering characters, as Amanda Panda seems to think:

“Kick Ass” is a movie about Hit Girl. What the filmmakers did was a classic bait and switch. They brought forth certain conventions of movies to lure you into thinking you’re watching one kind of movie (about a young man’s coming of age), and instead they gave you an entirely different story. That Hit Girl steals the show is the point.

This is about as absurd as saying that the Obama administrations recent health insurance company enrichment legislation is a way to secretly enact single-payer. It's beyond absurd and into a realm of fantasy seldom visited by the non-chemically enhanced.

Hit Girl is a fetish character - the sort of pre-pubescent school-girl-with-a-big-gun sex object that's been a mainstay of Japanese Anime and Manga (and to a certain extent European exploitation comics) since the early '60s. One of the reasons why Kick Ass didn't do very well on it's opening weekend is that this character isn't even very well known, much less accepted, among American fanboy audiences. Fanboys expect homoerotic undertones to their comic book movies, not the sort of guilt-free crypto-pedophilia peddled by characters like Hit Girl.

This is why I'm beginning to suspect that Amanda isn't just a cynical manipulator of lackwitted on-line pwoggies besotted by O-brand hopium, but an actual hopium smoker herself!

It appears to me that Amanda fundamentally doesn't understand marketing, the profit motive, basic human greed, and a lot basic human motivations. In Amanda's pwogwessive fantasy world the Democratic Party is the hard working champion of the vital middle class and not, as is fairly obvious, corporate-owned warmongering exploiters of middle class ignorance and apathy. Similarly, for Ms Pander, comic book movies subversively hide strong female characters within their garishly simple plots and are not, as again is abundantly clear, rather ham-handedly made fetish product marketed to sexually stunted over-stimulated pud-pullers.

But then again, as they say, there's no accounting for taste.