The best new release of the week is The Ghost Writer (Summit), which I review here for MSN, while the most enjoyable special release is a toss-up between the new DVD edition and the Blu-ray premiere of the original Roger Corman-produced Piranha, which I review on my blog here, and the box set Turner Classic Movies Spotlight: Errol Flynn Adventures (Warner). And there are more sets than I have time to cover as completely as they deserve: The First Films Of Akira Kurosawa (Eclipse Series 23) (Criterion), The Kim Novak Collection (Sony) and a massive Elvis 75th Anniversary DVD Collection (Warner) and more modest Elvis Blu-ray Collection (Warner). But given all that, the big release this week will surely be Kick-Ass (Lionsgate).

Chloë Grace Moretz takes aim at the comic book movie

Kick-Ass is a comic book movie with a killer premise: what if regular people in the real world became costume vigilantes like the superheroes in comic books? Based on the uber-violent comic by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., this film tosses a high school teenager (Aaron Johnson) into a crime-fighting culture he isn’t the least bit prepared for, and then pairs him up with an adolescent schoolgirl (Chloë Grace Moretz) who has been trained by a mentally unbalanced (yet absolutely loving) father (Nicolas Cage) into becoming a ferocious filling machine. Yeah, it’s completely f*****d up, and that’s what is both right and wrong with the film. Your appreciation will depend in how much you can appreciate it’s utter wrongness as a twisted virtue. Or how much you appreciate Nicolas Cage’s impression of Adam West’s Batman. Matthew Vaughn directs with plenty of brutal black humor, but he can’t quite follow the real-world blowback all the way down the inevitable spiral of doom. For all the collision between adolescent fantasy and material world reality, it’s just another kind of superhero fantasy, but with more blood and expletives along the way.

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