Last week, fans of "Kick-Ass" pointed out that with a $30 million budget it would be easier for the adolescent super-hero film to turn a profit than pricier comic-book movies. Now that it looks like "Kick-Ass" will top out at a mediocre $55 million in the United States, let's leave that whipped-up furor behind.
A $15 million movie flew in under the radar six weeks ago and has already made $59,492,000 domestically: "Diary of a Wimpy Kid." It's a movie with middle-school protagonists who actually act their age, not like would-be commandos. But it hasn't garnered attention equal to its impact.
"Wimpy Kid" is based, not on a graphic novel, but on Jeff Kinney's "novel with cartoons," the first in a series. Kinney's string of "Wimpy Kid" books contain distinctive deadpan narratives seemingly hand-written on ruled paper, interspersed with squiggly caricatures.
These best-sellers brought a core audience to the theater. But the movie has lasted this long (after a month and a half, it's still #12 at the box office) because it captured many of the books' qualities, including their visual invention and the young antihero's funny and upsetting combination of social ineptitude, misguided obsession and genuine outrage. He really is Larry David in short pants.
We spend too much time arguing about films like "Kick-Ass," which, no matter what you think of their other qualities, are calculated to stir debate before a single script page is written. As I've written before, to my mind "Kick-Ass" merely brings conventional comic-book tropes to extremes. I think "Wimpy Kid" does something more difficult: it brings a quirky, humane sensibility to a movie with tween and teen characters. Can you think of other contemporary youth movies that contain comparable qualities? Has anyone else seen both of these? Which do you like better?