Little Chunks of Awesome

#1 Kick-Ass

After a kind of aborted start to my Literally Geeking career following my Rare Exports post back before Christmas, this is me back with the first of two regular columns I'm hoping to debut this week.

I'll talk more about the second later (hopefully on Friday!), but right now it seems more pertinent to introduce 'Little Chunks of Awesome'. The goal of LCA (like my nifty little acronym? Just thought of that right there. That's the kind of mad improvisation skills you're going to get from my writing), is to take those little moments in films or from TV shows, tiny minutes long chunks, that within them distil what it was that made that film or show so great from my point of view. In future I may even tackle the opposite and look at moments that really offer, in microcosm, reasons why I see the films or shows as a failure.

Now originally, I had planned for the first instalment of this feature to look at Louis CK's amazing sitcom 'Louie' but, unfortunately, I was unable to pick just one moment of that show that I wanted to feature – largely because 'Duckling' was too obvious a choice and has already been talked about to death by columnists on other sites.

However, as luck would have it, this stopped being a problem when during some idle channel surfing on Friday afternoon I happened across an airing of Kick-Ass, Matthew Vaughn's 2010 superhero action-comedy.

It was the first time I had watched the film properly since I saw it in the cinema on release and, as much as I enjoyed it first time out, I think I got far more out of it this time round. However, the one thing that worried me as I watched was: will the strobe light rescue sequence hold-up?

The first time I saw the movie, that was the bit that really stood out for me. It was just a hugely impressive piece of cinema and, rendered on the big screen, the tension of it was almost unbearable – but, like, in the best way imaginable.

So, on TV, was it as good as I remembered?

No.

It was much better.

If there has been a more impressive sequence in any movie in the past few years, I don't know what it was.

Everything about this was spot on. The first person-shooter aspect at the start. The darkness. The strobe light. The fire. Nicolas Cage's anguished screams. John Murphy's score. And the editing, my God, the editing.

The sequence is knitted together so perfectly that you actually begin to fear for the villians and forget that they are up against a 10-year-old girl. It's like watching a horror movie where you're actively rooting for the monster, such is the atmospheric intensity of the whole thing.

It is the stand-out sequence in a movie which is not short on great sequences, in that it sells the action, but it also perfectly sells the emotional stakes and gives a real sense of pathos to an incredibly weird, and yet rather sweet, father-daughter relationship that has been built up throughout the movie by Cage and Chloe Grace Moretz.

More than anything though, it was at that point of the movie where I finally realised that Vaughn really had the chops in the director's chair. Layer Cake and Stardust had been OK, but nothing about them – beyond Daniel Craig's breakthrough performance in the former – had really stood out. However, you come out of Kick-Ass desperate to see what Vaughn would turn his hand to next.

Just a pity that turned out to be the underwhelming X-Men: First Class.

Anyway, I hope to be back on Friday with the first edition of Internet Movie Douchebag so, until then, try not to get yourself killed. I kind of like you.

Rare Exports and the Spirit of Christmas (Movies)

I would openly admit that over the last few years, Christmas has started to mean a little less to me than it did. It's maybe just the nadir of my mid-twenties as I get to the point that I've seen a lot of them now, it could just be that this time of year doesn't play well with cynicism. I don't know. It's just where I'm at right now. But despite this, the one thing that I do love about Christmas is the movies.

I doubt this is surprising: I mean, I'm writing this article for a film and TV blog called Literally Geeking. If that doesn't suggest a certain amount of nerdiness about the medium of film then what would? But even then, when you look at the kind of shows and movies that I would normally watch over the course of the year, there's not a exactly a strong streak of sentimentality through them – and that's something you normally can't move for in Christmas movies.

Even Die Hard is essentially a story about an estranged father trying to spend the holiday with his family. John McClane can shoot all the terrorists and walk through all the broken glass he wants, but the giant teddy bear in the back of his limo still marks him as a soppy bastard. Ho Ho Ho he just wants his kids back.

This is one of the two most common features of Christmas movies: family and learning. One of the two always has to happen – a family (whether it be blood relations or just a group of friends) has to come together; or someone needs to learn about the true meaning of Christmas. All of the classic holiday films share at least one of these elements: It's A Wonderful Life; Miracle on 34th Street; Home Alone; The Grinch. Many of them have both.

The weird thing is, you can't even put this pattern down to typical Hollywood syrup. The clear start point for it all was that bleak bastard himself Charles Dickens. If Ebenezer Scrooge hadn't seen the light all the way back in the 1843 then who knows what kind of entertainment we'd end up turning to on these dark December nights.

Anyway, this has been a long, roundabout kind of way to get to the point I particularly wanted to make: Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale may well be my new favourite Christmas movie.

For those of you who haven't had a chance to see it, the film tells the story of a young boy Pietari whose Christmas takes a strange turn when excavations on a nearby mountain turn up a strange discovery.

Although you'd be hard pressed to call the film traditional in any way, shape or form due to it's unrelentingly dark sense of humour and it's copious amount of full frontal male nudity, it shares the same warm, beating heart as all the greats of the form.

The success of the film comes from the fact that despite all the batshit crazy shenanigans and blood-soaked imagery, the really truly important thing going on here is the relationship between Pietari and his father and how, through the events of the film they grow that much closer and come to appreciate each other all the more. What's more, you really come to route for Pietari in his quest to make everyone understand what they have gotten themselves in for.

I'll stop there so that I won't spoil it any more that I need to, but if you want to watch something a little different this Christmas, this one comes highly recommended.

An awesome addition to the pantheon of great, sentimental, Christmas movies.

Check out the trailer below: