They like to kick off the South by Southwest Film Festival with a kick-ass movie, so it’s fortunate that this year, someone actually made a movie called Kick-Ass. If ever a movie was designed for the SXSW crowd — mostly young, male, and slightly geeky — it was this, an action comedy based on a graphic novel, featuring superheroes, buckets of blood, and outrageously vulgar jokes. Imagine if Judd Apatow and Robert Rodriguez teamed up to make a Spider-Man movie.

Kick-Ass is about an ordinary teen named Dave (Aaron Johnson) who wonders why no one has ever tried to re-create themselves as a superhero. Bruce Wayne proved you don’t need supernatural powers, only ingenuity (and possibly a lot of money). Dave becomes the titular hero and soon encounters people who are taking the whole thing a lot more seriously than he is, including a father and daughter played by Nicolas Cage and the soon-to-be-infamous Chloe Moretz. (She played Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s little sister in 500 Days of Summer.) Christopher Mintz-Plasse — aka McLovin — is on hand, too.

The film, scheduled for wide release on April 16, was crowned the Next Big Thing in December, when it played at Harry Knowles’ Butt-Numb-A-Thon and beat everything — including the sneak preview of Avatar — in terms of audience reaction. (Here’s Cargill’s review from then.) Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Stardust, Layer Cake), Kick-Ass certainly does not lack for big laughs and enjoyable action, though its mixture of comic book homage and comic book parody doesn’t always work. Is it the future of comic book movies? I don’t know about that, but it will probably be a big hit, and it deserves to be.

I hope a similar fate is in store for Micmacs, the latest whimsical delight from Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, which is also a repeat from Butt-Numb-A-Thon. (On the one hand, only a couple hundred people are able to attend BNAT. On the other hand, most of them live in Austin, so it’s kind of redundant when SXSW shows the same movies three months later.) At Saturday night’s screening, a very animated Jeunet said “micmacs” is a slang term for “shenanigans,” and added that he finds the word “shenanigans” hilarious, which I can definitely get onboard with.

Micmacs concerns a gentle movie buff named Bazil who sets out to get revenge on the weapons manufacturers whose products led to his father’s death and his own unrelated injury from a stray bullet. Revenge films tend to be nasty, but this one is exceedingly pleasant and merry, owing to Bazil’s good nature and the team of misfits who assist him, including a contortionist, a human cannonball, and other odd ducks. Jeunet demonstrates as much wit and energy as he did in the beloved Amelie, so here’s hoping Micmacs gets that kind of attention.

It’s not just the old pros delivering popular entertainment at SXSW. Will Canon, who has made four shorts since 2001, has expanded one of them into his first feature, Brotherhood, which is playing in competition here and winning over crowds with its fast-paced and energetically stupid story. It deals with a fraternity initiation prank that goes awry, and instead of all the pledges learning about the purpose of fraternities by enjoying some intense but socially acceptable homoeroticism, one of them gets shot. Whoops! Things get really dumb from there, mostly because the characters themselves are really dumb. But there’s no denying the 81-minute lark (which stars Jon Foster, Trevor Morgan, and Lou Taylor Pucci) is lively, never boring, a good example of what breezy direction and tight editing can do for a ludicrous screenplay.

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Eric D. Snider (website) is currently engaged in micmacs.

Tags: kick-ass, sxsw film festival