I've seen 74 on the Modern Classics list. Most of the ones I haven't seen are horror films, which means I probably won't ever fill in those gaps.

The number I saw in theatres drops off sharply after 2007.

62 on the first list, and 68 on the other. Which is strange since there are big holes in my movie watching...70s, westerns, war movies.

68 on the modern, 58 on the all-time, which is more than I expected. Huh.

Yeah, so I found Kick-Ass to be highly disturbing and upsetting. I found nothing amusing or entertaining about casual murder.

How was it casual? They were killing bad guys. Often to avoid being killed by them.

Sean, are you a fan at all of Tarentino or John Woo? The violence of Kick-Ass seemed on that level to me - kinda' cartoonish in its absurdity.

Right. I will say that some deaths made me a bit uncomfortable, but overall, besides the fact that there was rampant, bloody violence committed by a child, the violence itself wasn't that different from other movies of its ilk.

This made me go back to look at my Paris movie diary from the first time I lived there. Paris having something like 425+ movie screens showing everything you can imagine, I thought many might have come from that, but only 6 did (which is amazing, considering I watched 72 movies in 9 months).

God, I need to move to Paris for some serious movie watching.

And monthly passes! This is practically the only thing I know about Paris.

It was awesome, especially because they had all sorts of things to make it affordable, from true matinée prices to cards where you prepay for 5-10 movies (and now the UGC/Gaumont unlimited cards), to the city government sponsored "18 heures 18 francs" (a week where all movies between 5 and 7 pm were $3.50--don't know what they call this with euros) and the national "Fête du cinéma" weekend (where you pay for 1 movie at full price and got a passport that allowed you to see as many more as you wanted that weekend for 10 francs, or about $2).

It's a great place to catch up on things because at any given time, there are tons of "festivals" going on--westerns, Hitchcock, Italian films, whatever.

Just as an example, here are what my favorite Latin quarter cinemas are playing just this week:
Action Écoles
Grand Action
Le Champo
Reflet Médicis
Ursulines

I've seen 84 of the so-called modern classics, several of which rate among my least-favorite movies. And I've seen all but 3 of the so-called all-time classics, with the exceptions being Titanic, which I refuse to watch, Raise The Red Lantern, which I've never gotten around to, and The World of Apu, which isn't available on DVD in the US.

How many people do you casually kill in Assassin's Creed? Answer: 0. How many people killed in Kickass: 0. All fictional deaths. Of course they're different media, but people have made that claim about shooter games. Were you upset by the slaughter in Kill Bill?

I am aware that it is all fictional death, David. I understand that they didn't actually murder an actor on camera, and that I was not watching a snuff film.

I'm talking about how it's presented.

I like Kill Bill, and Fight Club, and James Bond movies, and Braveheart, and the Godfather movies. Though in each of those, there may have been individual deaths that made me wince, or even disturbed me.

Sean, are you a fan at all of Tarentino or John Woo? The violence of Kick-Ass seemed on that level to me - kinda' cartoonish in its absurdity.

How was it casual? They were killing bad guys. Often to avoid being killed by them.

The guy handcuffed to the steering wheel of a car in a car compactor died screaming, helpless, and begging for mercy from the "heroes". And it was played for laughs, like many of the murders in this movie. I did not find that remotely funny. Nor even the tiniest bit heroic.

The woman in the red slutty dress at Rasul's? She was murdered while unarmed and attempting to flee the scene.

Batman is almost always stopping somebody from trying to kill him or somebody else. He does it without murdering the criminals in question, as do most superheroes. When some "superhero" does start killing criminals in the comics, it is usually presented as something bad, and disturbing that must be stopped, or that has a profound negative effect on the hero in question, usually leading to his own downfall or death.

This movie was presented as "what if real, everyday people tried to become superheroes." That's not being a superhero. That's serial mass murder, and if some real person started really doing that, I would want the police to stop them.

Right. I will say that some deaths made me a bit uncomfortable, but overall, besides the fact that there was rampant, bloody violence committed by a child, the violence itself wasn't that different from other movies of its ilk.

None of it felt cartoonish to me, though it was frequently played for laughs.

I felt like there was nothing heroic about any of the "heroes" of this movie.