The frog who appears to be a prince is a staple character in romantic comedies: what Jane Austen novel didn’t feature a handsome, wealthy suitor who, in the final pages of the story, turned out to be ethically challenged, penniless, or engaged to someone else? My Girlfriend’s a Geek offers a more up-to-the-minute version of Mr. Willoughby, this time in the form of a nice young woman who looks like a dream and holds down a responsible job, but has some rather unsavory habits of mind.
The hapless protagonist of My Girlfriend’s a Geek is Taiga Motou, a perpetually broke, somewhat flaky college student who aspires to be a novelist. Taiga is on a quest to find the perfect job, one that “pays big” and is “close to college and easy to do and not too sweaty”; bonus points if the staff includes “a beautiful, hard-working big sis-type chick.” When he stumbles across a clothing company with a “Help Wanted” sign in the window and an attractive manager in the office, he jumps at the chance. Once employed, Taiga does his best to flirt with the beautiful Yuiko, though his opportunities are few and far between: a chance encounter in the lunch room, an after-hours search for missing inventory. Yuiko’s signals are hard to decode — she blows hot and cold, and ditches him to fiddle with her VCR — but she eventually agrees to go on a proper date with him.
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Asumi Kamogawa is a small girl with a big dream: to be an astronaut on Japan’s first manned space flight. Though she passes the entrance exam for Tokyo Space School, she faces several additional hurdles to realizing her goal, from her child-like stature — she’s thirteen going on eight — to her family’s precarious financial position. Then, too, Asumi is haunted by memories of a terrible fire that consumed her hometown and killed her mother, a fire caused by a failed rocket launch. Yet for all the pain in her young life, Asumi proves resilient, a gentle girl who perseveres in difficult situations, offers friendship in lieu of judgment, and demonstrates a preternatural awareness of life’s fragility.
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Among the most discussed scenes in the new Kick-Ass film is one that pits a tweenage assassin against a roomful of grown men. To the strains of The Banana Splits theme song, thirteen-year-old Hit Girl dispatches a dozen gangsters with a gory zest that has divided critics into two camps: those, like Richard Corliss, who found the scene shocking yet exhilarating, a purposeful, subversive commentary on superhero violence, and those, like Roger Ebert, who found it morally reprehensible, a kind of kiddie porn that exploits the character’s age for cheap thrills. What’s at issue here is not children’s capacity for violence; anyone who’s run the gauntlet of a junior high cafeteria or cranked out an essay on Lord of the Flies is painfully aware that kids can be beastly when the grown-ups aren’t looking. The real issue is that Hit Girl seems to be enjoying herself, raising the far more uncomfortable question of how children understand and wield power.