Synopsis Saturday- Griff is...awesome!

Much has been said about the recent explosion of "superhero" or "comic book" films so I am not going to attempt a detailed deconstruction of the genre as a whole, instead I will merely admit to being a fan and leave it at that. Now do I love every movie featuring a dude in tights fighting crime? No, after all a bad film is a bad film and though there are occasions when I can overlook the cheese and have fun I still have standards. So I enter the movie experience with a jaded expectation for it to be bad, and though I am sometimes rewarded with a great film I did not expect, often times my fears are confirmed and I want for my 90 minutes of life back. So after watching "Griff The Invisible" my feelings on the film were definitely refreshing...I loved it.

Griff The Invisible is an indy movie with but one recognizable face, Ryan Kwanten, or Jason Stackhouse from the HBO series True Blood. The film is much less in the vein of Superman than it is Special or more recently Kick Ass as much as I hate to compare anything to Kick Ass. It deals with what happens to real people when they decide that crime fighting is up to them and the mental instabilities that these urges stem from. Griff has no superpowers to speak of and his "equipment" seems rather high tech and expensive for a guy who works in an office cubicle, the twist being that since the film is from his perspective of course everything is going to look like its straight out of Batman. So once the outside world starts to seep into his fantasies there is much more duct tape and cardboard involved than Griff would like you to believe.

The film mostly deals with with Griff and his brothers new girlfriend, another socially awkward human being named Melody who, like Griff, is constantly forced into "normalcy" by her family. These two characters make up the heart of the story and you truly want things to work out when the inevitable problems arise. I wont spoil the later half of the film but it all becomes very much Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind by way of Super(Or if you really must....Kick Ass). Its a very sweet film with wonderful characters and its own way of showing you what it is like to not be "normal".

Then again, who is normal these days?