In Jeffrey Sconce’s piece Friends for Life, he shows how easy it is to convince ourselves that it’s Monica who now stars in TV’s Cougar Town and Chandler in Mr. Sunshine. Those two shows are, in fact, on at the same time. Sconce wonders “was this part of their divorce settlement – joint custody of Wednesdays at 9:30?”

I love conceptual faux-sequels like these. (Of course Walt from Breaking Bad is actually poor Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, a once-hapless father desperately trying over again with a new family!) A couple of years ago, I gave a few examples of these odd sequels for triple j magazine. Forgive this quick cut-and-paste:

THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES (1976) -> UNFORGIVEN (1992)

This one is a gimme, really, as both films are directed by and star the David Bowie of Machismo, Clint Eastwood. Sure, every western is a kinda-maybe sequel to every other western – that’s how genre works – and Eastwood played variations on the same cool cowboy in a dozen films. None fit together better than these: Unforgiven’s William Munny is Josey Wales, unwillingly dragged back to killing all these years later. It’s all the more heartbreaking once you see it.

THE EXORCIST (1973) -> THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980)

Think past The Exorcist‘s  projectile vomit and crucifix masturbation to when a sleepwalking Regan warns an astronaut at a party that he’s “going to die up there”. Sure, there were a pair of different but equally poorly-received sequels to The Exorcist a few years back – but original Exorcist writer William Peter Blatty called his own cult movie, The Ninth Configuration, the real sequel. Why? It features that same astronaut, Captain Billy Cutshaw, admittedly played by another actor.

While I was preparing for a hosting gig at last month’s Castaway interview for ACMI, however, I discovered my favourite conceptual sequel of all time. Is this something everyone knew but me?

HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING (1967) -> MAD MEN (2007)

In How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, Robert Morse plays J. Pierpont Finch, a window-washer who bluffs his way – through the power of song! – to the top of a farcical corporation. He does it by way of the advertising department, even though the movie warns us that “advertising does something to men’s brains”.

Fast forward: the same Robert Morse plays Bertram Cooper, the enigmatic patriarch of advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, on AMC’s Mad Men.

Cooper’s secret history as window-washer J. Pierpont Finch isn’t just an amusing intertext. It actually provides Mad Men with new – some might say necessary – depth. Why does Cooper not care about Don Draper’s multiple identities? It’s because Cooper’s past is based on exactly the same brand of lies! “This country was built and run by worse stories,” he says, “than whatever you imagined to hear.”

At the end of How To Succeed…, Finch only saves himself from disaster by finally coming clean about his past. Will Don Draper find redemption the same way? Maybe. But he probably won’t sing about it.

I had a theory that Mark Millar’s stories would benefit enormously from quick edits and pop music. That cinema would maybe boost the good qualities of his writing (great concepts, snappy one-liners, black comedy) and cover some of its flaws (the sometimes shoddy execution of those concepts, or the way he can seem to get bored halfway through his own stories).

My review? Well, you might have heard that Kick-Ass is the story of what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero in the real world. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Kick-Ass, however, isn’t. It’s actually about what happens when a powerless nobody decides to become a superhero… and then meets some real superheroes already out there.

The movie’s definitely a success – certainly more than Vaughn’s only fitfully charming version of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. The action scenes are smart and inventive, especially considering the film’s semi-limited budget; they recreate the sense of John Romita Jr.’s art without being slavishly faithful to it like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen worship. Bursts of violence wrung at least three bursts of spontaneous applause from my audience.

Having actual humans step into these roles gives them new life, too. Both Aaron Johnson’s Kick-Ass and Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s Red Mist are better characters than they are on the page, and a hilarious Nicolas Cage as Big Daddy proves – yet again – that he’s developing a new alien form of acting that might only be properly appreciated by future generations.

The movie, though, is entirely stolen by Chloe Moretz as the tween assassin Hit Girl – and that’s part of the problem. Mortez is perfect in the role, oozing charisma, and I can see her becoming a cult figure for young girls everywhere. I’m not the only one, either. Read the half-excited, half-concerned “Hit Girl Could Be Your New Favorite Tween”.

Her relationship with her Big Daddy is the best part of the film that, and one of the only parts that doesn’t feel like empty calories. I’m a sucker for proud parents in fiction, and Big Daddy just seems so damn giddy to watch her in action; their bond has the best parts of Father Knows Best and Lone Wolf and Cub. Thankfully, the movie ditches Millar’s more painful Republican-versus-Democrat zingers, too.

But in order to make Kick-Ass an over-the-top action movie, Vaughn makes Hit Girl a pint-size John Woo-style killer. She ends up undercutting the supposed point of Millar’s comic. Millar said that the story originally began with Big Daddy and Hit Girl, and Kick-Ass was later added to reframe it into something more human, more real. You can tell. Kick-Ass himself never suddenly develops super-ninja-moves (as tempting as that must’ve been for this big screen version) but Big Daddy and Hit Girl would be entirely comfortable in the Marvel Universe alongside Elektra, Hawkeye, and whoever else suits the movie’s tagline: “I can’t fly. But I can kick your ass.”

Kick-Ass’ high-school-loser realism and Hit Girl’s tween-ninja antics and angst never quite mesh together. It’s sometimes more like two movies sitting together side-by-side and occasionally intersecting, or, better still, two comic books that periodically cross over to boost sales. The movie’s hyped ‘realism’ is just an opening hook, not a high concept.

With my experiment in not reading the source material for once finally over, I came home from the screening and read them in a single sitting. I discovered that there’s a twist to Big Daddy’s character in the comics that didn’t make it into the film. It might’ve singlehanded short-circuited this logic glitch, and it’s a real shame the Kick-Ass movie decided not to keep it.

And you know what? The pop music did help. Everything’s better with The Banana Splits.

Scuola di ballo (The School of Ballet) is the second of the three pieces that comprise the latest production by The Australian Ballet: the ambiguously-but-sleekly named Concord. Choreographed by Alexei Ratmansky, it’s the story of an egotistical buffoon in charge of a dance studio and the lengths he’ll go to in order to ditch his worst dancer, Felicita, onto an unsuspecting impresario. Eventually, though, the authorities dance in to put a stop to the schoolmaster’s schemes, and…

Hold on. The authorities dance in? Sure. I mean, it’s a ballet. That’s fine. Everyone dances.

But then… I mean…

If everyone dances, all the time, then why is there a need for a dance school? Is the dancing they do in the school somehow different than the dancing they do when they dance at home, or out of bed in the morning, or through the aisle of the local grocery store? Or is everyone forced to attend a dance school in order to learn some basic steps? If they don’t, they must be shunned the rest of society. Imagine if everyone was dancing around you at all times – friends, family, strangers – and you were just putting one foot in front of the next like a nobody. Imagine the name-calling. Imagine the self-loathing.

Furthermore: are they born with these steps already encoded deep inside their nervous systems? Perhaps they attend the school to learn a complicated selection of steps that they can use during various commonplace social events! A ‘happy’ dance, a ‘sad’ dance, a ‘my schoolmaster is trying to palm off his worst student and I wonder if he’ll succeed’ dance…

You accidentally ask one question; that question clatters into the next; before you know it, the entire premise of the fictional world has ceased to make sense.

Somehow, I’ve taken to naming these moments of complete logic meltdown after the Thirsty Mayor. It’s a reference to a quick joke from The Onion: “Thirsty Mayor Drinks Town’s Entire Water Supply“. This story was used as an example in a behind-the-scenes piece by beloved radio show This American Life on the hellish pressures of The Onion’s writer’s room. They describe how most writers thought the Thirsty mayor headline was ridiculous enough to be instantly funny – but one writer needed more. Some kind of reason. Why was the Mayor so thirsty? What does the joke actually mean?

(The answer that placated him was that the Mayor had “…deeply mismanaged city resources”.)

You can find the Thirsty Mayor everywhere. He’s particularly at home in superhero comics. The interconnected universes of Marvel and DC lead to exactly the kinds of logical fissures that the Mayor finds irresistible. Every kid has asked themselves why Batman doesn’t just call his indestructible pal Superman to solve 99% of Gotham crime without breaking a sweat, right?

These disjunctions are not only between different characters. They’re often contained within just one. For example, Batman (the all-to-human street-level vigilante who beats up punks on the streets of Gotham) must coexist somehow with Batman (the teleporting, dimension-hopping, alien-fighting member of the Justice League of America). Or take his relationship with fellow Justice Leaguer Zauriel. Zauriel was an angel. An actual, literal, from-heaven-above angel. Would you expect this undeniable proof of the existence of the Almighty would make Batman wonder about, say, his beloved dead parents and their eternal afterlife? You’d be wrong.

You can see the Mayor’s footprints all over commercials, too, especially those for food or alcohol. I remember one beer ad where animated bottles walked up to a bar, and the bartender (who was also a beer bottle) popped off all their bottle caps, and then, uh, I guess they happily drank themselves. Did they metaphorically drink the beer that was already inside their own glass bodies? Or slosh their internal fluids into each others’ mouths? And does that make the bartender-bottle some kind of sadist, or murderer, or…

The Mayor is very, very thirsty. Try not to think about it.