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On paper, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is the ideal film for a guy like me. I like music, I like poking gentle fun at hipsters, I like pop-culture references, I like Edgar Wright, I even like Michael Cera, I think Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pretty, and my frame-of-reference for videogames stops around 1996. The trailer for this movie looked fantastic, and I fully expected to love it. And yet, I guess didn't or whatever.
I blame part of that on the films already released this year. The action in Scott Pilgrim is great, but it's basically on par with Kick-Ass in terms of both visual coherence (which is really important in these Michael Bay days) and creativity. Scott Pilgrim has plenty of visual jokes and witty lines, but Toy Story 3 made me laugh more. Scott Pilgrim is visually inventive and arresting, but not nearly so inventive and arresting as Inception.
But it isn't just weak by comparison. Every individual element of this film is appealing: the video-game logic and imagery, the kinetic, maybe even muscular editing, the cast (with Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Alison Pill and Aubrey Plaza holding it down in particular), and the wide-range of 90s-centric, 20-something cultural anchor points. But it doesn't add up. The whole is somehow not as great as the parts.
For one thing, despite the fact that this movie ought to be for a guy like me, it (oddly) skews younger. It's especially weird because when you consider the references (late-80s video games, The Smashing Pumpkins), I should really be on the young end of the target age bracket. So why does this movie go to such great lengths to avoid any swearing? Why does it tip-toe carefully around issues of sex? Why is it rated PG-13? I don't have any problem with PG-13 movies (like, uh, Inception), but Scott Pilgrim calls attention to it's own censorship in a way that doesn't feel nearly as intuitive as the rest of the surreal elements of the film. [Kind of spoiler-y and nitpick-y for the rest of this paragraph.] Scott and other characters can wield weapons and fight with super-human strength, and this is never addressed as unusual. It's just the way this world works. Yet in another scene, Aubrey Plaza's character repeatedly swears at Scott and a black box appears in front of her face as each swear word is bleeped out. "How are you doing that with your mouth?" Scott asks her. For some reason, this one unusual part about this wholly unusual world is called attention to. And other swears in other scenes are also obscured by sound effects (like a popping noise from a cord connecting to a guitar) rather than the self-conscious black box. It's inconsistent and awkward. This movie is already gunning for a niche-market (it was only playing four times today at the gigantic AMC on Boston Common) and one would think most of that niche is over 17 by now.
Anna Kendrick, the justification for including this review on this blog, is Anna Kendrick-y as always. Her comedic chops have been well-established. She doesn't get to do much (she's in this about as much as she is in Twilight), but she is very good at making the most of short lengths of screen-time. Her interactions with Kieran Culkin are particularly funny - the movie could have used more of both of them. One of the more clever things this movie does is incorporate several of the bland anecdotes we all found compelling in high school as earnest dialogue; at one point one character informs the others that we only use about 10% of our brain's potential. Directors use Anna Kendrick the same way.
I don't mean to sound like I didn't enjoy this movie - I did. And a few hours later, retrospectively, it almost seems better than it did at the time. Leaving the theater the whole thing felt slight and airless, which is probably due to a dragged out and self-undermining denouement. But that's something to discuss when more people have a chance to see the movie. If you waited for the DVD I wouldn't blame you. This is the best Michael Cera film I've seen, and Edgar Wright's most creative. The music is pretty good, and pretty loud. I'm getting my bass guitar out of the basement. And I just might dye my hair pink like Ramona.
Were it not for the giddy and morbid Kick-Ass or the assured and mind-blowing Inception, it would probably be one of my favorite "big" movies this year, but I'd like to think those films illuminate the problems with this film rather than obscure its merits. And maybe it also means I'll never like anything again. Thanks, Christopher Nolan. At least when I watch Twilight movies I don't have that problem.
Previous entries can be found in the Biterion Collection directory.
5 comments:
I really agree about the movie calling attention to its censorship. Broadly, I think that's a decent measure of the strength of writing in a less-than-R movie or non-subscription TV show. Scott Pilgrim wasn't quite absorbing enough to keep me from wondering why none of these twentysomethings swear. By contrast, Breaking Bad takes place in a world that should be littered with obscenities, but the infrequent use of "fuck" doesn't faze me at all.
I really enjoyed the movie, mostly for the simple fact that I have read the book series. If you've read the book series than everything makes perfect sense. I think that is why not many people will understand a lot it. The censorship isn't because it was drawing attention to itself, it's because that's how it is in the books. For a movie that fit 6 books into a two hour movie, it did really awesome and stuck to all of the important stuff. Compare it to pretty much any book to movie adaptation and it has everything beat as far as authenticity goes.
Alicia- I don't think the metric by which me measure book-to-film adaptations is how much of all the books they can cram into the movie; certain Harry Potter flicks have had that problem, LOTR also. That said, Scott Pilgrim didn't feel overstuffed to me anyway- coming from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the books it felt like a great adaptation, in that I could totally understand everything and didn't feel like I had to read the books. (A good example of the opposite is maybe Watchmen.) Nothing particularly confused me except the censorship part. That said, if that is how it is in the books and doing it was simply a shout-out to the fans, then I guess I'm fine with that.
All of that said, Dear - I agree. I haven't seen Breaking Bad, but I would even say the same about Inception, which manages to make both the bloodless violence and the lack of any swearing totally inconspicuous.
I also saw your tweet about not really knowing why you didn't like it, and I am having a similar problem. Last night my wife and I were talking about some of the images we especially liked - this movie is brimming with creativity, it's just hard to praise most of it without spoilers - and there was so much of it that I really did like, so many tricks and bells & whistles and lines (I like that in a movie that appeals to hipsters and stars hipsters there were still characters on the sidelines who embodied every horrible stereotype about hipsters - that guy saying "Their first album was so much better than their first album" is a particularly great moment) and yet, and yet and yet. I really haven't wrapped my head around what went wrong. This movie needed like, +2 more balls and +3 more heart, I guess.
The problem with this movie is that all of those elements you enjoyed, the music, the video game references, etc have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE PLOT. We don't even know if Scott himself likes video games beyond a causal DDR looking thing. He talks about Pac Man, sure, but the only time we ever see him actually play a game is one time, and in a rare scene that was entirely unique to the movie. The rest of it used the comic as a story board, recreating every panel as a shot in the film. So basically, those references are ONLY there to pander to the nostalgic college freshmen who are only just old enough to be able to look back on their childhood with a more mature perspective. They reference all kinds of 90s shit in this movie, AOL, Seinfeld, even fucking Duck Tales. The entire film is just one big nerd-exploitation fuckfest.
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