The primary story concerns the title character Scott Pilgrim and his battle against his dream girl Ramona's evil exes. The biggest problem here was that I couldn't get past was that we never are told why we should care about Scott Pilgrim. When we first meet him, he's dating a high schooler and full of self loathing hatred. Do the filmmakers believe merely assumes that we'll like him because he's "Michael Cera." I like Michael Cera, he plays the same role in every movie and that role is getting old.
The film is directed by British director Edgar Wright, who's previous two films "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hott Fuzz" both saw him cooking up hilarious satires. I'm not sure what Wright is satirizing with this film. Teenage angst? Video game culture? Indie Rock? Manga? By the way, what the hell is manga? Either way, Wright abandons the well rounded characters and strong stories of his previous films and instead focuses on relentless energy . Every frame in this movie is digitized, colorized, mp3ized, jpegized, and anything else technical you could think. At one point, Pilgrim goes the bathroom, and a "pee bar" appears over his character and decreases as the process continues.
This is where we are in the history of the narrative - pee bars. If that is what people want, well, shit, I don't know what to say to that. Scott Pilgrim is a explosion of filmmaking that waves it's huge technological middle finger in the face of all the old masters who believed in creating interesting characters, building sets, and using emotional effects aka acting to tell a story. Here, I'll turn it up for ya a couple notches; how can people love Inception and love Pilgrim at the same time? At the end of the day, I felt nothing for any characters in the Pilgrim, not Pilgrim, not Ramona, and any of the evil people*, and no pee bar or hyper drive could save it.
*I thought Chris Evans was funny, but only cause he's the man.
I disagree. I had a much better reply to this, but the site deleted it.
ReplyDeleteInception was a "film." SPVTW is a "movie." Its unfair to view the two different genres through the same scope of critique - it would be like using a socket wrench when you could have gotten by with a hex set.
Also, respect the Pee Bar. That an allusion to an old 8-bit animation on G4 called "Code Monkeys."
Dammit my original replay was so much better than this.
Let's not throw in the towel yet for our generation. But rather lets see why this "movie" was made and why it will be successful as compared to that "film" called inception. Two different approaches, but will both sets of audiences respond well to it?
ReplyDeleteAnd where does the world of the graphic novels really belong in all this?
How can someone disagree with this review?
ReplyDeleteI mean okay I can give you that the comparsion between Inception and Scott Pilgrim is a bit of a stretch but this review hits the nail on the head on why this movie is bad.
References.
It's all that. References. I am a "gamer". I am from the generation that this movie caters. I didn't had fun. It was just "things happening" and "references". Not in a single moment the movie tries to make me care about any of their characters, plot or references. They just throw it away. It was like reading a "gamer" web comic that thinks it is smart, charming and funny by referencia video game "culture" and nothing more.
I love dumb/goofy/"So bad it's good" movies, but I just couldn't get into Scott Pilgrim.