FINALLY got to see Scott Pilgrim Versus The World today. And I loved it.
I had wanted to see it for ages, but you know how it is. At the time it came out, I could not afford to go to the theater at all, and then it came out on DVD and I couldn’t really afford that, and then, four years later, it pops up on Netflix and I am all YES. I will watch this thing now.
And it’s a blast. The hyper-intense visuals got a little annoying in parts, but that is probably just because I am old and feeble. The whole setup, the idea of having to fight the seven evil exes in video game style fights, appeals to me as if it was a projection of my own mind.
About those visuals : I am pretty sure some of them worked a hell of a lot better in the graphic novel upon which the movie was based. Mixing the cartoonish with live action is always a big gamble because that route passes right through the Uncanny Valley. Asking an audience raised with cartoon and live action being two separate dialects of the same visual language to process having them both on the screen at the same time causes a kind of cognitive dissonance that can be unsettling.
I mean, I think there are parts of Who Framed Roger Rabbit that have that effect, and I adore that movie.
Your mind wants to tune in to one level of abstraction or the other. This also happens in animation when the animators introduce toonish elements into what is otherwise a fairly realistic animation.
But anyhoo, loved the flick. Obviously, the whole inclusion of video game imagery is custom made to appeal to me because I have played video games almost literally my entire life.
Seriously. I played Space Invaders when I was so small I could only see the top half of the screen. I am not exactly sure what I was getting out of the experience, but I have since seen other wee ones do the same thing, so I am willing to just consign it to the vast and mysterious land that is the mind of a toddler.
I mean, who knows what goes on in those little heads? They are halfway between human and animal, with the cleverness and tool manipulation skills of a human but with an animal’s lack of anything between instinct and action.
So video games are pretty much written into my base DNA. But more than the use of video game imagery is using video game elements as metaphors for other things.
Never saw that done so well. And it turns out that it pops big in this noggin of mine. I felt like it shone right into my heart. Amazing when someone skillfully appeals to emotional furniture you did not even know you have.
Means you get a cool movie and learn a little about yourself as well. That’s a great bonus.
Michael Cera is always a pleasure, although I am not sure he was the ideal choice for this particular role. I get the feeling that the original character in the graphic novel was not quite a Michael Cera soft-voiced timid type but more like a totally average normal kind of guy, almost generic. The sort of guy who blends in wherever he goes because nothing about him really sticks out. You meet him and you feel like you have met him before because you have met so many others of his type.
That is obviously rampant speculation though. For all I know, the graphic novel version of Scott is exactly like the movie Scott and I am just blowing smoke out my ass.
Besides Cera, the other breakout performance is Jason Schwartzman as Gideon, the final boss and mastermind behind the League of Evil Exes. His role is not a big one, in fact he barely shows up for most of the movie, but he does such an amazing job at completely embodying the Asshole Ex Boyfriend that I had to mention it.
He makes Gideon such a perfect asshole that you are truly joyous when he gets his comeuppance. That is, of course, the job of the villain, to be so utterly despicable that beating him or her feels like a victory not just over a person but over evil itself. Schwartzman pulls this off perfectly.
The movie never explains how Scott, supposedly normal guy, suddenly gets awesome kung fu powers when the whole fighting the evil exes thing starts. I realize that asking that question in something so stylized is a little absurd, but I still want to know. It probably also worked better in the graphic novel.
The fights are quite awesome, by the way. Basically video games meet The Matrix. Lots of fancy moves and wire fu and people being kicked through walls and stuff. But unlike a lot of movies these days, SPVTW does it all in a way that makes sense and is not too hard to follow.
It takes skill and finesse to turn up the speed on the action without it turning into just a jumble of noise and pictures. You have to have a deep command of visual language and know exactly how human vision works and what it can do.
My own dabbling in the world of video editing has show me that the editor of a movie is a very powerful person. They are the ones who take all the bits and pieces and synthesize them into a cohesive, understandable, effective narrative. There is no other medium like it. As a writer, I have to create whole worlds, but I have the advantage of starting from scratch.
Movie editors, on the other hand, have to take whatever principal photography and the rest of post-production churns out and make it into a movie.
It’s like a form of collage.
Anyhoo, final summary : SPVTW is very fun and even somewhat moving. I recommend it for anyone under thirty or anyone else (like me) who grew up on comic books and video games.