(image via allmoviephoto.com)
It’s hard to talk in detail about why you didn’t like a film, particularly when it will be pretty much universally loved by everyone else. When you seem to be the only one with your thumb down you start to wonder whether you’re really out of touch, and you hesitate to talk about it because you don’t want to take the wind out of anyone’s sails. That’s why I’d like to make the point that I have not read the comic on which the film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is based. Based on the film, I’m not sure it would interest me, and I can say for certain that at least visually it doesn’t hold any appeal. For that reason, if you are a huge fan of the comic, you should probably stop reading now, since by all accounts you will probably love this movie for reasons that are totally independent and unrelated to why I didn’t, and you should be free to enjoy it without taking my crotchety commentary into account.
What I liked: Overall, the execution of this film is brilliantly slick. The fight scenes are cleverly choreographed, and the film is entertaining from start to finish. When it inevitably airs on television at some later point in time, I will probably watch it again (even tho’ my overall opinion of it will likely not change), and that is a testament to the fact that it is entertaining without a doubt. The visual effects in the film are smartly done, with the comic book onomatopaeia being particularly strongly executed.
What I loathed: Michael Cera is horrid. I find him completely unwatchable, and am seriously stymied by how much people seem to like him. His cutesy, wussy “aw shucks, it’s just me, Michael Cera” shtick is grating, and as Scott Pilgrim he adds a layer of emasculated douchiness that I didn’t think was possible to embody. I enjoyed him as George Michael Bluth and I’m not extremely opposed to him in principle, but the laughter and “awwww”s that he solicited from the crowd continually just left me totally confused. The film is fucking fast, with, as Simon from Sound on Sight commented to me, probably more jokes per minute than any film previously made. While that’s not a bad thing, I found the relentless pace of the film to be tiring overall, like an amped up version of some overstimulated kid’s show made for ironic ADD-affected adults. The videogame references got a little old for me, and the “touching final lesson” of the film fell totally flat for me as well. Above all, though, what really ultimately turned me off is not really a fault with the film, but a fault that comes with age, and that is related to the weirdly revisionist 90s feeling to the film. I know that kids today are enjoying aping the 90s like I did with the 80s growing up (and I realize now how fucking obnoxious that really is), but watching a jacked up version of what was once my life kept sending me into spontaneous fits of eyerolling. Stupid short haircuts in unnatural colors, Smashing Pumpkins tshirts, shopping at Goodwill, trolling the record shop, answering every statement or question with “whatever”… gah, I don’t look back on that with nostalgia at all. All it reminds me of is the awkwardness of growing up and trying to fit in during a period of time when irony ruled and the seeds for future hipster ultra-nonchalance were sown.
As much as I didn’t like the film, I didn’t hate it. The things I didn’t like about it say more about me than about the film itself. Weirdly, my overall sensation while watching that film was of peering into something that while recognizable, was also in some way totally foreign, and my final impression was that everyone else got it, but I was left in the cold. Maybe I SHOULD read the comic? I dunno.
