I know what half of you are thinking, so we might as well get this part of the review out of the way right now.
There's a good chunk of the people who are reading this who are probably rolling their eyes or already dismissing Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World as "just another Michael Cera movie." In fact, many people might not even be reading this review because they've already written the film off for that very reason.
But Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is not "just another Michael Cera movie," and we have director Edgar Wright (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz) to thank for it.
To be fair, Cera does do his usual thing here, playing the title character. Y'know, he plays that quirky, nerdy, almost hip but a bit too caught up in the past (by liking things like early Nintendo games, for example) indie kid who falls for a woman who's entirely out of his league. Despite this, he tries everything in his power to win her over. Blah blah blah, you know how the rest of it goes, right?
To be quite fair, at some point Cera's going to have to make a decision about whether he should keep acting or just stop because at this point he's lacking serious breadth. There's a definite commonality to all his roles, but you could say that about many actors and actresses.
But let's leave that aside because the film really isn't about Cera, despite him being the titular character. Here's where it gets different from your usual Cera pic: Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), that woman in question, has seven evil exes (emphasis on exes, not "ex-boyfriends," and I'm sure you can figure out why that is) who want to kill Pilgrim and won't let him date her. He has to defeat them before he can win her heart.
Kieran Culkin turns in a great performance as Pilgrim's super-gay roommate, Wallace Wells. His might actually be the film's best performance, but Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is less about the acting and is more about the production and direction instead.
Think of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World more as a Nintendo game and graphic novel come to life. It's obvious right from the opening that Wright tried to maintain the vision of Brian Lee O'Malley's graphic novel series on which the film's based. The opening Universal logo has been pixelated like an old Nintendo game (think Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros., etc.) and its opening music has been turned into a midi.
While the graphic novel series was rendered in black and white and the film is in colour, it seems to be pretty true to the books. Wright uses pop-ups to introduce its characters and to explain the action at certain points in the movie, and even tries to set up the shots to resemble panels from the books. That makes it the ultimate adaptation of a graphic novel to date.
The fight scenes, in which Pilgrim battles Flowers' evil exes, are also incredibly well done. Sure, there's no blood, guts or gore like there was in films like Watchmen, but there's no guts and blood in Super Mario Bros., is there?
Nintendo aside, the film is practically a love note to Toronto. It says something that the city's mention right at the beginning of the film had the entire audience filling a theatre last night screaming, yelling and clapping in response.
What's important here is that all the Canadian references have been kept in the film. Given how hyped it's been, it could easily have been Americanized for an international audience and its Canadian references could have been zapped out of existence. But instead, it's unabashedly, proudly Canadian.
That means Toronto landmarks like Honest Ed's, the Pizza Pizza at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, the Sonic Boom record store, the Baldwin Steps, Lee's Palace, Parliament Street, Little Italy, Cabbagetown and Casa Loma are all prominently featured.
And while that might make those outside of Toronto grumble (our country is mired in regionalism, of course), there are other Canadian references, like Second Cup getting a lot of time on screen (product placement, blah blah blah) and Pilgrim's CBC, SARS and, very appropriately, Plumtree shirts. (The Scott Pilgrim series takes its name from a Plumtree song, for those who weren't aware.) I can't think of a large scale film that's trumpeted Canadianness this much in a long, long time.
The film's humour, with its quirkiness and self-deprecation, is something every Canadian can appreciate, along with its main character's attraction to Flowers, an American. Our neighbours to the south are kind of like the unattainable girl you have to fight to be with. We're drawn to Americans and we respect them, no matter how much we might criticize them or roll our eyes at them. It's a love-hate relationship, to be sure, even though, as a professor of mine once argued, "Canadians define themselves based on not being American."
At any rate, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is fun and you shouldn't write it off as just another Cera nerd out. There's a lot more to it than that.
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