--- It's Pilgrim Time - What with Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World coming out tomorrow there will be a lot of reviews coming out and interviews and all sorta junk that I'm gonna be tempted to link to, but I'll try to keep it light. Gotta let y'all see for yourselves how awesome it is. And oh it is awesome. But I liked this point made by Mr. Beaks over in his review at AICN so I'm bringing it over here I am:"[Edgar Wright] speaks for the distracted generation that frittered away their youth zoning in front of MTV for hours on end, navigating fantastic 8-bit worlds via the NES, gorging on comic books, and watching whatever was on HBO because it was on. Wright connects by accessing these shared memories, but he reaches well beyond nostalgia to an understanding of how this mass consumption of media fooled us all into believing we're living "The Hero's Journey".
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is the perfect character through whom to examine this phenomenon: he's a scrawny, unexceptional twenty-three-year-old with a solipsistic worldview and an unintentional disregard for the feelings of others. There's nothing remotely noble about Scott: he plays bass adequately for the struggling Toronto-area garage band Sex Bob-omb, freeloads off his gay friend Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin), and proudly avoids a steady job. Emotionally, he's kind of like a sixteen-year-old girl - which partially explains why he's taken up with high-schooler Knives Chau (Ellen Wong). But Scott is also using Knives to boost his ego after suffering a devastating break-up with Envy Adams (Brie Larson), who's gone on to pop stardom as the lead singer of The Clash at Demonhead. At this supremely unsettled point in his life, Scott's not after a girlfriend; he's looking for someone to worship him like his peers now worship Envy.
No one could be less deserving of a monomyth than Scott, but he's at the center of one because everyone believes they're due a monomyth nowadays."
I think the film's brutal in its dissection of Scott Pilgrim's myriad faults - faults I see as generation, my generation, myself firmly included, wide - and shows him/us for what he/we is/are, until he raises above it all, but I've seen people criticizing the film as a celebration of his slacker lifestyle and I just don't see it that way. You're supposed to find him terribly frustrating a protagonist for the vast majority of the film. Whether it's worth the effort or not is up to you, but it's an intentional uphill struggle from where I stand and I loved the friction caused by throwing such a... well, such a Michael Cera into the center of this sort of story and watching the way it threw off the entire ways this sorta thing is supposed to work. Ramble ramble see it! I'm seeing it a second time as soon as I can.
--- Mayor Morgan Fairchild - Stacie Ponder has brought so much wonder into my life that I'll never be able to repay her. Never! I could send her a box of Barbie hair and Kajagoogoo cassette tapes and it still wouldn't be enough. She reviewed three films at Final Girl yesterday and the center review, of a film called Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (yes there's a movie named that, shut down the world we're done creating forever), only took two sentences to convince me its the Greatest Movie Ever Made which I must see immediately. Thankfully Netflix has it! Yay!--- Nice Welt Sweetie - Glenn wham-bammed out three new installments of his scene-by-scene dissection of the Scream films, so check those over at Stale Popcorn. The Fonz! Tatum's lollipop! Linda "Pea Soup" Blair! Oh my.
--- Speak No Evil - The horrifically under-rated horror film Pontypool got chatted up over at The Horror Squad yesterday. Have you seen this movie yet? You really need to see this movie. I loved it so much I made out with it with a mouthful of blood.
--- And finally, Joe Reid has righted an Internet Wrong, and I'm here to steal it - James McAvoy got pretty naked in some Brit-show called Shameless and this is what it looked like:
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1 comment:
I think I'd be more down with the "critique of a generation" angle if the whole movie weren't just as steeped in the same kind of retro obsessions and weightlessness as Scott himself is. After all, it's not like Scott ends up rejecting the whole "life's a videogame and I'm the 1P" ethos of the movie. He just uses it to prove himself worthy. I totally get that the story of the movie is the story of Scott "getting a life" and manning up and whatever, I just think the progression is limited by Cera, the unconvincing (to me) romance, and the fact that ultimately life is still just a winking self-referential video game.
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