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The Appropriate Tune: 'Garbage Truck' by Sex Bob-omb
Scott Pilgrim has been hanging over my head for years. As someone who was coming of age during the rise of youtube, and consumed large amounts of video game based content on that platform, I was inundated by talk about Scott Pilgrim. How cool it was, how it incorporated video game references, how people were seeing it two or three times, and so on and on. You’d think it was the biggest cult film of the age, and maybe it was, but that still didn’t make me see it. Not because of any adolescent ‘hate what’s popular’ behavior, I just didn’t get around it at the time, and not doing something is always easier than doing something. So let’s do something now.
Released in 2010, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was directed by Edgar Wright, written by Wright and Michael Bacall, and produced by Wright, Eric Gitter, Nira Park and Marc Platt through Marc Platt Productions, Big Talk Films, Closed on Mondays Entertainment and Dentsu, based on the graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O’Malley. Michael Cera stars as the titular Scott Pilgrim, a 22 slacker living it up in the greatest city on Earth, Toronto. Scott’s life is a simple one; fooling around with his garage band Sex Bob-omb, and hanging out with his 17 year old Chinese girlfriend Knives Chau, but everything changes when he meets the literal girl of his dreams, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Now he’s all about Ramona, and she’s kinda about Scott too, only there’s a catch. 7 catches actually, in the form of The League of Evil Exes, a parliament of prior paramours dedicated to destroying any new figures in Ramona’s love life, namely Scott. So if Scott wants to get with Ramona, he’s going to have to defeat all 7 exes in mortal kombat first. Can Scott succeed in his quest of romance? Can Sex Bob-omb win the Battle of the Bands? Probably.
After building up a respectable resume in British TV, including the cult classic series Spaced, Edgar Wright made a successful jump onto the silver screen in the mid 00’s with Shaun of the Dead and later Hot Fuzz. Both films, and Spaced, established what would become known as Edgar Wright’s filmmaking ‘style’ to the world at large: sharp use of montage, highly choreographed action sequences, surreal even absurd humor and protagonists who firmly fall into the ‘loser slash outcast’ territory. Scott Pilgrim follows that trend while also pushing the envelope firmly with both hands, resulting in one of, if not his most visually ambitious film. There had been other comic book films before Pilgrim but none that had really played with comic books, using visual representation of sound effects in gags, cutaways and such. Similarly there had been films that were based on or referenced video games before Scott Pilgrim, but none that felt as giddy about it as Pilgrim. Scott’s getting power-ups, he’s got an on-screen score, defeated characters explode into quarters (or loonies I guess), and fighters move like they turned on god-mode. Watching Scott Pilgrim it comes as no surprise why there was such a buzz for Edgar Wright to direct Ant-Man for so many years, because Wright had shown that could pull off super hero level action when he had the budget.
This is also yet another movie with some pretty good music attached to it. The score was done by Nigel Godrich, most famous for his work with Radiohead, and the soundtrack is a who’s who of alternative rock. Metric, Broken Social Scene, Frank Black, Beck (who also wrote Sex Bob-omb’s songs), and so on and on. Going from garage rock explosions to 8bitcore and back again, it’s one of the best soundtracks of its day. In fact the closest I had gotten to Scott Pilgrim before this was hearing the soundtrack, because it was getting generous amounts of airplay at my college radio station long after the film left theaters.
Beyond the music and impressive effects though, I’m not sure I actually really liked the movie? For example, the film loves speed and so there’s a lot of quick wordplay and sight gags, but there’s an artificiality to how the characters interact with each other during these moments that kept me from connecting to it, like I became very much aware that these were ‘actors’ rather than ‘people’. Also I hate Scott Pilgrim? Yes the whole idea is that Pilgrim is an asshole who grows out of it but he’s been such a whiny, neurotic douchebag for the past two hours it’s hard to care when that change does come, or care whether he succeeds in his goals at all. And no disrespect whatsoever to Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but Ramona Flowers doesn’t seem like the kind of person you’d kill seven people for. If at the end of the movie it turned out that they actually were incompatible after all and they grew as people by separating maybe I wouldn’t have minded, but as it is I had no investment in how this romance would pay off. Wallace was pretty cool though.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gets a mild recommendation. I can definitely see why the film had such a cult following when it was released, and Edgar Wright is still someone worth keeping track of in Hollywood if he keeps making films like Baby Driver, but this one just wasn’t it for me. For those comic book geeks, anime geeks, music geeks and video game geeks out there, or for those who just watched Pixels and need a palate cleanse you’ll likely find something of value, but for those others I don’t think hipster relationship drama is going to hold their attention. Maybe if I moved to Toronto…
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