Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

Cafe Society
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Saw it last night. Liked it a lot. It fell just short of “loved it,”, though. Since what I liked will be “everything else,” I’ll just point out what I didn’t really care for:

Thought the gay roommate thing was weird and unfunny and almost uncomfortable at times. I didn’t even realize he was gay until a good 30 minutes in (did I blink and miss something before they explicitly said he was gay?), and then I spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out who this character was. Mack-daddy? Nice guy? Wise sage? Empty container to store gay jokes in?

I thought Sex Bob-Omb could’ve rocked or sucked more. They were just . . . ok.

Everything about Scott’s relationship with Knives was weird and awkward. I mean, why was he dating a 17 year old? And they were never fully committed, never fully broke up . . . it was just a little weird.

For that matter, I would’ve liked to have seen a little more reason for him and Ramona to like each other. I hate this Hollywood “it was written”* copout for not being able to write a convincing romance that is trending so big lately.

I would’ve liked a little tighter editing/pacing. It wandered a lot, even when it got deep into the plot, and most of the time it was for unnecessary scenes that weren’t really funny or endearing or cool or redeemable in any way IMO.

I know you guys are going to say about a lot of my complaints, “oh you just can’t appreciate subtlety.” That’s not true. I love subtlety in a story. I love ambiguity, and unanswered/unanswerable questions, when done right. This didn’t feel like that, though, to me. It felt like there was a guy fighting for it to be a romcom, and another guy fighting for it to be an action movie, and another guy fighting for it to be a coming-of-age story, and they never really reconciled with each other. Without even looking at IMDb, I’m going to guess it had a bare minimum of 2 screenwriters, and probably more like 3 or 4. Where some might’ve seen subtlety, I saw conflict-- and not in the good “drama is conflict” way.

Some of you might also ask why the hell I’m complaining so much about a movie I claim to have liked. Well, I expect a lot of movies :D, and I can like something quite a bit yet still see much room for improvement.

8.0 out of 10

*(see Slumdog Millionaire)

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I read that this morning and also thought the studio exec was way too hard on Michael Cera, and I don’t really like Michael Cera. He pretty much got personal.

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I wouldn’t say I’m his biggest fan or anything, but I still don’t get the hatred for him playing Michael Cera-oid characters. I mean, it’s like hiring John Wayne to play a cowboy; or Peter Lorre to play a wormy, creepy guy. It’s what he’s supposed to be doing! :smack:

64

You really have to ask why he was dating a 17 year old Asian Catholic schoolgirl? C’mon, man. Some questions answer themselves.

65

Well, would it kill The Duke to try a role just a little out of type? Like… maybe if he played a Mongol warrior of some sort!

Something I realized last night: Kieran Culkin, the guy who played Wallace, Scott’s gay room mate is Macaulay Culkin’s brother. Seems he also played the main character’s cousin in Home Alone.

Oh, and Cisco, Wallace’s gay-ness was alluded to a few times early on “Does this mean we have to stop sleeping together?” “Do you see another bed here?”, and I think it gets mentioned in passing during one of Scott and Wallace’s conversations earlier on, but I’m not sure if it’s stated outright until Wallace meets Knives (at which point Scott mentions that Wallace is gay about three or four hundred times in one awkward run-on sentence.)

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Advance notice tip: Rory Culkin is Macaulay’s brother too.

Kieran was 8 in Home Alone and has been in a lot of movies since then (my favorites being It Runs In The Family and Igby Goes Down) and it’s about time he and Rory started getting some attention, even through supporting roles.

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Oh…I’m a Michael Cera fan. I only made the point to elfkin477 who stated a distaste for him.

I agree with Cisco in that I’d like to have seen a touch more development between Scott & Romona…but there was the great Pac Man scene at the party. Maybe she was simply charmed by him there.

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Yeah, that’s how I feel too. I don’t have anything against the guy. I think he is a good choice for playing this kind of character.
I’m disappointed that Scott Pilgrim isn’t doing better. Though I’m not its target audience either (I play some video games but I’m not a hardcore gamer, and I had never heard of the comic book before the movie came out) I think it’s very fresh and funny. I’d love to see more creative and quirky movies like this.
This movie’s poor showing makes me fear that when studios put out crappy movies they really are just giving the public what they want. :frowning:

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If you’re just now figuring that out, you haven’t been paying attention.

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Incidentally, Cieran (and Macaulay, as mentioned before) Culkin’s brother is going to be in Scre4m, the 4th Scream movie. I haven’t seen the Scream movies, but I have heard they tend to be on the more intelligent end of the horror movie spectum at least.

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The first one was kind of a satire of horror movies before every horror movie was a satire of horror movies. The sequels . . . yeah . . . the less said about them, the better.

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[quote=“lavenderviolet, post:68, topic:550220”]

I have never understood the general public’s tastes. I don’t expect everyone to have my tastes (which are admittedly very simplistic) but the fact that The Saw series for instance, makes enough money to keep being made continues to amaze me.

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Incidentally, a lot of the quote tags seem to be getting mangled in here lately. If you see a hanging {QUOTE=Someposter} tag hanging up at the top of a post, maybe add another {/QUOTE}tag at the bottom. (only, with the square brackets instead of the squiggily ones)

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I’m not the biggest Michael Cera fan in the world, but I appreciated him in this role specifically because Scott is a giant tool for most of the movie. You may sympathize with him to varying degrees (I didn’t, really), but he’s not supposed to be likable.

I’m not surprised the movie is a bomb. I liked it a lot, but it’s weird. I can see it having huge appeal to a very small subset of people and hardly any outside that group.

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I guess I naively assumed that crappy unoriginal movies get made because people are willing to put up with them than because they actively prefer them. :smack:

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[quote=“Raguleader, post:73, topic:550220”]

Incidentally, a lot of the quote tags seem to be getting mangled in here lately. If you see a hanging {QUOTE=Someposter} tag hanging up at the top of a post, maybe add another {/QUOTE}tag at the bottom. (only, with the square brackets instead of the squiggily ones)

[quote]

Thank og you’re here!

77

I am NOT the demographic for this movie, but my boyfriend is. We both loved it. One of the better movies I have seen lately.

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I hope a lot of you who liked the Movie but had issues with the pacing/quickness of it take the chance to pick up the books themselves. That’s what amazed me- they basically took a 6 part series, and combined it all into a 2 hour film. So coming in as a fan, I knew there was going to be no sequel, and that basically this was my one shot of somehow seeing around 1000+ pages of a series compressed down into 2 hours, and hope it would be okay… And Edgar Wright pulled it off quite well. So even if the movie HAD succeeded, there wouldn’t really have been a way to create a sequel for it, unless O’Malley (the Canadian Manga’s writer) wrote a new story basically afterward for the characters.
And that’s not very likely to happen. But for those who want more Scott Pilgrim love, they should definitely check out the manga series, there’s 6 books, with the story basically taking place over a year or more, and each of the boss fights happening several months apart and waaay more character buildup and explanations there. Plus, it’s got a different ending than the movie, so something else to have (Though I preferred the Movie’s ending to the books, but watching the movie’s ending made me like the book’s ending a little bit better, though I still prefer the movie ending).

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I’ve been in the hold queue at the library since April. Should have it soon, though.

80

Just came back from seeing this after giving up on finding anyone else to go with me.

This movie was fucking AWESOME!!!

I can’t believe this is dying at the box office, it’s fantastic! I spent a huge amount of time watching it actually saying in my head “this movie is brilliant!” which doesn’t happen often. In fact I’ll go as far as to say I think this film just resuscitated by flatlining interest in anything produced by Hollywood as it seems that nothing but unmitigated shit is being churned out at the moment.

I don’t get the Cera hate personally, maybe because I’m so used to him in Arrested Development which I loved so have positive associations. Also I haven’t got burned out on slacker movies as I tend not to watch them, so seeing this one was fine.

But man, this was incredible! The characters were great, the acting was extremely good (I nth the Wallace spin off, I’d watch that shit), the story engaging, the humour perfectly delivered and the special effects were just out of this world. I’m torn between what my favourite moments were, can’t decide if it was the vegan police busting in on Todd to strip him of his powers, or the fight between Ramona and Roxie (fuck that was intense!).

Anyway, enjoyed it massively, way more than I expected to (in fact it reminded me very much of Kick Ass in that respect which was very similar).

10 out of 10