The Guardian in UK has a good review today, give it 4 out of 5 stars. See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture
Scott Pilgrim Vs the World
Michael Cera is the star of the graphic novel series in Edgar Wright's witty and stylish big-screen transfer. By Peter Bradshaw
Edgar Wright takes the ache out of "achingly cool" with his entertaining, hyperactive gamer-geek comedy Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, set in freezing cold Toronto and based on the graphic novel series by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Despite riffing on some apparently emotional themes – male romantic status-anxiety is brought interestingly into parallel with Canada's cultural cringe to the United States – Wright insists on nothing more than comedy and the spectacle of pastiche, an entertainment of Seinfeldian inconsequence. The movie has been attacked in some quarters for lack of heart, and for an alleged lack of box office nous in pitching to a demographic that favours illegal downloads over ticket-buying. I can only say that where some see shallowness, I saw a witty interplay of surfaces and style.
Our hero is Scott Pilgrim, bassist in the crashingly loud local band Sex Bob-omb and keen player of video games, activities that encompass the sum total of his cultural life. An interest in literature surfaces briefly when he realises that the love of his life has a job making special deliveries for Amazon, and so orders a book – the title of which is irrelevant and unmentioned. Scott is played by Michael Cera, perhaps the most sexually unthreatening male in the history of cinema, with a gentle, moonish face that makes him look like an early-60s Beatle. Scott and his band are not slackers, exactly: Wright shows them industriously rehearsing and worrying about their romantic and musical careers, but they are so utterly unworried about earning a living that they could as well be in college or even high school.
Scott has a love life that, though notionally filled with angst, is actually beyond the wildest dreams of most real-life saddos and geeks. He has been dumped by impossibly glamorous blonde singer Envy Adams (Brie Larson), but now into a platonic rebound relationship with teenage schoolgirl Knives Chau, played by 25-year-old Ellen Wong, to the tetchy disapproval of his sister Stacey (Anna Kendrick). But then he falls for unattainably cool Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who has just moved to Canada from New York – the number she gives him still has the 212 area code. Their forbidden love begins to blossom, but Scott is confronted with a terrible quest: he must do battle with Ramona's seven evil exes, led by Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), the oleaginous New York record boss who holds the destiny of Sex Bob-omb in his hands and is given to snide solecisms such as "Between you and I".
The titanic battles between Scott and each vengeful ex are, of course, entirely stylised, sorcery-fantasy contests whose choreography can exist only on a gamer's computer screen: they are different, in their way, from the martial arts confrontations in, say, Tarantino's Kill Bill or Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, because they are so unreal and unserious, and always liable to be interrupted and undermined with throwaway gags. Each face-off exists only to facilitate comedy and a continuous fizz of generic pastiche, and even the romance isn't to be taken too straight. There is one quietly tremendous moment when Scott is whacked hard, and flies through the air away from us, in the direction of the camera's sightline, holding a roughly static position on screen but dwindling in size to a tiny insect-like figure, before finally crashing into a distant castle. "Surreal" is an overused and misused adjective, and yet applicable here.
The more potent duel is the one Cera always loses: the comedy duel in which he will perpetually be upstaged by the evil competitor. Brandon Routh, a former Superman, plays Ramona's ex-boyfriend Todd Ingram, who has evil superpowers that are dependent on his fanatical veganism, and for whom dairy products are Kryptonite. The movie is always close to being stolen by Scott's gay flatmate Wallace (Kieran Culkin), who provides a comic perspective on the lead character. He is prone to crash into the apartment late at night ("Guess who's drunk?") and wreak havoc with Scott's need for privacy. Culkin plays what might be called the "Nick Frost" role: part-pundit, part-intimate.
Scott Pilgrim is an intriguing picture for being so exotic and eccentric, and for aligning itself with the style and structure of a videogame rather than a film: following not conventional narrative arcs, but a series of game-levels and flavouring this sequence, not with the usual dramatic reversals and character-development, but with an open-ended comic shtick. My only reservation is that Wright could have afforded to relax a little more, to take his foot off the pastiche-pedal and give his comedy more breathing space. Having said that, this is an entertaining and distinctive display of technique, an exhilarating demonstration of film-making IQ.
