Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

Directed by: Edgar Wright
Written by: Edgar Wright/Michael Bacall
Based on comics by: Bryan Lee O’Malley

How can you love someone when you can’t truly love yourself.

Or whatever. What previews did we see tonight?

EASY A–A few interesting themes for a teen movie (gay-bashing, sex double standards), but it still doesn’t really help to make this look any better than most teen movies. Maybe I’ll check it out on video or if it gets awesome reviews. Otherwise, meh.

IT’S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY–I think Zac Galifianakis is getting all of Robin Williams’ roles from 15 years ago. As funny as he is, I’m kind of over seeing his hairy face everywhere. Hell, I can’t even watch movies made 10 years ago without seeing him.

I’m especially uninterested in this one. It’s Boy, Interrupted In A Cuckoo’s Nest. Whatever. Done.

LIFE AS WE KNOW IT–And once again, haven’t we seen this movie before? With partly the same cast? Katherine Heigl stars in Knocked Up Without The Pregnancy. Even less interested in this than It’s Kind Of A Funny Story.

Ok. Let’s find out what a hipster would do if he had to fight off 7 evil exes before a beautiful girl would date him.

When Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera in his best, most different role yet) meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead looking cuter than ever in her multi-colored hair), he finds out exactly what he would do: fight and do his very best to win. His friends are in his corner, but they can’t do a whole lot except cheer him on. (Or, if they’re his sister (Anna Kendrick from Up In The Air), they ask him what the hell he’s doing.)

Of course, Scott’s gay roommate (Kieran Culkin) steals the whole movie.

I won’t tell you who all the exes are, but one of them is fairly Super and another is pretty Bland.

Here’s the deal: No matter how his friends react, you get the feeling that none of it is actually happening. Scott is actually a self-obsessed little dick who thinks that everything is a video game, including love. The movie is actually about his trip to self-discovery and realizing that he’s not the most important person in the world.

Yeah, maybe I’m reading a lot into the movie, but I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on. Scott is like a LOT of people in my generation and a couple of younger generations. They think that there’s nothing more important than how they feel and what’s going on in their lives. They’re also obsessed with video games and pop culture, so why not turn their lives into a video game?!

Bryan Lee O’Malley honed in on that with his comics and Edgar Wright knows how to make films about those kinds of people (read: Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz and “Spaced”). Here, he’s made a film about a young man who turns people into piles of coins that he has to collect in order to get to his goal. When he sees a ring, he hears a sound from the Flash Gordon movie. When the movie starts, he sees the Paramount logo in 8-bit. (That’s pretty awesome.)

I loved this movie. There haven’t been many movies that really caught the zeitgeist of the current college/post-college generation. This may be the one that finally has.

And, luckily, it’s a lot of fun, too. Unluckily, the kids the movie is pointed at don’t care enough to go to theatres and the movie has already basically bombed. That’s too bad. It just means that, next summer, we’re gonna get more Transformers movies instead of smart, funny films like this. Pity.