Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

PG-13 for sexual content, language, innuendo, drinking, and violence.  My oldest is heading to high school in the fall, so we opened the door to some more questionable content.  There was only one moment that I felt it necessary to fast forward for a second.  There's stuff.  I won't deny this is probably one of the more vulgar choices that I've shown one of my children.  (Okay I let my eleven-year-old watch this too, but that's because there's this weird trend in parenting that said that the two oldest had the same privileges.)  Still, pretty PG-13.

DIRECTOR:  Edgar Wright

Do you realize how stoked I was to find an hour where nothing was scheduled?  I mean, if I was able to write this blog in that hour, I still wouldn't have been caught up.  But I would have been closer.  Then, my seven-year-old asked me "Daddy, can you teach me to ride a bike?"  Well, yeah, I'm going to do that.  That seems like absolutely the right choice.  I would have been a monster if I said, "Well, Daddy has to write a blog that no one will read", right?  So now I only have about ten minutes to write something before the toddler wakes up from a nap and at least I can say that I formatted the page.

It's amazing that I hadn't written about this movie on the blog before.  One of my pages literally has an image from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as its background.  I love this movie so much and can I tell you how liberating it is having the opportunity to have non-kids' movies as family movie night picks?  Like, it's weird.  I can't deny that it's weird when something a little crass comes up on screen and I'm just trying to avoid eye contact with the kids.  But, also --and this is important! --my daughter loved it and is asking for movies that aren't animated.  Big win for me and a big win for trying to spread the gospel of Edgar Wright.

Now, I've gone down the deep dive of the Scott Pilgrim world.  I read the graphic novels.  I watched the movie multiple times.  I've played the video game.  I watched the Netflix animated show.  Heck, my wife and I dressed up as Scott and Ramona for our first married Halloween together.  To say that this movie hasn't been watched in a decade is a bit of blasphemy.  Scott Pilgrim falls into that category of cult films where there is such quality to the film, but it is a little more off the beaten path, especially fifteen years after its initial release.  I won't deny that a lot of my love for the film comes from the fact that I'm low-key obsessed with Edgar Wright as a director.  My top three directors are Edgar Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and Akira Kurosawa.  I would actually maintain that order.  Now, that may sound like blasphemy, but all three of those directors could somehow release another movie and I'd probably be most excited to watch the Edgar Wright movie.

Scott Pilgrim might be the one where, paradoxically, Edgar Wright had the most room to play.  Now, I'm not saying that Scott Pilgrim is my favorite of Edgar Wright's movies.  Heck, I'll take every one of the Cornetto movies before I even consider Scott Pilgrim.  But as aesthetically insane as Wright makes his movies, especially when it comes to editing, the graphic novel actually encourages Wright to do non-diagetic elements as visuals.  (Also, there's a question whether or not some of these non-diagetic elements are actually diagetic.) While Wright made Shaun of the Dead a movie with insane cuts and fun choices, there's this tethering that Wright has to follow.  Tonally, while it is a comedy, he's paying respect to a long tradition of zombie films that would only allow him to do so much without distracting from what he's trying to create.  

But Bryan Lee O'Malley's book is a send up of the insane world of video games.  Video games, especially the type that O'Malley is homaging, allows for a visual style that is just emotional candy. Wright might be the perfect director for Scott Pilgrim because he's looking for places to just go that extra mile that other directors would shy away from.  In the picture that I chose, we have sound effect bubbles, tying back to the fact that Scott Pilgrim was initially a graphic novel.  But when you watch the film, each frame does something unique (okay, a bit of hyperbole.)  For every overt joke that Wright gets in there, he's hiding a bunch of stuff in the background.  It's that stuff that makes the world of Scott Pilgrim something fascinating to look at.

It's funny because I really like Scott Pilgrim as a non-traditional love story.  There's almost something wasted on me liking Scott Pilgrim vs. the World as a married man because Scott Pilgrim is almost the king of the non-traditional rom-com.  These are movies often incredibly cynical about love.  There's commentary about the fickleness of love and Scott Pilgrim has that in spades.  Part of it comes from the fact that Scott himself, portrayed by Michael Cera, is not the traditional leading man when it comes to a romance film.  (Sure, Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist exists, but these movies almost exist because of each other.) As opposed to having an over-the-top trait, Scott's biggest crime to the world of romance is selfishness and mediocrity.  That's the stuff I find way more fancy than being devestating handsome and having some stupid bet about a girl going out with him.  

But I'm also in a weird place with my takeaway with Scott Pilgrim.  Scott starts off the film in a pretty gross place.  Kim often voices the things that we should be thinking because she's past the decorum of relationships.  As Scott's jilted ex, Kim reminds us that Scott is a bad human being, despite the fact that he's colored in nice-guy clothing.  Scott is bragging that his newest romance is a 17-year-old girl still in high school while he is 22.  I'm sure that O'Malley created that exact dynamic to be just over the line of being truly gross / illegal.  (Again, I'm not sure what the laws are and the fact that I'm thinking about those laws now kind of stress that we're in gross territory.) 

But from Scott's perspective, Knives --his 17-year-old sorta girlfriend --has no personality beyond adulation and being seventeen.  She plays video games, but we're not sure if she actually enjoys the video games or is matching Scott's energy.  (I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt because she seems really good at that dance game.) But Scott doesn't really seem to know anything about Knives except that she's really into him.  Scott's fickleness then moves him onto Ramona Flowers, the main squeeze of the movie.  But Scott almost becomes a human being when he makes the choice --admittedly after Wallace twists his arm --to break up wtih Knives to pursue Ramona.  However, the end of the movie reminds us that Scott did technically cheat on Knives and that, in the world of storytelling, makes Scott an unworthy suitor for Ramona.

I keep hearing that Scott should have ended the film with Knives.  I don't remember how the graphic novel ended, but I'm really against that. I could potentially see the movie with a loveless ending, where Scott uses the Sword of Self-Esteem to work on himself instead of pursuing girl-after-girl as they maintain his interest.  But the one thing that is very clear to me is that Scott genuinely isn't interested in Knives.  He may respect her, especially towards the end of the film as she puts herself in the path of danger when they fight Gideon Graves.  But he doesn't like her.  She's too young for him and their power dynamic is completely messed up.  Knives worships Scott because he's the first person to give her attention and Scott seems completely emotionally unteathered to this girl.  If anything, his relationship with Ramona lets him see how immature that relationship with Knives was. 

The conceit about fighting the Seven Evil Exes is honestly fascinating.  Sometimes my job is to say the obvious quiet thing out loud, but this is a movie about insecurity.  We expect our partners not to have any baggage and it is the job of the mature significant other to wade through the minefield of a partner's past.  Some of us are cool about it.  As much as it is a joke that Scott makes friends with Nega Scott, that's what he should have been doing since the beginning.  What is interesting is that Scott's battles with those Evil Exes actually gives Ramona a lot more characterization than what we're initially presented with. As much as Scott is constantly portrayed as romantically and emotionally immature, as we progress through the Evil Exes, Ramona goes from being unbothered and overly cool with her past to actually being quite hung up on what choices she's made.  Part of the takeaway is that we're all battling the choices that we've made in the past and reconciling --in the case of Scott Pilgrim --with these choices potentially violently. 

Golly, this is such a good movie.  It helps that it is funny and appealing to a distracted viewer.  I can't believe I haven't watched this movie in so long, but I dig it.  Honestly, I'd love to watch it for my film class if it wasn't as crass as it is.  Still, the movie works.  Boy, it really works.