Cinema Post: 'Scott Pilgrim VS The World'

6 Reasons Why You Should See

‘Scott Pilgrim VS The World’

by Derek Boeckelmann

This past week has seen the release of two major studio films: the action-blockbuster, The Expendables and Ryan Murphy’s Julia Roberts-driven dramedy, Eat, Pray, Love. While both these films have received a fair amount of media attention and box office love, another film was released this week to poor box office and nowhere near as much media attention as it deserves: Scott Pilgrim VS The World. To be fair, it was always an unlikely contender in the uber-competitive summer box-office – it targets a very specific audience (no broad appeal) and doesn’t have the advantage of being part of a recognizable franchise (not that this latter reason helped Sex and the City 2 and Iron Man 2 much, earlier this summer). But here’s a list of 6 reasons why we should get behind this dark horse, and give The Expendables and Eat, Pray, Love the flick:

 

1. Its Style

I guarantee you, you have not seen a film that looks like this. It might not be as visually-impressive/mind-blowing as Inception, but what its visuals lack in scope they easily make up with charm. The entire film feels like a feature-length pop art exhibition. Not enough praise can be given for the film’s outstanding art direction and cinematography – both responsible for making the film feel like its graphic novel counterpart.

 

2. The Cast

It may not be jam-packed full of Hollywood A-listers or action stars of yester-years but Pilgrim’s ensemble consists of the perfect blend of recognizable stars (Cera, Schwartzman), stars on the verge of stardom (Kendrick, Winstead), and talented newcomers (Wong). Every single one of these performers are talented, breathing life into the film’s colourful characters (all of whom are memorable long after the film’s end credits). It’s been far too long since we’ve had a such a rich line-up of fully-realized adolescent characters ably portrayed by such talented performers. I’ll happily admit that I saw this movie, not because of an impressive trailer or strong word-of-mouth, but because of its cast. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see both Up In the Air’s Anna Kendrick and the brilliant Brie Larson (TV’s United States of Tara) in the same film – and the fact that it also reunited my favorite Arrested Development couple (yes, I was a George Michael/Ann shipper), certainly didn’t hurt matters.

 

3. It’s A Pop Culture Enthusiast’s Wet Dream

Scott Pilgrim VS The World acts as a perfect ode to popular culture of decades past. Specifically the 90s. One can’t help but be amused by the Ninteno-ized version of the Universal logo or the all-too-short Seinfield spoof.

4. Wallace Wells 

In an ensemble as large and impressive as this, it might seem impossible for one character in particular to stand out. Yet this is exactly what Culkin manages to achieve as Wallace Wells, Scott’s gay roommate. Avoiding the stereotypes that normally plague gay characters (Glee anyone?), Wallace is a refreshing departure – stealing every scene he’s in and delivering more comedy than any other character. I’d be quite happy next summer to pay to see a Wallace-led spin-off…not that this is a likely thing to wish for (financially, Pilgrim’s a flop).

 

5. It’s Both Funny AND Charming

Ok, it might not be the most heartfelt movie of the year or the funniest – but Scott Pilgrim VS The World manages to score a nice balance between the two.  The one-liners are biting and the over-the-top performances (especially by the league of ex’s) are hilarious. Yet the film also boasts plenty of quieter character moments and there are even a few genuinely touching scenes. It’s impossible not to feel for Knives (brought to life by the scene-stealing Ellen Wong) – a bubbly and optimistic teen who’s first love is killed by the arrival of another woman. Unlike so many portrayals of siblings on film, the relationship between Scott and Stacey feels incredibly authentic. Even Ramona, one of the film’s weaker characters, manages to evoke sympathy in her desperate attempts to start over.

 

6. The Soundtrack

For a film about a rock band, one would expect a killer soundtrack. Thankfully, Scott Pilgrim VS The World delivers. Standouts include Broken Social Scene’s dreamy “Anthem For A Seventeen Year Old” and “Sleazy Bed Track” from The Bluetones. Though it’s Metric’s phenomenal “Black Sheep” that’s currently dominating my iPod’s playlists.

 

The film is not without its flaws – it’s far from perfect – but it’s certainly one of the most enjoyable films of the summer and far more deserving of the impressive box office numbers that lesser films, I’m looking at you The Expendables, have managed. Sigh. At least Scott Pilgrim VS The World, destined for cult-hit status in the years to follow, will enjoy a longer shelf-live than its forgettable blockbuster peers.

LOST: The End (Series Finale) - 6.17/18 Review

LOST: "The End"

I'll admit it. LOST's final bow last night produced more than a few tears from this avid fan. Was it a perfect conclusion? No. But was it satisfying? Hell yes. 

The Vampire Diaries - Season Finale - 1.22 Review

THE VAMPIRE DIARIES: 

"FOUNDER'S DAY" REVIEW

Review coming soon.

LOST 6.15 Review

LOST: "The Candidate"

Review Coming Soon.

LOST 6.13 Review

LOST: "THE LAST RECRUIT" REVIEW

9.2/10

The pieces are finally coming into place as LOST enters into it’s last stretch of episodes. After a slew of hit-and-miss episodes earlier in the season, the series has finally started to gain momentum with first the Desmond-centric “Happily Ever After”,  then the Hurley-centric “Everybody Loves Hugo”, and now the multi-centric “The Last Recruit”. All three episodes have been remarkably strong, managing to juggle both some heavy plot developments with some  softer character moments. Make no bones about it, “The Last Recruit” is a transitional episode designed to start moving the plot along at a faster pace but what’s nice is that even amidst all of the rapid plot developments, the characters (or at least, most of them) aren’t lost in the scuffle. 

 

The Good:

Despite this episode technically being a multi-centric, there is a heavy focus on one character in particular in both the current timeline and the flash-sideways: Claire Littleton. And all I have to say about this is that it’s about time. Claire is definitely shaping up to be one of the series' more tragic and interesting characters - something that would seem almost ridiculous a season or two ago. At this point, I'm really much more invested in her journey than many of the other characters on the island.

Claire’s character arc this season has been phenomenal and this is primarily because of Emilie de Ravin constantly rising to the challenge of delivering some much heavier material than she’s been used to.

The look on Claire’s face when she sees what were once her friends, congregating and then leaving without her – for the second time – is heartbreaking. De Ravin’s facial expression conveys so much pain in this single shot that we can actually understand how and why Claire’s become what she’s become. So many of the characters we’ve been following have done some horrible things because they have been abandoned or betrayed by one person they’ve cared about, but Claire’s been betrayed by all of the people she’s cared about. Watching how well de Ravin works with such emotionally heavy scenes, it’s a shame that the writers couldn’t have brought out more of this in Season 4 after Charlie’s death.

The fact that Jack, Sawyer, Hurley, and Sun were so readily willing to abandon Claire for a second time really paints them all in a negative light - especially when you recall the relationships that Claire's had with all of them in the early seasons: Claire and Hurley were good friends and Hurley was there for Claire during some of her more emotionally stressing moments, Sawyer acted like an older brother figure/guardian figure to Claire for most of Season 4 being overly-protective and risking his life on multiple occasions to save hers, Sun was like Aaron's second mother during the first three seasons of the show and Sun is really rather hesitant to leave the island in Season 4 without Claire (it's a shame she doesn't feel this way the second time round), and Jack is (quite literally) the closest thing to family Claire has on the island. So the mutual decision made by all of them to abandon her is really disheartening and really lowers my opinions of all the characters involved. It just seems like sloppy writing - it's irrational that these characters would be so willing to abandon one of their own and lead her into a death trap (they are after all leading her to Widmore's army with Flocke where no doubt, blood will be shed).

But I guess the silver lining in all of this is that Kate is given another chance this season to redeem herself in the eyes of many viewers. I've really loved Kate this season - she's rational, independent, and doesn't care about anything but getting Aaron back his mother. Kate's refusal to leave without Claire is a nice moment for both characters and helps Kate gain some much needed likeability points as we head towards the show's final hours.

 

Another nice addition to the episode was the appearance of Ilana in the flash-sideways. This was one character I never would’ve thought to have seen in this alternate universe so it was a nice surprise. Her appearance gives me hope that maybe her character wasn’t the waste of space that I had assumed following her sudden and insignificant death last week. Ilana always seemed like an interesting character – the writers just didn’t have enough time to devote to her proper development – so it’s nice to think that maybe in this different environment off the island, we might be able to get a better understanding of her character and her mysterious back-story.

 

The Bad:

Aside with the aforementioned storyline of Hurley, Jack, Sawyer, and Sun abandoning Claire, I really only had one other problem with this episode and it’s once again involving the way the writers have dealt with Sayid this season.

With how intriguing Claire’s storylines have been this season, it’s hard not to contrast it to that of Sayid’s – who’s own developments have been somewhat been linked to Claire’s. And unfortunately for the character of Sayid, his transformation just hasn’t been handled anywhere near as well as Claire’s has. Despite multiple characters tying Claire and Sayid’s character transformations together, there seems to be a big difference between the two. While Claire’s developments manage to be emotionally honest, Sayid’s strikes no emotional chords whatsoever. Whereas de Ravin is portraying Claire as a woman who has been abandoned by everyone in her life (Christian, Charlie, Jack, Kate, Aaron, and possibly even herself as her mental state has deteriorated) and has been steered down a dark path by the one person who never left her, Andrews (who isn't given much to work with) has been forced to play Sayid as a mindless zombie this entire season.

Even more disappointing is that in this episode the writers addressed this in an incredibly unsatisfying way. When Desmond questioned Sayid's dramatic character change and his allegiance to Flocke - Sayid claims that he is acting the way he is acting because Flocke has promised to give him back the one person he's truly loved who has died. So Sayid's been acting like a brainless zombie because he wants Flocke to resurrect the love of his life? That might be a good enough justification as to why Sayid’s been following Flocke’s orders but this hardly explains why he’s been acting the way he has. I can only hope that if there is some mystical or supernatural element behind this, it’s explained soon because at the moment – Sayid has become one of the series’ most inconsistent and tedious characters. And the Sayid of seasons past, deserved better than this. 

 

Verdict:

With its latest offering, “The Last Recruit”, LOST seems to have finally gotten rid of the pacing issues that had been plaguing the series’ final season earlier in its run. Satisfying yet tantalizing at the same time, this episode proves that there’s a lot to look forward to when LOST returns in two weeks with its final 5 hours.  

LOST 6.07 Review

LOST: "DR. LINUS" REVIEW

9.6/10

Coming Soon.

2010 PALEYFEST COVERAGE: "LOST"

PALEYFEST 2010: "LOST" Panel

As any avid TV lover knows, the Paley Center for Media's 2010 Paleyfest kicked off last Friday night and will continue to run until mid-March. Of the 13 shows being recognized by the institution this year, LOST - in its final and much-hyped season - was destined be one of the more memorable panels. 

 

In attendance last night were series executive producers Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse, Eddy Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, and Elizabeth Sarnoff as well as cast members Terry O'Quinn (Locke), Michael Emerson (Ben), Zuleikha Robinson  (Ilana), and Nestor Carbonell (the seemingly ageless Richard). 

 

Highlights of the panel included some teases of what's ahead for the series and its characters, as well as some insight into what might've been different had the creators not run into certain actor availability issues while shooting the series.

 “We’re not writing a novel where the characters will do whatever we ask them to”, explains Damon Lindelof. “When we write something, the actors give so much back [so] we’re sort of interested in not making off-the-rack suits [but] tailoring suits. The fun part is doing the alterations constantly.”

So have how have these unforeseen circumstances affected the initial narrative of LOST that Cuse and Lindelof had planned years earlier?

 “We’ve talked in the past about the fact that Eko would’ve had a much more prominent role in the series beyond the beginning of season three when we killed him off – primarily because Adewale didn’t want to be on the show anymore”, begins Lindelof. “That definitely changes the initial plan but sometimes it happens in a positive way where you bring an actor on for 2 or 3 episodes, like Ben, and Michael [Emerson] comes in and does what he did and then you know, that guy’s going to be in the finale.”

 

When asked how intentional things like the names of characters or the books seen on the show were, Lindelof set some limits to the Easter Eggs the writers regularly place within the series. 

“We obviously try to name the characters with some degree of intention and we pick books on the show for very specific reasons and there are some Easter Eggs that we hide but the minute we start feeling like we’re really smart…well, down that path lies destruction.” Admitting, “we’ve had to accept that the audience is infinitely smarter than us and they’ve proven to be, so anything we include, we want them to get.” A character’s name that might have historical, philosophical, or culture relevance is “not an accident”, but “the reality of our lives is that every ten days we have to generate a 55-page script” so regularly including some of the extreme “Easter Eggs” fans have hypothesized about” (like the Jack Bender painting for instance) is not an option.

Relating the question of character names to the new season, Carlton Cuse admitted that the naming of ‘Dogen’ (played by ) “was an intentional choice”. “We felt like that’d be a cool piece of Japanese history to attach to the character.”

“All I have to say”, joked Lindelof, “was that when I was taking Intro to Philosophy 101 I was like, I’m never going to use this - I was wrong.”

 

In one section of the panel, the producers were asked to respond to a series of questions with a ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Pass’ and the results were quite revealing:

Have we already met the person Jack was married to in his flash-sideways? YES.

Was Jacob telling the truth, is somebody coming to the Island? YES.

Did the Smoke Monster manifest itself as the bus that killed Juliet’s ex-husband in “Not In Portland”? NO.

Will we get an answer to why women can’t give birth on the Island? PASS.

Will get answers about Libby and her connection with Hurley? YES.

And perhaps the most pressing of all: Will we ever get Vincent’s back story? Choosing to ignore the aforementioned rules of the section, Lindelof sarcastically chimed “Talk about daddy issues”. Clarifying things a little, Cuse promised that, “we will see Vincent again”.

Other tibdits of the panel included an 'N-O' to the series ever being released in chronological form and a baffling ambiguous clue about the series' final three episodes, from Lindelof himself - the singular word of 'water' will no doubt lend itself to thousands of varied fan responses in the coming weeks. 

 

But before the panel came to a close, Darlton were able to finally answer one of the more pressing questions in the fan community: 

With LOST being such a diverse show - why the lack of LGBT characters? The sole LGBT character featured on the series being that of Tom Friendly, played by M.C. Gainey, whose sexuality wasn't revealed until almost a year after the character's death!

Beginning his response to the heavy question on a much lighter note, Lindelof joked: “I think we’ve definitely killed more straight characters than gay”. After laughter from the packed-audience, Lindelof addressed the question in greater detail. "One question we get asked all the time is - what are you guys going to do with the love triangle in the final season? There are these inherently romantic concepts [on the show] but it's also a very chaste show. The fact that the characters are thinking sexually or acting sexually is not something that very often manifests itself in the writing unless it's very specific to the Sawyer/Juliet dynamic or whatever. We haven't paired off a lot of the other characters and there might be other characters on the show who are gay or lesbian or bi, it just hasn't been us getting up on our soapbox and saying so."

This is not to say the producers are without their regrets, however. "This is certainly one of the regrets we have in terms of saying, looking back at the broad base of the show, should we have had more lesbian and gay characters? Should we have had more African American characters? Should we have had more arabic characters? Absolutely but you know this is what we did and this is our best shot. So we apologize but at the same time, that's what it is."

Further information on the Paleyfest can be found at: www.paleycenter.org ; 

Photos, Coverage, and Story by Derek Boeckelmann