Hey folks, Harry here furious at not being in Las Vegas, on what is obviously the greatest night that Vegas has ever seen. Sure they've had many of the greatest boxing bouts and mixed martial arts bouts - but man... to see SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD? That's a whole new level of LET'S GET READY TO RUUUUUUUUUUMBLLLLLLEEEEEE!!!! Now - here's Maria Von Crapp with the nitty gritty details about this extremely rough incomplete work of genius...
Hey I am Maria Von Crapp. A report from the Rave theater/Las Vegas test screening of Scott Pilgrim. I think the biggest takeaway for me from seeing Scott Pilgrim tonight is how much comedy comes from the visuals in it. Every scene is packed with on-screen graphics that add comic-book flourishes or explain what's going on, cutaways that are for the most part really inventive and funny, or just over the top or out of the blue things that cause you to experience the film in a different way than you're used to. While it's not really like anything I've seen before, it's like some mash-up of elements from Fight Club, Kill Bill, Speed Racer, Natural Born Killers and a Michael Cera movie (take your pick). As schizophrenic as that sounds, Edgar Wright found a way to shake all that up and come out with something original and fun and fundamental. I'm not sure how closely the film follows the comic book source, but the plot is pretty simple until it goes totally crazy: Scott Pilgrim, played by Michael Cera doing Michael Cera, is a jobless kind of loser who's in a garage band with his friends in Toronto. He's just started dating an Asian high schooler named Knives who's nuts for him but he then falls for this alternative punk girl who he sees at a party named Ramona Flowers. That's when things start to get kind of bananas. To win Ramona, Scott has to defeat her "seven evil exes" in these insane video-game/anime style fights that basically follow the same kind of Looney Tunes physics as most wire-fu. But there's just something ridiculous about having guys someone like Michael Cera in those situations fighting these angry ex-boyfriends (and girlfriends) of Ramona. It's kind of like a John Hughes movie smashed into The Matrix. Ramona's exes include Chris Evans as a douchey action movie star and Brandon Routh as a douchey bass player in the band of Scott's ex-girlfriend. Routh's character gets his superpowers from being a vegan until he's stripped of them by the Vegan Police who show up because he's duped into drinking some half and half by Scott. Yeah, it's that kind of movie. You're either in for the absurdity or you're not. I thought that was pretty hilarious. One thing made me smile even before the movie began: they redid the Universal logo and theme song as an 8 bit video game version. Anyone who grew up playing those first generation Nintendo games will so get this. The video game references continue throughout the movie, with Scott getting on-screen ratings and earning bonus points in his fights and the villains turning into coins after they're defeated. They throw those visuals in at even the most random of times like when Scott goes to the bathroom to take a leak and a "pee bar" appears that goes from full to empty. The fights with the exes start from crazy and go from there. The first one to show up is an asian guy, and that fight turns into a full-on floating musical number with vampire/zombie back-up singers. There are the fights with Chris Evans and all of his stunt doubles shooting a stupid action movie in toronto, plus Brandon Routh's psychic vegan, a girl from Ramona's experimental phase who calls herself "bi-furious" (actually, that fight turns into one between the ex and Ramona wielding a giant sledgehammer and is one of the more awesome ones) and then two asian twins who fight Scott and his band as a double-headed Forbidden Planet/id-type-dragon. Like I said, you either go with it or you don't. Ultimately it all leads to the ultimate bad guy, Gideon, played with Jason Schwartzman and his usual smarminess, who's basically got his bad-guy lair that Scott has to infiltrate. Like he did in his other movies, Edgar Wright really pushes the genre into whole new areas. This has to be the world's first coming of age/romance/superhero/comic book adaptation/musical/comedy/whatever movie. It has some traces of things you've seen before but not blended together in this way. The cast is all pretty great. Michael Cera's definitely a love him or hate him kind of guy and he pretty much stays in his usual zone here. I didn't recognize everyone in it, and there are a ton of them, but did know Anna Kendrick as Scott's sister, Aubrey Plaza who is hilarious and angry all the time, and Kieran Culkin as Scott's gay roommate. The girl who plays Ramona is particularly great. There's a long way to go to finish it. Nearly everything looked pretty rough down to comp/green screen/wires still being visible. But there was enough going on that you could get a sense of where they're headed with it. I thought it was pretty awesome, all and all, and I really appreciated that it was completely unique. On originality alone it wins. But it also kept me laughing along with it, too, sometimes just at the plain audacity of what's going on the screen.
