Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) faces foes of all sorts in order to win the heart of Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
It’s easy to fall for the genre-defying, era-defining slacker adventure “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” and plenty of viewers ages 16 to 26 will count it among their favorite films.
A hyperkinetic pop collage of comics, video games, rock music, television, animation and ultra-modern lingo, it has its fashionable finger right on the pulse of contemporary youth culture, and it’s composed of all the endless media contemporary youth has grown up with. Not to disclude the effects of such exposure, it’s also a coolly berserk bit of ADHD filmmaking, representative of the very current need to constantly refresh.
If you took a fast-talking 1940s flick, linked it to the pseudo-counterculture witticisms of the recent hipster boom, then filtered it through a dusty, turn-of-the-millennium PC, you’d have the tone of the movie, which proceeds with such breathless haste it finishes characters’ sentences with imagery from the next scene. Directed by Edgar Wright, based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novels and starring a slew of bright young things, it centers on the titular hero (Michael Cera), a 23-year-old Canadian bassist who must battle, “Street Fighter-style,” the “seven evil exes” of his new squeeze (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
That last part is a rather late-arriving development that, with its arcade-like sequences, will flabbergast those unaware of what they’re in for. But even for those who are, “Scott Pilgrim” is an awful lot to absorb — too much. It’s funny, and it’s in fine control of its out-of-controlness, but it’s obnoxious, tedious and terminally sarcastic. By the time the third wisecracking, of-the-moment opponent showed up (one’s a vegan, another a lesbian), I was more than ready to cash in my tokens.
“Scott Pilgrim” may be an on-point sign of the times, but that ain’t enough to make a great movie, nor is it as great a thing as this movie thinks it is. The film’s speech and style are so frantically, head-spinningly hip, it sort of makes you want to wage your own war against the world.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
PG-13
Two reels out of four
Opens tomorrow in area theaters
Me and Orson Welles
PG-13
Available Tuesday
One of the unsung gems of 2009, Richard Linklater’s “Me and Orson Welles” stars Zac Efron as a high-schooler who lands a role in a Broadway production directed by a young Orson Welles.
Theater actor Christian McKay portrays Welles in a performance robbed of an Oscar nomination.
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