Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2010)

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Foam
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#101 Post by Foam » Mon Aug 30, 2010 12:47 am

I can understand finding the character obnoxious, but I don't see how those instances are at all related other than that they both use clichés.

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#102 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:04 am

I always took Wallace (of the book, at least) to be a parody of the gay best friend. Except he's a better character than the hero, gets to hook up, and isn't some accessory to Scott.

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Steven H
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#103 Post by Steven H » Tue Sep 07, 2010 12:16 am

This movie was absolutely ridiculous - also, I *really* liked it. The gay and vegan bits could have been a little subtler but that only popped into my head after the fact. Strangely, I tried reading the comics a few years ago and they seemed awful to me but, after watching the flick, I went back and gave the first one another shot over a cup of coffee yesterday and I'm looking forward to reading the whole thing. I would have probably passed this one by if it wasn't for the activity in this thread, so thanks.

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domino harvey
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#104 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 02, 2010 5:35 pm

So the Blu-ray sounds like the most ridiculously packed home video release for a single title ever. Calling in sick next week to get through it all

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Finch
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#105 Post by Finch » Wed Nov 10, 2010 9:25 am

Slant on the DVD
Extras:

The collection of extras is a mixed bag. Both the 10-minute blooper reel and the optional trivia track are fun but seriously padded; there are a few really funny and noteworthy allusions and gags, but otherwise, there's not a whole lot about them worth recommending. The audio commentaries, at least, are entertaining; the one where DP Bill Pope and director Edgar Wright shoot the shit about the look of the film and the way they organized the characters' world to suggest a video game is especially instructive. The 27 minutes of deleted scenes from the film are kind of amusing, but they aren't new so much as redundant, or just plain negligible, clips that begin many of the scenes that are still in the film's theatrical cut.

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domino harvey
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#106 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 10, 2010 11:06 pm

I actually watched the deleted/alt scenes with a group of people last night, which was a first. The best cut material is an extended version of Knives dying her hair which really sells her character (and explains the "I think you mentioned she was fat" line) and the discovery that there's a third Crash and the Boys song. I liked the censored TV track featurette, which presents itself as the TV edits for profanity from the movie but grows more and more absurd as it goes along, until words like "hell" are getting overdubbed with "heck" and "ass" gets a ludicrous replacement made all the sillier by its repetition.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#107 Post by Jack Phillips » Thu Nov 11, 2010 4:42 pm

It's nice having the music promos as well, if for no other reason than to hear each of those songs all the way through.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#108 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 11, 2010 6:15 pm

Except the mysterious exclusion once more of "No Fun"-- haven't listened to the commentary tracks yet, maybe they explain what's up with that one being MIA in all formats

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#109 Post by manicsounds » Sat Nov 20, 2010 7:23 pm

I've never read the comics, but this movie combined my love for video games and music with a boatload of filmmaking techniques which ultimately pushed this film to one of the most fun experiences I've had recently. Still just wading through the Blu disc, as there is a lot on here, as usual from an Edgar Wright film.

I guess I'll have to get the comics soon.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#110 Post by karmajuice » Sat Nov 20, 2010 11:49 pm

I haven't read the comics myself, but my friend finished reading them recently and must have liked them. It helped inspire him to make an autobiographical comic (something he's done before, but before he usually situated characters based on real people in fictional circumstances). I don't know how much it will resemble Scott Pilgrim, because his style is very different, but I think the sheer energy of the comics are what fueled his interest in this.

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#111 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:05 pm

manicsounds wrote:I guess I'll have to get the comics soon.
A box set of the comics is out now so you're in luck. Depending on how you liked the characters in the film, the book really fills them out and gives them more great moments than the film could contain. And the video game lore is given wider reign, too.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#112 Post by puxzkkx » Mon Dec 27, 2010 7:50 pm

I thought this was a lot of fun, but I don't think it is as complex or coherent an achievement as Wright's last two films. Shaun of the Dead had a very interesting grasp of emotional reality in an absurd situation and Hot Fuzz was thematically layered in its exploration of honour codes and city mouse/country mouse dynamics. Simon Pegg was the conduit through which Wright realized those films' respective visions and I think his absence here, and lack of a suitably insightful replacement, immediately puts this at a level lower than his two Wright collaborations. Scott Pilgrim pretty much worked on one level for me - that of a pop culture wet dream. As such, I had an excellent time, but I think on that level it has flaws as well - the editing, visual and sound design are bravura and, dare I say it, revolutionary, but the plot just chugs along without lending weight to characterization or subtext, and soon even the "fight" scenes that break the film into its separate chapters start feeling kind of perfunctory.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#113 Post by jbeall » Sun Feb 06, 2011 12:25 am

Man, was this an ambivalent viewing experience for me! On one hand, it was difficult to sit through; on the other, I did watch the entire flick, so something kept me going beyond that first hour, which was incredibly irritating.

I suppose my visceral dislike of the first hour or so had a lot to do with the film's being mired in hipster culture (perhaps similar to critics of Blow-Up who found it too mired in mod culture). I had very little tolerance for these shallow characters, I couldn't see why Knives, Ramona, or even Scott's friends would want to hang around him, since there's simply nothing appealing about him whatsoever. (I see this as more a fault of the character than Michael Cera, although I didn't find him particularly appealing either. This role seems an extension of Nick from Infinite Playlist, which I thought was awful.) Indeed,
SpoilerShow
Scott should've stayed with Knives since they shared the emotional and intellectual state of seventeen-year-olds. Hey, I like video games and music, too, but these two characters have no complexity beyond that.
It's also interesting that
SpoilerShow
the more grounded characters are all undermined in some way. As mfunk noted, all of Wallace's more interesting personality traits are wholly secondary to the fact that, omigodhe'ssogay! Scott's sister, who seems to have a clue, only dates guys who end up hooking up with Wallace, and yet she and Wallace remain close. Go figure.
However, my loathing for hipster culture (does anybody like hipsters? Apparently not, not even the hipsters themselves.) is a matter of taste, and in fairness, the film is slightly ironic toward hipster culture--I think of the two passwords Scott has to utter to gain entrance to Gideon's club--although being ironic toward hipsters is so meta nowadays. So my distaste for the subject matter is probably overriding anything rational I could say about the film. I just really didn't like it.

That said, this film does the best job I've ever seen of translating the medium of comics and the medium of video games to the screen. In the former case it's visually more interesting than The Hulk, even though I think Ang Lee's the better director, and there were a lot of striking visuals, especially in the last half-hour that went slightly redeemed this film for me. By its end,
SpoilerShow
I just wanted to punch Scott in the face, at least vicariously through Knives, and I still just didn't get the appeal of any of the characters except perhaps Knives, if only because she's seventeen and doesn't know any better.

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Alan Smithee
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#114 Post by Alan Smithee » Sun Feb 06, 2011 12:35 am

For the record that article is by Mark Greif who, though he leans more towards the literary end, is definitely a hipster.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#115 Post by JMULL222 » Sun Feb 06, 2011 4:40 am

I'm having a pretentiousness overload. Too, much, doucheyness.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#116 Post by Mr. Ned » Thu Mar 03, 2011 6:54 am

Just caught this and while I wasn't disappointed, it failed to grab me the same way as Wright's films with Pegg and Frost. Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead arguably have a timeless quality to them--mainly because they're genre exercises that transcend the limitations of said genres (not to mention excellent scripts)--but this one felt too caught up in the current moment to flesh itself out like those two. All the performances were strong, but I couldn't help but feel a little letdown after all the hype; outside of Cera, none of the characters rise above secondary cliche--even Winstead, who is gorgeous but comes across too much like a prize and not enough like a girl to spend your life with. I almost would've preferred Scott stay with Knives at the end to give Ramona that supernatural quality of other femme fatales, but she hardly qualifies as dangerous most of the time; she has a troubled past, sure, but she seems ultimately as harmless and well-intentioned as Pilgrim throughout everything ...a victim of circumstance and bad choices. Still, I couldn't help but think Scott is a bit of a douche, if only for Knive's sake, and how silly it was for him to still end up with Ramona after his "rebirth" and self-realization. Some of the set-pieces were good fun, but I wasn't enamored with all the cultural pandering, even if the vegan police was very funny; maybe I'll check out the graphic novels to investigate the similarities. I really liked Wallace and his coquettish ways and almost wanted to movie to center around him. Beyond that and a couple other scenes this one was a cute and mildly interesting one-and-doner.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#117 Post by jojo » Fri Mar 04, 2011 8:28 pm

Just because Scott resolved to be less of a douche doesn't mean he should suddenly "like" Knives better than Ramona. I get that Knives was treated a bit crappily throughout, but nothing pisses me off more in a romance film when the hero suddenly "realizes" that the girl he's been trying to get all this time isn't as good as his current love interest/girl next door/lifelong best friend/etc. Maybe I'm treating Ramona like a prize here too, but to me it always seems like a hero has simply "settled" for his 2nd option when--for whatever reason--he gives up on the person he's been battling for in 3/4 of the entire movie. This goes for girl heroines too. I absolutely hated that Reese in Sweet Home Alabama and Kate Bosworth in Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! ended up with their "lifelong/childhood male best friend" instead of the person they spent like 3/4 of the film with.

Strangely, if Scott ended up with nobody at the end, I would have been fine with that though. That would have meant he either lost or decided through "self realization" that having a girlfriend RIGHT NOW wasn't necessary. Still much better than settling for the 2nd option.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#118 Post by JeanRZEJ » Thu Mar 17, 2011 8:21 pm

Mr. Ned wrote:even Winstead, who is gorgeous but comes across too much like a prize and not enough like a girl to spend your life with. I almost would've preferred Scott stay with Knives at the end to give Ramona that supernatural quality of other femme fatales, but she hardly qualifies as dangerous most of the time; she has a troubled past, sure, but she seems ultimately as harmless and well-intentioned as Pilgrim throughout everything ...a victim of circumstance and bad choices. Still, I couldn't help but think Scott is a bit of a douche
I think all of this is in fact the central point of the film, and the inanity of Winstead's character contrasts perfectly with the way his conception of the world is distorted to the point of absurdity. She is inane, but he doesn't notice, because he's a selfish douche and hence when he desires her he must have her (and having her implies defeating her baggage, in his mind, even though the entire process was merely a delusion). If there is one thing the film is about it is: naive delusions of grandeur lead people to selfishly destroy relationships for no good reason without establishing anything substantive in their wake.

I think the editing rhythms brilliantly accentuate the delusions, and by writing the dialogue to keep pace with the rapid sequences of ellipses provided by the editing it mimicks the patterns of a screwball comedy but exposes the inanity of their efforts by replacing language that is expected to be clever with language that is inane, with the ironic relationship to these screwball tropes and the recurring anti-climaxes of the dialogue's punchlines all emphasizing the naive delusion. Combining this with the visualization of grandiosity in the fight scenes, most of which conclude in silly anti-climaxes themselves, and you have a wonderful distillation through purely cinematic means of the same elements which are presented clearly through the unflattering character traits you describe. In essence, I think the film works in perfect concert with its source material to accentuate the central point, and the methods in which these two are blended felt ridiculously varied and clever when I watched it for a second time, something which is more difficult than normal due to the increased rate of turnover between jokes created by the editing techniques but also was necessary to the central point, so it had to come together as such. Given that the characters are depicted as and even exaggerated to seem more vapid the comedy is filtered almost purely through filmmaking techniques and ironies, and if you pay close attention to the way in which the editing delivers jokes on a consistent basis without and often in spite of dialogue it is pretty amazing, like nothing else I've ever seen. The film has a distinct comedic film language, and I think that is no small feat. Most film comedies these days have virtually no film language, relying purely on performances and outrageous material to provide laughs. This is not to say that either way is better than the other, but I certainly think Scott Pilgrim is more distinct in this regard. I also think the way that the characters are intentionally muted provides an extra layer of social commentary, not necessarily purely satirical but at the very least ambivalent, that others aren't quite able to achieve. Lovely film.
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I'm not ready to cross off an entire swathe of humanity simply because of the way they dress, so, yes, I do like some hipsters.


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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#120 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Wed Feb 13, 2013 1:27 pm

A great video essay on Scott Pilgrim about the way that "Wright folds representations of comics, videogames and music into a movie based on a comic book that was itself strongly inspired by videogames."

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#121 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jun 24, 2020 11:00 pm

Oral history with the cast and crew ten years later

There’s some gold in here, including some great on-set stories and a tease for the future. Also, Seth Rogan as Scott Pilgrim?!

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#122 Post by DeprongMori » Wed Jun 24, 2020 11:56 pm

The article didn’t mention whether Michael Cera was cast because he looked like Beck (who wrote and played the SEX BOB-OMB songs), or they got Beck to write the songs because he looked like Michael Cera.

Beck or Michael Cera?

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#123 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 02, 2020 11:51 am

I decided to revisit this film the other night for the nth time, and there's no denying that this just gets infinitely better every time, with countless gags to (re)discover. Wright is essentially operating as Godard in completely reinventing cinema by embracing the magical realism of comic book worlds, inviting us into a space where the internal logic is limitless, so when a new sound or visual effect pops up unexpectedly, it feels right at home in this space of pure imagination. These kinds of exaggerated fantasies are best when reflecting real human truths, and this one takes shots at self-inflation via fads, superiority, and as defense mechanisms for low self-esteem, but also the bare validating struggles of social comparison and initiating uncomfortable actions.

Scott may be dubbed an "asshole" for his treatment of Knives, but breaking up is hard, and as someone who has broken up with people in similar circumstances of awful timing ("let's meet my parents," "it's my birthday") yet when it felt gut-piercingly necessary, there's no escape from causing harm sometimes (though even still, one must acknowledge the self-driven place that action precipitates from along with the empathetic one- "I can't string someone along any longer" may be earnest but there's also a part that is saying "I don't want to be in this any longer" or in Scott's case, time to move on to the next person). The method by which Wright and co. navigate these real raw emotions peppered in with humor, takes both a non-judgmental and a revealing look at how all people are not only capable of, but naturally experience, selfish behavior and fear-based actions by the essence of social engagement which forces another's feelings to come into contact with our own.

The entire plot and the way it's carried out also serves as the ultimate metaphor of affirmation in measuring oneself up against the sexual history of your partner in emerging adulthood. The cartoonish 'evilness' of all the exes serving for a sole existential purpose of stopping you from obtaining this partner is simultaneously solipsistic in honing in on a skewed subjective perspective (of course all her exes are two-dimensional awful people!) and a self-fulfilling egotistical prophecy that you are that important where one's existential goal in life revolves around you. Scott's fantasy of defeating tangible video-game characters to win the affection of a lover also mirrors his inept lack of skills in traversing romantic relationships exposed early on with Knives. If only we could advance in predictable levels to reach a status of Acceptable Partner rather than cope with the unknown, impermanent, 'present-moment' mindfulness that Ramona comfortably holds as a motto!

The film is so clever and funny and relatable through self-reflexive blends of artificiality and emotional resonance that it feels like an indie version of the Hollywood Musical recontextualized into becoming its own thing (plus the music is great too). I don't know if it'll count (I still need to read Rick Altman's book) but I could see this making my Musical list if so, along with Ema (for very different reasons!) Scott's story is the externalization of the existential experience of millennials, and it couldn't possibly be more perfect as analogy, direct demonstration, or a piece of artistic expression, using all the possibilities the medium can offer. This is, simply put, right up there with the most 'fun' cinematic experiences ever, and one that only reveals growing shades of brilliance and splendor over time.

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tenia
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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#124 Post by tenia » Thu Jul 02, 2020 1:08 pm

I revisited the movie a few weeks ago and I can only echo your thoughts about it. It's also a fascinating revisit for me because, well, almost 10 years have past since I originally discovered it, and having "grown up" since, the movie felt so much deeper and relatable than ever before.

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Re: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (Edgar Wright, 2009)

#125 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 02, 2020 1:31 pm

Exactly, having revisited both this and The Heartbreak Kid close together this week, I feel like they are perfect examples of films that are so much better once self-actualization has triggered the willingness to be critical and compassionate toward your younger self, to acknowledge what is basic grey space of inevitability (harm, shame, problems, reincarnated back to joy) and what is a defective mindset or pattern of behavior to grow from, and how they can often be intermingled without black and white judgment. As a result, and for many other reasons (including sociological patterns of behavior that have only become funnier with nostalgia over time - i.e. hipster culture, vegan power) the purely pleasurable aspects have ripened with age too!

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