My weapon jammed and I got stuck way out and all alone

Each Day, A Film
January 23rd 2012 (Retrospective)

Sticking with the theme of films actually observed in their native environment as opposed to captivity, let's talk about the strange and annoying experience I had when I went to see Scott Pilgrim.



Now, believe it or not, I don't go to see a lot of films on my own. There are a few - which will no doubt come up in future posts - that I had no real other choice but to, but they weren't particularly bad experiences.

The weirdness with Scott Pilgrim is that because I couldn't actually convince anyone to come and see it - not even, embarassingly, family - I managed to score a ticket and went on my own. Now, as mentioned before, the other experiences weren't so bad - for one simple reason; the cinemas were usually filled with two to twelve people.

With Scott Pilgrim the cinema was full. This isn't the sticking point, though; I took my seat, which was next to a couple of mothers who'd brought their young children. And before you think it, the children were the model of well-behaved throughout the film. No, the issue I have is that within ten minutes of me sitting down, the child next to me was shushingly relocated away from me for no reason that I could actually see, leaving me feeling like being at a cinema alone was somehow indicative that I was a strange, antisocial type who shouldn't be left near the children lest I corrupt them with my odd ways.

In reality, the mother probably thought I'd appreciate not sitting next to the child - in case of acting up, or whatever - but it felt really strange at the time, as if I wasn't a fully-functioning member of society and the younglings needed protecting from me.

Let's move on, though, because I'm probably making something out of nothing.

Scott Pilgrim as a film is probably somewhere in my top ten, because, frankly, it's an amazing synergy of director, material, and, occasionally, cast. Oh, we can all moan about Michael Cera - and he's maybe not perfect casting, but at least he's not Dawson Casting, and he does carry it well even while basically being outshone by Kieran Culkin every time Wallace shows up.

Then again, I do have a man-director-crush on Edgar Wright, starting way back with Spaced and leading on to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Don't get me wrong; in terms of directors, my first love was Robert Rodriguez - primarily because of his 10-minute film schools, which fanned the nascent flames of my passion for film - but when I grew up (and after having seen Once Upon a Time in Mexico), I switched gears to the freneticism of Wright with nary a backward glance (except for, of course, Planet Terror).

And, at the same time, thanks to the recommendations of Barbelith - which I still kind of miss, by the way - I'd read the source material, lovingly described by almost nobody as Amerimanga, and while there were perhaps a few narrative missteps there - some chapters could have been shortened, and maybe the ending was a little pat - it was still worth following in all kinds of ways.

The film, though, is something I love for the visual effects. Now, if you've read the previous post, firstly well done!, secondly who are you? and thirdly you'll know that I'm a big one for visual effects, although I only know how to do the most basic of basic personally. (I could probably animate a moving box for you, or some swirly text, or fun stuff like that, which if I were a wizard would be the equivalent of the light spell; useful in certain situations, useless in most others.)

But Edgar Wright uses a cutting style that I'm in love with; it's frenetic, it's often used for silly jokes, but it never breaks the flow of the film. In point of fact, it tends to enhance it - because the cutting means that often two minutes of visuals can be locked down into thirty seconds or a single minute without too much in the way of loss.

I wish I had more cogent arguments to make and more in-depth analysis to give you, but, frankly, I just love the film (not to perfection, but pretty close) for what it is and, maybe, what it represents, because even though it wasn't a particularly huge sucess at the box office, it was - as has been mentioned before - another taste of validation that the weird stuff I liked to read was worth making into a film.