140 Chrctr Review: Dinner for Schmucks
The Dinner scene’s great, then yr castigated for laughing @ the schmucks! Also the 90 minute appetizer is inedible. [C-]
140 Chrctr Review: Countdown to Zero
The set-up is uneven and the fear-mongering is borderline offensive but it pulls off a rare political tightrope act. [C+]
140 Chrctr Review: Get Low
Promising start falls into a supremely mediocre summer escape 4 the shuffleboard set, fine turns from Murray & Duval though. [C+]
SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD! (A Review)
Screened @ The Ritz Five, Thursday, July 29th.
Ya know – it’s ok if you don’t get this one. It really wasn’t made for you. That seems like the best response to anyone who files out of Edgar Wright’s latest film with a look of perplexed annoyance on their face.
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World has a very specific audience. It limits audience understanding though an overwhelming assault of visual, textual and audio clues largely drawn from the soup of GenY popular culture. Wright’s previous films all played on the tropes of genre to tell their story but also had a solid enough through line and enough tertiary comedy to allow the specifically uninitiated to revel in the broader communal fun. With Pilgrim, he’s communicating in a more insular way and places the onus squarely on the audience to show up with their baggage and deconstruct a rapid fire torrent of semiotic clues.
It’s obvious that pacing has a lot to do with the insular nature of the film as well. The speed at which the narrative is propelled forward is unlike anything Wright’s done before. With apologies to Canada, the tone of Pilgrim is much more Japanese/American. This is a significant departure from the source material which unfolded over six volumes with a story that was able to breathe in quite a few panels of black bordered flashbacks and washed out alternate realities. What it does draw from the comic source in, well, comic style. The FX laden action scenes and quick cutting musical numbers not only contain the sensibilities of the source but also a good deal of the overlaid visual communication – though used in a more ironic fashion now that they’ve made the jump to a moving picture, inviting another layer of context and thus avenues for decoding. For those looking for a well developed characters though, the kind so prominent in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, you may be turned off by this film. In keeping with the visual and auditory shorthand, the characters also tend to be well known archetypes. They are mere symbols, and you don’t really have to get a deep sense of them to get what you need to out of the film.
So now a bit about the flick… Absurdist at its very core, Pilgrim is a nerd fantasy - not some goofy-ass Middle Earth troll crap, but an idealized life in the real world, with some super-powers. Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is an average self-centered kid living in this FanToronto. He (like everyone else in fantasy world) is in a band, hangs out at the most awesome clubs, wears interesting clothing an knows everyone. He’s 23, dating a 17 year old private school girl (Knives Chau, played by Ellen Wong) and, ya know, just going with the flow. Oh, and he’s poor. He lives in a small apartment with Wallace Wells (Kieran Culkin) where they share a single mattress on the floor. Wallace is sardonic. Also gay. One day Scott meets Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) – the most awesome girl in the world (she has purple hair – for at least 25 minutes). He falls hard for her but there’s one problem. She has a LEAGUE OF SEVEN EVIL EXES that insist on controlling the future of her love life. In order for Scott to find piece, he has to defeat them. This happens in a series of epic battles that can most closely be compared to the driving segments of the Wachowski ¿Brothers? criminally underrated Speed Racer in terms of sheer visual magnificence. Along the way he comes to know his own faults and becomes less evil himself or something like that. There’s also something to do with subspace and veganism.
If you flip over a copy of one of the Pilgrim novels… like say, this one:
You’ll see (amongst other symbols - nearing the density of the film) a little pink box (giggle) in the lower left listing genre information. It says (assumingly in layers of increasingly greater importance) “Comedy”, “Action”, “Romance”, “Graphic Novel.” This is what the kids expect these days. They’re tired of neatly categorized entertainment options. Even more so than the source material Wright offers in the film a tangy emulsion that becomes an altogether new taste, unclassifiable by standard taxonomy. But like that emulsion the film remains remarkably consistent in its tone, shifting amongst its various elements quickly and smoothly enough that the complexity of the whole is so much greater a satisfier than any of those individual parts.
That is the real art behind this film. Wright exceeds by far, all his previous efforts and displays the mastery of a master chef in combining the technical elements at his disposal to offer the viewer a feast for the eyes and ears – but in order to get the most out of his offerings I strongly caution one approach with a palate immature enough to pick up on the lack of subtleties, otherwise Pilgrim may leave a sour taste - in your face.
A
The Road Runner 3D short almost had me but this quote has pushed me over the edge. Kitty Galore, here I come!
Quote Win of the Week
In a rare convergence of fresh ideas, the top three movies all were original stories, not sequels or adaptations of comic books, best-sellers, video games or other pre-existing material.
(Well, “fresh ideas” is debatable…)
Travers on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice - No, I’ve no idea what it means either and that’s why its the…
Quote Fail of the Week
Knight and Day (A Review)
Screened @ United Artists Riverview Plaza Stadium 17, Tuesday, June 22nd.
So Tom Cruise has fully entered the self-parody phase of his career. First we had the Les Grossman, then came… uh Les Grossman and of course the news came out earlier this month that he will star in a Les Grossman film! But between squeezing every last drop from those fat-suit enhanced utters he managed to fit in this too-clever-for-its-own-good film.
The romantic-espionage-action-comedy-thriller plot starts in Kansas as Cameron Diaz hops a plane early to get to her sister’s impending wedding. This, obviously, was a mistake. The plane is passaged by Cruise and a dozen or so people trying to kill him. As Diaz steps into a restroom to give herself a pep talk, Cruise dispatches the attackers, including both pilots. The plane soon lands in a cornfield (Kansas, remember?) which our heroes walk away from… but not before Diaz is drugged and mysteriously wakes up in her own place in Boston, setting up the most successful element of the script. From there there’s the requisite intrigue, MacGuffining, accented baddies and globetrotting to fabulous locales!
Knight and Day plays to Diaz’ strengths as the funny, blond type that made her a star in the first place. She gets to act alternately ditzy and self assured and has great chemistry with Cruise. Oh, and she fixes 70’s muscle cars for some reason, I believe this is important in one very minor plot point. In a film that tries to be all things to all people, the Rom-Com angle works pretty flawlessly.
Of course the more interesting angle stems from screenwriter Patrick O’Neill (or whoever else was on the project over the length of its development), taking the Mission: Impossible formula and tweaking it into parody. There is a fight sequence on a train that includes the baddie getting knocked out of the window… except he hangs onto sausage links to save himself! These kind of lame jokes are minimal though and are an afterthought to the films greatest asset – taking the set pieces that make the Mission: Impossible films so compelling and having them take place off screen. Trough the use of drugs and Vulcan neck pinching (!), Diaz is unconscious for the most harrowing escapes in the film waking up intermittently over the course of a couple days (it’s a really strong neck pinch) just so that we can chuckle at the snippets events that she and we are missing out on. Imagine the Langley break-in starts and then it just cuts to Cruise walking out with the NOC list. It’s a fairly genius approach which is even carried through on the film’s poster with its empty white figures where images of the stars should be. The use of a battery, of all things, plays great as the MacGuffin as well. It’s so incredibly useless inherently that the fact that it drives and even ends the plot has to be seen as a winking nod to the genre. And a scene where Cruise walks back though a rain of incoming fire (that he just duck & covered his way past) to prove his love for Diaz shows that this is a film that should never be taken seriously.
So what happens when subtracting the suspense from an international espionage film? Well, you’re left with Cruise’s inherent smarminess. This is an unfortunate remainder that hurts an otherwise half-decent film. Cruise has to turn up that thousand kilowatt smile and act all over-the-top “Cruisy,” and frankly it’s just off-putting. The also go to the well one to many times and the parody elements begin to wear thin – though this is more of a problem with the genre in general. Mangold’s use of bad CG is also on the list of offences on display here. The climactic chase (motorcycle v. smartcars) features laughably rendered bulls charging though the streets of Spain and providing obstacles for our heroes. The uninspired decision to ramp the action up to this kind of preposterous level should never have been made, even if this was a full-on parody, this is dumb silly, not smart silly.
Over-all, Knight and Day is more of a mixed bag than anything else - actually, it’s a pureed blend of a whole bunch of things. Some of them are even good. But it feels like a shopping list of studio pitch notes rather than a combination intended to genuinely satisfy, and even if that’s the intent it still just doesn’t feel right – to much was compromised to get it made and the whole package suffers as a result.
C
