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Scott Pilgrim vs The World
I guess today is my Edgar Wright day. Earlier today I watched and reviewed Baby Driver and now I just wiped my tears from watching Scott Pilgrim vs The World.
While Baby Driver is Edgar Wright's ultimate Micky Mousing film, Scott Pilgrim is more towards the other side of Edgar's sensibilities. The way he likes to play with the cinematic language. From the first frame of the movie ( a pixelated Universal logo ) you are constantly bombarded with Edgar's insane amount of sheer cinematic ADHD. He plays with everything like a child who just discovered a huge studio of people willing to execute every his command. If you know anything about film-making, or if you ever paid even a little bit of attention to how a movie is being put together, this will be an utter over-stimulation of your film-senses.
And saying that could make you believe that the movie is bad. Experimental and weird movies tend to not resonate very much with the majority of audiences. Usually because it means that the director deviates way too much from the tested techniques. But in this movie everything just works flawlessly. Edgar Wright always had a sensibility to properly oversell boring moments. He can do a very epic montage of a person making a cup of tea. And you will feel as if it's a very epic moment. Even though it's literally just a guy making a cup of tea. This movie applies this concept to the entire story. Because quite frankly, unless you are in a specific sub-group of people, you probably would not, otherwise, care about the plot of this film. Because well...
The movie is a teenage romantic comedy. It's about a complicated love triangle / square / pentagon / polygon with many vertices. The main character is a bassist in a band that is trying to get a contract with a major label. And that is conflicted about what girl he truly likes. One of the girls, the one that he decides to spend most of his energy onto, ends up having a lot of exes. All of which are very upset that he is now dating her. And so they are trying to stop him from dating her. You know... normal teenage romantic comedy stuff.
The action in this movie is very good. The stunt choreography is fantastic and the CGI is nearly flawless. The effects hold up to this day looking better than a lot of the stuff that comes out these days. And you are probably asking yourself: Action? Stunts? Visual Effect? In a teenage romantic comedy movie? Well this is exactly the way Edgar Wright is making those themes interesting and exciting to watch. If you saw the movie, you will understand how it all works. If you didn't. Well... You are up for a treat.
The comedy surprisingly doesn't over-rely on spoken jokes. While there are quite a few funny one-liners, puns and other types of spoken jokes, most of the film's comedy is visual. It is very hard to describe without listing every visual joke in the movie, but the director finds a lot of ways to show something, or to cut to something, or to not cut from something, or to exaggerate something in just the right way to induce a laugh. There is also a lot of audible jokes that are not dialog. Like a funny sound-effect being put just in the right moment.
On the other hand, the comedy doesn't necessarily kill the drama. Even though this movie is more comedy than drama, dramatic moments are still dramatic enough that, even though I laughed my ass off watching it today, I started this review with telling you that I had to wipe my tears off my face. It's that good.
There is a weird decision made in this movie. All other Edgar Wright films he made for cinema are in the 2.39:1 wide screen aspect ratio. This one is 16:9. Though by the picture of the movie, it's evident that it was shot as wide screen as the others. And some parts of it are played in the original aspect ratio. But most other scenes are cropped into 16:9 which is weird. By the way, you can see it because he uses an anamorphic lens, which makes the bokeh elongated vertically. And the anamorphic lens is specifically designed to shoot wide screen footage on a normal 4:3 film stock. I guess Edgar Wright saw The Dark Knight with it's jumping between anamorphic and IMAX formats and thought that perhaps he can extend on this idea.
Also Michael Cera is the hottest man on the planet earth. And poor Knives!
Happy Hacking!!!
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