Thanks in no small part to its recent endless repetition on cable movie channels, I have become a fanboy of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. From the very first opening credits — where the Universal Pictures globe is presented in boxy pixel graphics with an old-school sound chip music theme — to the final shot, where Scott and his girlfriend open the door to head to the ‘next level,’ — the movie is one big tribute to video gaming, grunge rock of the ’90s, alt-whatever lifestyles, crappy warehouse bars, bladder control, Toronto and even, in sly little moments, Japanese anime.
Enjoying this movie takes a certain, um, mindset. It will annoy a lot of people, including a lot of young people who won’t get the Mario/Mortal Kombat/World of Warcraft/Dance Dance Revolution/life-with-the-band references. And if you’ve never heard of the movie and want to know about the plot…well, I’m not even going to try. “An epic of epic epicness” is the tagline on a lot of the movie posters, and that seems as good of an explanation as any.
The quotes from the film are priceless. “We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff!” Scott screams, as his band launches into another song. Elsewhere, when talking to his girlfriend: “When I’m around you, I kind of feel like I’m on drugs. Not that I do drugs. Unless you do drugs, in which case I do them all the time. All of them.”
But what it is, more than anything else, is wildly original. I’m almost always a fan of movies that can’t be pitched in 20 seconds, that might repulse the usual corporate suits who green-light films, that break out of the box and try to do something different. Scott Pilgrim does all of these things, while still seeming somewhat commercially accessible.
I love all of the fight scenes — particularly the “band vs. band battle” scene that calls to mind a key scene in Kung Fu Hustle — but my undoubted favorite is the scene where Scott is dead. But this is ‘dead’ in the MMORPG sense, so he’s really just in exile for a while. I can’t find the original anywhere online, so I present to you this fanfic YouTube re-enactment (and how geeky is that?):
