All right, here we go. I know it's been a while since I promised this post, and even longer since I've blogged at all, so I'm gonna play things fast and loose with this here review -- spell check be damned!I hate to say it, but for the first time, Edgar Wright let me down. "Spaced," "Shaun of the Dead," "Hot Fuzz": they're all very good or great. He's a key director for my generation. But the dude dropped the ball on this one. It's just that simple.
OK, so I don't get labeled as a hater or whatever, I'll give you the good stuff first. Any conversation about "SP vs TW" and its positives has to start with Kieran Culkin as Wallace, Scott's roomate. Loved him seven years ago in "Igby Goes Down," and he just keeps getting better as an actor. He brings Wallace (my favorite character from the "SP" books) to life so perfectly, any time he was on screen the movie immediately got better. This isn't the kind of role that wins Oscars, but hopefully it's the kind of role that leads to bigger parts in the future.
Also, while we're talking about the goods, I'll say this: Edgar Wright is incapable of making a movie that doesn't look or sound amazing. His use of color, lighting, editing and sound design make this one of the most thoroughly enjoyable action movie experiences I've had in a while, probably since JJ's "Star Trek." Edgar knows how to shoot a movie and deliver a series of images to audiences in a way that is exciting, informative and fun. You can feel a love of the possibilities of the cinema in every frame he shoots -- kind of how you could feel that with Kurosawa and early-to-mid-period Spielberg.
But while we're talking about the sound, let me segue to the bad. For the most part, the soundtrack kicks ass. However, a big chunk of this movie is about musicians. And in the original "SP" books, Bryan Lee O'Malley makes it perfectly clear what the music made by his characters should sound like. In the epilogue to one of the books (4 I think?) he says that the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Graham Parsons-led band that birthed alt-country, is the soundtrack to Scott's head, while Uncle Tupelo, the alt-country trio Jeff Tweedy was in before he started Wilco, is the favorite band of Stills, the lead singer of the band Scott plays bass in, Sex Bob-omb.
OK, so, given that information, you'd think that the big screen Sex Bob-omb would be an alt-country band. Hell, the Flying Burrito Brothers' cover of Bob Dylan's "To Ramona" is used in the movie. But, all of the Sex Bob-omb songs were written by ... Beck. Yep, they didn't bring in an alt-country guy like Jeff Tweedy, Ian Felice, AA Bondy, the Avett Bros., or even Beck's roots music-leaning buddy, Jack White. No, they brought in garage rock/sex rock/acoustic mopey rock (sometimes)/Danger Mouse pawn Beck to write Sex Bob-omb's songs. And how were the songs? Oh, they were fine. Probably the best Beck songs I've heard since "Sea Change." But they weren't Sex Bob-omb songs. They were Beck songs (which were imitations of White Stripes songs).
And that may seem like a minor gripe, but I'm using it to make a bigger point about the film. "SP vs the World" is a well-executed technical exercise that misses the point entirely, kind of like those pesky songs.
In anticipation of the movie, I read the six volumes of the "SP" series in the week before I went to the theater and saw it. And while I greatly enjoy the books, they're not without their problems, the biggest one of which being that the story, even after Bryan Lee O'Malley has spent six books and upwards of 1,000 pages telling it, feels rushed. That's due to the richness of the world and characters he created. I could have kept reading about super-powered hipsters in Canada for a dozen books, and I was sad to see it end so soon.
My second issue with the "SP" books is that their two protagonists, Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers, just aren't good people, and O'Malley doesn't hide this fact. At one point, Ramona tells Scott, "You're the nicest boyfriend I've ever had," to which Scott replies, "That's sad." Yes, it is, because Scott's a dick. You see, something you learn from the books is that pretty much every supporting female character in the books has had her heart broken and her life damaged by Scott in some way. He's a selfish, self-absorbed, willfully ignorant prick, a fact that the movie pretty much white-washes over entirely -- and not only does this take several layers away from its title character, it pretty much results in the removal of characters' entire back stories (did you ever see Kim Pine not behind the drums in the movie?! In the books that character is so much more) and the erasing of entire characters whose mere presence would make it clear how bad of a guy Scott is (I'm sorry you didn't get to be in the movie Lisa, I really liked you).
At another point in the books, a far more sympathetic character tells Ramona, "You're not nice!" and no, she's not. You know those "seven evil exes" that Scott has to battle over the course of the story? Well, in the book they each have backstories, and the thing that unites each of them is the fact that they were hurt, damaged, emotionally harmed by this insensitive and selfish bulldozer that is Ramona Flowers. They each had a reason for being angry, for being vengeful, for having been turned "evil." However, in an attempt to make Ramona more likable, the exes' backstories were pretty much minimized (Matthew Patel), changed so they become Bond villains (Gideon) or removed entirely (the twins have no lines, when in the books they said some pretty important stuff to Scott).
So essentially, we went from having six mythology-rich books fueled by an alt-country soundtrack and centered around two terrible, selfish people who were together because they each deserved to have someone that bad thanks to all the harm they'd done to others TO a movie about Michael Cera and a quirky girl with multi-colored hair walking through the snow to the sweet sounds of OK Beck songs while doing well-filmed battle with criminally underused character actors.
So yeah, looks like Edgar kind of missed the point. Oh well, at least we have Wallace.
