Scott Pilgrim vs. the World Post Release - Page 2

One thing I've been curious about -- and it's a weird thing to be curious about, given the wealth of detail put into this movie -- is whether or not "Launchpad McQuack" made it into the film or not. The first song Sex Bob-omb plays in the books, tabbed out by O'Malley.

I found Alison Pil strangely cute with all those fake freckles.

Heh, so did I. One of the many reasons I wish she was more prominent.

The sacrifice was Kim Pine's story for Knives' being much more thoroughly developed. I love that they managed to streamline so much material and character development into one cohesive fucking fantastic movie. Can't wait to see this again. The throwaway "The book is better than the movie" line as Scott returns after his 1UP slayed me. As did the Seinfeld sequence. And Young Neil. So so so so good.

I did appreciate how much more Knives' story was focused on. I liked the way she and Scott teamed up at the end with the whole "2 player sequence." Sure in the book it's Ramona that tag teams with Scott and maybe that makes more sense (at least for the books), but I liked the way the movie went.

I also loved the cut from Scott telling Ramona and Knives that he had to fight Anti-Scott alone to the two of them walking out of the club chit-chatting. It's not the most original gag in the world, but I loved it.

I was afraid that they might not be able to get away with Gideon impaling Scott and that they'd have to tone it down, so I was really surprised and satisfied when it finally happened.

One of the things I really liked about the film was that I would have been happy with either a Ramona/Scott ending OR a Knives/Scott ending. I was invested in both relationships.

My crush on Alison Pill increased exponentially with every "1-2-3-4!"

It is, and plays during the opening credits...though from what I recall it's not the words in the comic. On the soundtrack it's called We Are Sex Bob-Omb I think.

Heh, because "Launchpad McQuack", "that's not the actual title of the song".

I forget if I mentioned this, but the only thing from the book that I really felt was truncated in the movie was the Todd Ingram fight. Probably because it's pretty close to the books except for having a giant chunk missing. I do like that you can see Honest Ed's in another shot.

Having seen it yet again, I think the only thing that truly bothers me, still, about the film, is that Ramona is so passive during the third act. She was never really a "damsel in distress" in the books and yet in the movie (aside from the kneeing) she just stands around while Scott and Gideon fight over her. I have a feeling that if time and money weren't an issue, Wright might have reshot a bit more of the ending to get Ramona in on the action, but instead they just altered the last couple minutes.

What I wonder is how late in the game was it that they decided Scott would be with Ramona in the end. In the script I read he ended up with Knives, and the final fight plays out the same way in the movie, until Knives is like "go with Ramona. I'm all good now." At that point it ends rather like volume 6, so I wonder if this is something from those later reshoots they did.

From what I've heard, the ending of Scott ending up with Ramona is very new. All of the really early screenings had the Knives ending.

Elvis Mitchell did a great, spoiler-free, interview with Edgar Wright on the Treatment recently. Highly reccomend it.

Man. Shooting in Honest Ed's would have been a NIGHTMARE. But yeah, I was sad to see that scene go as well. Still, thoroughly enjoyed the new & improved bass battle.

"Sounds like someone wants to get a bit funky."

The fact that Wright managed to make me not miss Crash And The Boys saving Scott's ass and being destroyed by Ingram (I was almost disappointed when I saw them die during the Patel fight) is a testament to how well he manages to play this whole thing out.

Also, the best exit of a duo making a cameo ever. "YEAH~!" *high-five*

Goddamn, you know it's a good movie when the fight you like the least is only because there was less character development of the exes than the rest of them (I'm talking about the Katayanagi Twins, who literally have no lines the entire picture and no past beyond "they dated Ramona. At the same time."). But even then, you still get Scott standing there in his "4 1/2" shirt, playing a chord with his taped-together bass, slowly pulling together the energy that propels him through that completely badass and wholly believable finale where he sounds and acts ready (and then proceeds) to murder every motherfucker in the room that is between him and Ramona. Wright still slips a great moment in during what's the slightest damn battle of the movie. He's a master.

I wasn't ever a huge fan of the Katayanagi Twins in the book, so I wasn't sad to see their backstory go. When Scott steps on the pedal and a burst of special effects lightning came out I flashed back to memories of Ghostbusters and Back to the Future.

That kind of sucks that Wright changed the ending at the last minute, as him getting together with Knives would have been an interesting direction to take Scott's journey, but I'm sure what he has in place is satisfying. Oh, for those that have seen it, how does Brie Larson fare as Envy Adams? I haven't seen any footage of her yet.

It was the only one that felt out of place the way the exes had been built is what I mean. And them having no lines whatsoever was weird, but then again, neither actor spoke English.

The ending does feel a little "off", but at that point, the audience is practically begging for that last step to be taken and for Ramona and Scott to be together (because he just burned through like twenty guys and fought to the blinking-red death with Gideon Gordon Graves to be with her), it makes it work.

And Brie Larson basically pulls off the super-hot-but-total-bitch Envy of Volume 3 perfectly. She doesn't come back for the end the way she does in the books, but her little quick subplot is wrapped up very well for something that didn't even need to have closure.

Also, she looks really goddamn good in tight white pants.

I am in love with Envy Adams.

Back of the line, bub.

But it also reminds me of how hard Brandon Routh knocks it out of the park on this one. The expression on his face when he says "chicken isn't vegan?" is priceless.

Routh's "I don't know the meaning of the word" (and the subsequent 'He really doesn't') is 100 per cent win. He deserves a second shot at Superman based on the good will he generates from this performance.

And the double cameo that caps off the Scott-Ingram fight is brilliant.

It's been almost a fortnight since I saw this. I WANT TO SEE IT MORE.

I must say I didn't care for Brie's performance of Envy the first time around, but it did grow on me upon the second viewing.

"She dusts!" was great Routh too (including pantomiming of dusting).

I've got to ask.

Scott vs Roxy: Does it still resemble this in any way shape or form?

It doesn't really relate to her performance but Metric's Clash at Demonhead song and the way Wright edits that performance have been stuck in my head all day.

More worth mentioning, despite the extreme shortening of Todd's appearance in the film vs. the books, the entire backstage conversation all the way up to the movie's invented bass battle is the movie firing on all cylinders. Along with the song, I can't stop hearing Simmons' desperate sadness: "You punched the highlights out of her hair. HE PUNCHED THE HIGHLIGHTS OUT OF HER HAIR!"

No.

And because this is a post-release thread, no spoilers, aka, this is a hint that there's spoilers coming:

Edgar moves the Envy "solution" from Envy to Roxie, and switches the knowledge of the back-of-the-knee-tickle technique from Scott to Ramona. Roxie is about to smash his face in, Ramona yells to tickle the back of her knee, Scott's like "what", Ramona goes "just do it", he pokes her, she orgasms into coins. In fact, Ramona's whole hammer thing is moved to Roxie, too.

Edgar then moves the Ninja Gaiden moment to Scott vs. Gideon, complete with Scott landing in the pose and a "how ya doin' back there"? This doesn't end the Gideon fight, it just cuts his face and the fight gets even better from there. Shit's crazy, man.

Basically, everything up to the conversation with Todd and Envy is as close as it can be to the books. It begins to really move away from the books right as the Todd fight ends and feels like something of a different beast when it finishes. It works on it's own level, though, because fuck if Edgar Wright is not the master of disguised setups and brilliant payoffs.

"Do you know how long it took me to find the contact info to form the league? LIKE -- TWO HOURS! BLEAH!"

Also, I can't stop thinking of and laughing at the look on Kim's face when Gideon refers to her as a "hot redhead drummer".

I see nothing that isn't awesome about those two paragraphs. Thank you. That'll hold me till Friday.

Sorry, didn't get to check back here for a while. Thank you, The Cameo and Tyler Foster, for answering my question in regards to Envy, as she was (against logic) absolutely one of my favorite characters in the series. The "Closure" bit sealed the deal for me in terms of loving her to pieces. It's nice to see Dellamorte agrees . Anyways, I'll stay out of here until I see the flick.

Absolutely incredible. Haven't come out of a theater so buzzed and energetic about a film (save for one obvious ex[in]ception) in over a year.

CHUD has some great great stuff coming from the Altanta screening event, so keep an eye out.

So, for other people who have seen it, let's discuss:

A common complaint I've heard levied against the movie is that the Scott and Ramona relationship isn't fleshed out enough to give the moments towards the end of the film enough weight. This is coming up both from print/professional critics and from random people posting on message boards. What say you? I can see where they're coming from - but I also question whether or not it's really necessary that there is much of a need to dig too deep into the "why" of the matter. Ramona spells out why she's with him pretty often: she wants something simple. But Scott never really explains why and we're not given a whole lot of clues to why, besides her being his dream girl.

But are we? I mean, let's break it down - she's a whole separate world for him. She doesn't care about his band being successful or even very good. She isn't concerned with his lifestyle too much. She becomes representative of a fresh start for Scott the same way he is a fresh start for her. The whole movie is built on the idea of a guy trying to climb over the wall of his girlfriend's past transgressions, which in turn reflect his own (Envy, Kim and Knives, although unfortunately Envy doesn't get the time she gets in the books) - it's a more cinematic and accomplished Chasing Amy, really, if you want to break it down to that. As he gets over her past (SCOTT EARNED THE POWER OF LOVE!), he gets over his own (SCOTT EARNED THE POWER OF SELF-RESPECT!) and finds that there is something in his life worth working towards. And it's her. In the way she uses doorways through time and space, she herself is a doorway through time and space - out of that manchild period of the 90s/2000s generation and into full-blown adulthood.

It also manages to be reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine, simply because it requires both people to take a step forward and be honest with regards to their own self-images. They need to see things from another point of view - and where Eternal Sunshine is a head-first dive into how, in a way, our memories sour over time and we bury the good things deeper and deeper as bad things occur, Scott Pilgrim is how the dark parts of the past, even when we've tried hard to bury it, can intrude on the present (via the Seven Evil Exes) and wreak havoc on that self-image. Each Evil Ex is a portion of Scott, if only that portion of Scott was the whole of him. Ramona is unable to handle a truly honest reflection of herself and her past and instead returns to that past in order to avoid facing it. Scott and Knives have to practically move the Earth itself to snap her out of this somewhat self-induced hypnosis (in a way represented by the Gideon chip on the back of her neck - keeping him always in her head, unable to let go of the past and move on, a clever sidestep to the "head glow" that O'Malley himself fails to explain clearly enough in the books). The movie is a great long push from the world to make these two people accept themselves so they can accept each other and try to make something of their lives. They have to accept that while the other person has done shitty things in their past, they themselves have left a swath of damage in their wake as they've gone through life. Scott gets to it first, but he has to die before he can even understand it. Ramona is awoken to it by Scott's refusal to give up on her.

It feels like there's a lot of relationship in there to me. And of course, in a way, the end of the movie is, once again, reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine: having managed to grow up over the course of the movie, they're rewarded by being given a fresh start, a chance to start the "game" all over again the right way - making the ending shot and countdown thematically and cinematically perfect for the story told.

I think the movie's just such a sensory overload that the romance gets steamrolled by the movie the first time. I think once you see it again, you can really appreciate the intimacy of the moments Scott and Ramona have together.

Yeah, there is just SO MUCH being thrown at you at every second of the film that it really begs for a second (and third, fourth, fifth, sixth... seventy-ninth) viewing to really appreciate all of it.

Well, if I'm pulling all of that out of it after one viewing, god knows what a second viewing's going to do to me. If it retains that special flavor, the thing's going to be on my all-time best ever list with a rocket attached to it.

Ramona is a complete thought of a character, they're at the beginning of a relationship, and the ex-boyfriends are a metaphor for baggage. Scott is intimidated by her changing her hair all the time, he's happy not to change anything, and he's afraid of change. She starts dating him partly because he's safe, and he's attracted to her because she's different and dangerous. By both beating the baggage and Scott doing it not because he's in love with her, but because he believes in himself, they can start fresh. Pretty awesome.

If only I could be that succinct with my thoughts. But yeah, the visuals - the Subspace door and particularly "CONTINUE?" and the countdown at the end - very much spell out the idea of moving forward and the sense of renewal. And from that point of view, it's the world's craziest "how we met" story.

That use of the Queen music cue is still making me smile. Just pitch perfect.

Great movie, as everyone else has said. The comics never really grabbed me, but Wright turned it into something I could really get into for a couple of hours. And man alive, that Mary Elizabeth Winstead is teh cutezors.

Also, the teeny little leap of the vegan police as they exit was awesome.

It kinda sucks when you see a movie a week out and pretty much all of your oh-so-original musings have been thoroughly explored and fleshed out on the discussion thread already....

...but who gives a shit when it's regarding something this amazing? Just means you guys are pros.

This is Edgar Wright's masterpiece, and it's resonated with me in such a different way than Hot Fuzz and Shawn. On top of that, I got to experience it with an audience probably just a hair below the Comic-Con folks in terms of enthusiasm for the material and the performers. The skill on display of effectively condensing and adapting so much material, making it his own, making every single fucking character count, and doing it with such style....just amazing. Some day, I am going to get to see a movie like this with some black people in it, but I digress...

I have only a passing familiarity with the source material, but I'm definitely going to track it down now. Just hearing that there's more Todd is enough...

Are you talking about the Flash Gordon ring shot before the final battle? So great.

I really liked the film, but I need to see it again--I got too caught up in comparing the film to the books the first time through.

I was thinking about this earlier today, and it finally got cemented when I read the interview with Mary Elizabeth Winstead on the main page today. I really like how the new ending works for Knives' character. I haven't seen the movie with the original ending, but I think the new one does a really good job of completing her arc. She gets over Scott in the books too, but you can't fit that whole 250 page final book in the movie, so I like how it wraps up her character. She comes to terms with Scott and what he did to her and then pushes him to go with Ramona. It really worked for me.

I think it was really smart of Wright to put a little more focus on Knives and to inject her into the final battle. It's my favorite diversion from the books (Well, the Katayanagi twins fight is, but only for the super cool factor). I would have liked to see Ramona be a little more active in the finale too, but I'm happy with the way it is.

The only thing that bugged me in regards to the new ending is that it creates two lines that conflict with each other, which is that Ramona tells him in his death dream that "Maybe I'm not the one you should be fighting for", which helps him earn the power of self-respect, but then Knives tells him he's been "fighting for [Ramona] all along". Like I said in an earlier post, I feel it's more about Scott's decision to fight alongside Ramona while she faces her own demons, and I think Knives could have said something different. But that's a massive nitpick.

I saw it a second time.

It felt the same as watching it the first time. Which is a ridiculous sort of feeling that I'm so incredibly glad to have. There is a density and detail to this movie that is almost maddening. The movie constantly echoes the idea of letting go of the past, of wrongs that have occurred to you, to lead to a better future. Even Gideon goes "don't let the past block your future". As has been pointed out, the Exes are prime examples of Ramona's baggage while being characters who refuse to let go of the past themselves, thus the whole existence of the league. At the end of the movie, Scott lets go of everything - the band, his home with Wallace, his relationship with Knives, the past he made for himself, what we know as his whole world - in order to step through another door with Ramona and try all over again. He exits the haze of early 20's ennui with only his love for her to his name. The past finally doesn't matter to him. It's all about the future now.

It's telling that, on their first date, the move to them being an "item" comes right after they take Subspace back to Ramona's place.

Also, yeah, Brie Larson in a picture-perfect replica of the dress from the end of volume 2 and the clothes she has on backstage = pure sex. It's really interesting, though, because her character's whole breakthrough comes from being reminded of her past, the opposite of the others, who dwell upon it incessantly until it dooms them. She abandoned Natalie to become Envy, and when Scott says "so long, Natalie", it breaks the entire wall she's built down between her old life and her now. Despite her not taking Julie's shit in college not being in the movie, she reverts back to Natalie in our last shot of her when she literally tells Julie to fuck off.

Of course, she's dating her childhood best friend - which is pretty much said explicitly in dialogue in the movie itself - so in a way she too is clinging to the past. She's dodging facing mistakes she made by totally eliminating the person she was, but taking one sole trinket from that time with her. She's pretty complicated for a character only in three or four scenes total; that must have taken some judicious pruning to keep her from being too complicated (which would stop the movie cold), because the whole Envy/Scott thing really could be a movie unto itself just based on how much goes on in the books.

Armond White... LIKED it?!

It starts to make sense once you see the whole thing is just an excuse to rant about Tarantino for 8 paragraphs, but it's still a surprise.

Not too much of a surprise; White is a fan of Wright's work, down to calling the Don't trailer the only good thing in Grindhouse.

If you removed every reference to Tarantino, that review would be spot-on. It's still a pretty excellent piece.

So... doesn't this mean that the movie must be bad? I'm so confused.

I had a feeling that would be the case. The points he was making seemed well-reasoned, and he came across as quite passionate about the film's successes. It's just the whole thing is couched in that constant barrage of criticism and it started to feel like he was using this film to grind an utterly unrelated ax.

But then, that's what makes it a classic Armond White review.

loved this so much. Liked the way it startes out feeling like a little indie movie and get more epic and fantastical as it goes on. So much fun. Probably the first time in forever that when it came down to the final confrontation that I really wanted to yell at the screen "Kick his ass!" Loved the message and themes of it along with how funny it was.

Out of personal curiosity, does this film pass the Bechdel Test?

I can think of at least one moment that makes it pass.

So I liked it. A lot. But... I felt awkward watching it.
- I was uncomfortable with the pacing and the structure. I won't say I disliked it, just I thought about it as the film went on.
- Michael Cera did a good job, but he was still Michael Cera.
- Good effort from all the exes, except the twins who basically got short changed.
- Routh was the best IMO. The effects, the bass battle and the vegan police punchline all rocked.
- As the end moved from night club to night club I was missing some of the chill out scenes of daily life. I was glad when Scott died as it gave the film a bit of a chance to decompress.
- I don't think Sex Bob-Om make good music. I preferred tCaDH.

I feel like the slow evaporation of the calm scenes from the beginning of the movie is deliberate; the further Scott learns about Ramona, the more claustrophobic his insecurities make him, to the point where he can't even get away from these problems through the band or doing anything. At that point he's already been half-kicked out of his home. Edgar's talked about how he becomes obsessed with things as time goes on - at first he's finding things easy to overcome, like the first couple bad things a lover informs you about "oh that's not that bad, I can work past that"; around Todd Ingram - where Ramona's issues begin to reflect his own through Envy showing up again - it stops becoming something easy for him to deal with. It's then and there he begins to get very snippy and bitchy with Ramona. By the time the twins show up, he wants to eliminate his insecurities completely ("I want to tear them apart"), but becomes obsessed with the fact that Ramona's with another guy - who in turn is an alternate Scott (a personality palette swap - a man just as stuck in his own post-adolescence, but on the very dark side of it).

And Edgar's talked about how he basically threw out the idea of classical pacing and structure with the movie - instead of making it an ebb and flow sort of deal, he made a whole bunch of tiny moments and at the end bundled all the tiny moments into a bigger package that encapsulated what he was saying with the movie. It's pretty interesting, as he reflects on the fact that he's not very naturalistic with his structures (and you could argue that he managed to make like fifteen or twenty little short films with an overarcing theme, and that each short goes with the title showing up: "Scott Pilgrim Is Dating A High Schooler", "The Infinite Sadness", "And Then It Was Time...", etc.).

I think it's in the interview at AICN right now. http://aintitcool.com/node/46105

My review http://tinyurl.com/3ylvjlq