Scott Pilgrim

I realize that I haven't been terribly consistent with my posting lately. This post and last week's post were both late, and I haven't done a post on The God Delusion in the past two weeks. I'm sorry about the delays. My life has been a little bit crazy lately. Hopefully I should be back on schedule next week with a post on Monday and another post on The God Delusion by next Friday. In the meantime, I hope you'll be patient with me.

Short Version: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the best movie to come out in a long time. If you have any interest in video games, offbeat romantic comedies, or highly original movies, you should go see it right now.

Longer version: This Friday I went with a group of friends to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. A few weeks prior I got the chance to borrow the graphic novels from a friend. I enjoyed the books, but I was skeptical that the movie would be able to condense the story enough while still preserving the spirit of the comics. In fact, the movie did an even better job than I had dared to hope.

The movie takes all the weirdness of Scott Pilgrim's world and puts it on the screen, without trying to rationalize it or explain it away. It adopts the conventions of comic books and video games in new and interesting ways. I feel like this movie is pointing the way forward for comic book and video game adaptations.

More importantly though, the movie has excellent writing and a great story. Beneath all the silliness and absurdity the movie has a surprising amount of depth. The fights may seem unrealistic, but the way the characters interact and grow and change is very authentic.

Scott Pilgrim is a great movie. It's also a movie that groks contemporary geek culture. I honestly didn't expect to see a movie like this for at least another five or ten years, if ever. I'm so used to mainstream culture demonizing gamers that I'm surprised that a movie like this, which celebrates gaming culture, got made.

Of course, getting a movie like that made is one thing. Getting it to be successful is something else entirely. Although it got great reviews (excluding a few people who decided to review the audience instead of the movie) the movie isn't doing that well in the box office.

I'm hopeful that the movie will end up being successful. Once word of mouth gets around, I expect a lot more people will come and see it, and in any case it's pretty much destined to become a cult classic. So I think that in the long run the film will definitely be a success.

Still, I would like to see the movie do well in the short term. For one ting, the people who made it deserve a solid return on investment. For another thing, I'd like to see how the reviewers who panned the film react when it becomes a much loved classic.

We will see what happens. Only time will tell.