Last year, George Miller announced his plans to release on Blu-ray a black-and-white cut of Mad Max: Fury Road, but that black-and-white cut never did surface on Blu-ray. Its absence from the bare-bones Fury Road Blu-ray was precisely why I avoided buying that Blu-ray. For once in my life, I made a wise decision, because on December 6, the black-and-white cut will finally arrive on Blu-ray. Marketed by Warner Home Video as the "Black & Chrome Edition," the black-and-white cut is considered by Miller to be the definitive version of Fury Road. The following is a repost of my June 4, 2015 discussion of Fury Road.
The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."
The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.
Oscar-winning Room star Brie Larson has had a killer year as a dramatic performer, so it's time to revisit my March 5, 2015 discussion of an offbeat cult movie in which Larson got to revisit her little-known past as a teenage pop singer, as well as experience a taste of her future. In this 2010 movie, Larson briefly dabbled in the same kind of pulpy material she'll be tackling soon as the star of the forthcoming tentpole blockbusters Kong: Skull Island and Captain Marvel. This 2010 movie has also been on its director's mind lately. When it aired on Channel 4 in the U.K. last month, the director live-tweeted a bunch of crazy behind-the-scenes details about the movie.
The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.
I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."
Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzzdid go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.
While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
There was only one word that kept surfacing in the mental notes I took in my head as I was watching Short Term 12 for the third time, in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, and that word was "economical." Asian American indie filmmaker Destin Cretton's second feature film, the story of a group foster home counselor (Brie Larson) and her determination to save her facility's newest resident (Justified's Kaitlyn Dever) from the same kind of child abuse she herself used to be subjected to, is a triumph of economical storytelling, a film that prefers to show rather than tell, while many other films with similar subject matter opt to smother the audience with dollops of on-the-nose exposition, speechifying and worst of all, mawkishness.
Destin Cretton (center), the Short Term 12 cast and the film's SXSW Grand Jury Award
Neither of those three things show up to ruin Short Term 12, which Cretton based on his own 2009 short film of the same name. The only major exposition the audience receives at the start of the film is the terse instructions Larson's character Grace gives to Nate (Rami Malek), the facility's newest staffer, about how to handle the at-risk kids they're assigned to look after ("Remember, you are not their parent, you are not their therapist; you are here to create a safe environment, and that's it"). None of the backstories of the film's four main characters--Grace, her good-humored co-worker and boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), Dever's character Jayden and Marcus (Keith Stanfield), a resident with both musical and ichthyological aspirations who's turning 18, so his new age requires him to move out of the short-term home, but he's deeply troubled about having to leave--are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks. They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments. For example, when Marcus refuses to celebrate his 18th birthday with a party or cake and simply requests to have his head shaven, the film withholds for a while from the audience Marcus' reason for his request. When the film finally makes clear--after the haircut--why Marcus wanted it, it's an unexpected and quietly devastating moment.
Nobody in the film says "My dad's been hitting me" or "I was raised by the system" when they first appear on screen. It just wouldn't ring true. Grace, Jayden and Marcus are survivors of abuse who have difficulties with communication and trusting anyone, so Jayden and Marcus prefer to express the pain they're experiencing through the art they create. In Marcus' case, his art takes the form of a mesmerizing freestyle Cretton shot in one long uninterrupted take.
The believable and stripped-down dialogue is a great example of the verisimilitude Cretton aimed for in Short Term 12 (Cretton himself once worked at a similar facility for at-risk youth, and his experience with social work is evident in moments like Grace's thorough inspection of the kids' rooms for drugs and the scene where Mason and Nate have to carefully restrain Jayden when she has a meltdown in her room). This is the kind of off-kilter film where a character like Mason introduces himself not in a monologue about how his foster family saved him from the streets--that monologue is saved for later, for the most fitting occasion--but in a monologue to Nate about a comedically disastrous workday: the day he shit his pants in front of a kid who tried to run away from both him and Short Term 12, to be exact. It's a brilliant way to establish Mason's compassion and doggedness--a doggedness that surfaces later when he has to deal with Grace's sudden reticence about both being pregnant with his child and accepting his marriage proposal--without lapsing into the standard bad-movie-writing method (ridiculed most memorably by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) of having Mason declare that "I'm compassionate and dogged."
Grace is equally compassionate and dogged in both her attempts to help the introverted Jayden, who's too scared to report her father's abuse, and her interactions with another similarly introverted charge of hers, Sammy (Alex Calloway), who frequently makes escape attempts that are foiled by Grace, Mason and another counselor, Jessica (a pre-Brooklyn Nine-Nine Stephanie Beatriz, who bizarrely looks and sounds 10 years younger than how she normally looks in her leathery, Emma Peel/Catwoman-esque cop outfits on Nine-Nine). But because Grace didn't grow up with the type of loving and nurturing parents Mason was lucky to have and she still bears emotional and self-inflicted scars from the years of physical and sexual abuse she suffered, social work is more of a challenge for her emotionally and mentally than it is for Mason. Margaret Cho recently said in an interview that the late Robin Williams, one of the kindest comedians she knew in the business, "knew how to give but he had a problem receiving." That perfectly describes Grace.
The film's implication that artistic expression has saved and will continue to save these troubled kids' lives--including Grace's--is never spelled out in dialogue either. It's nicely conveyed in only visual terms. Speaking of which, as someone who'd always get huge pencil stains on the sides of the hands while doodling or sketching with pencils, I love how Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak let the audience see the pencil stains on the sides of Grace and Mason's hands while they're relaxing at home by sketching portraits of each other.
Larson's performance is another one of those performances that make you say, "Why, Academy? Why the hell did you sleep on this performance?" The SXSW audience was far more attuned to Short Term 12's stripped-down wondrousness. They awarded Short Term 12 with Audience and Grand Jury prizes in 2013. This gritty but life-affirming film makes me eager to see what else Larson, Dever and Stanfield have up their sleeves acting-wise, as well as any of Cretton's future film work. It's hard to dislike any film where a character names his pet fish after a certain legendary Queensbridge rapper who happens to have a way with telling a story, just like Short Term 12 itself.
None of Joel P West's minimalist score cues from Short Term 12--which, to borrow the words of animator Timothy Reckart regarding Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score, don't dictate the emotions of the film and instead suggest the depth of those emotions--are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.
Every Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm intentionally pulling out the ticket that says "Mad Max: Fury Road" because I'm just in awe of both the film's visuals and the intriguing writing for its female characters, and I want to discuss how satisfying an action film the fourth Mad Max installment is--as well as discuss the one aspect that's disappointing. Mild spoilers ahead.
The boldest thing about director Destin Cretton's 2013 indie drama Short Term 12 is its lack of on-the-nose exposition and speechifying, which makes it stand apart in a genre where dramas about counselors or social workers who want to protect child abuse victims are frequently on-the-nose about their storytelling and over-explanatory or preachy. "None of the backstories of the film's four main characters... are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks," I said a couple of months ago. "They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments."
The same goes for Mad Max: Fury Road, Australian director George Miller's incredible and much-talked-about return to the post-apocalyptic action franchise that made his career 36 years ago. Aside from an introductory voiceover that's reminiscent of the recap about the fall of civilization at the start of Miller's earlier action masterpiece The Road Warrior, Aussie ex-cop Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy, ably taking over Mel Gibson's titular role) has even less dialogue in Fury Road than he did in The Road Warrior. He makes Detective Frank Bullitt look like a flibbertigibbet doing an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk.
It's remarkable how outside of the introductory voiceover, Fury Road conveys Max's PTSD and his guilt over the lives he was unable to save strictly in visual terms, namely two-second flashbacks to a dead little girl who keeps taunting him (either she's a daughter he raised many years after bikers killed both his toddler son and his wife in the first Mad Max film or a kid he failed to save from a recent massacre). During one of those flashbacks, another apparition appears in Max's mind, and he's the only Aboriginal in the whole goddamn movie. The Nerds of Color blog points out that out of Fury Road's cast, "actress Courtney Eaton is part Maori and Chinese, Zoe Kravitz is African American and Megan Gale is half-Maori. The text of the film does not reveal these to be necessarily conscious choices, meaning these actresses did not need to be persons of color, but here they are." But aside from those three cast members, the movie's ensemble, just like the casts in so many other recent movies about the future, is as white as a Lawrence Welk Show taping.
The Caucasity is a small speed bump in a car chase movie that's a mother lode of great examples of show-don't-tell storytelling, from Max's minimal dialogue to any scene involving war-rig driver Furiosa (Charlize Theron), both the film's real hero--even more so than her adversary-turned-ally Max--and its breakout character (aside from, of course, the bad motherfucker with the flamethrower guitar, a.k.a. the Doof Warrior). Not until Fury Road's third act does the audience realize why Furiosa chose to turn against her despotic, water-hoarding boss Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) and help five of the warlord's female sex slaves--one of whom is pregnant with Joe's child--escape to safety.
Furiosa's doing it out of remorse for being previously complicit in the same exact sex-slavery system that kidnapped her as a child. She was abducted from her home in the region known as the Green Place, along with her mother, and was raised in the Citadel, the mountaintop society ruled by Joe, and she wants to return to her matriarchal tribe in the Green Place and provide Joe's breeders with sanctuary there. But the film never specifies if Furiosa was actually one of Joe's sex slaves before becoming one of his imperators, a.k.a. lieutenants (a character detail that's not stated in the movie is Furiosa's infertility, which explains why she's a rig driver and imperator instead of one of Joe's breeders), and it doesn't have to. Like Chris Klimek said in an NPR piece about Fury Road, "We're not subjected to a cinemas-interruptus monologue where she tells us why [she's helping the women escape]. We get why. Theron's eyes show us why."
The beauty of Theron's lean and mean performance--by the way, when Theron said "guzzoline" instead of "gasoline," that moment, even more so than either the return of Max's old Interceptor or the presence of Junkie XL's suitably chaotic-sounding score, really made me feel like I was home again in the dystopic desert world I grew to enjoy during The Road Warrior--is similar to the beauty of Brie Larson's performance in Short Term 12, where many of the things Larson's equally laconic character doesn't say and is unable to share with other people are more powerful than the things she does say. If Short Term 12 is a triumph of economical storytelling, Fury Road is a fucking 62-foot buzzer-beater of economical storytelling.
"Miller didn't have much money [for 1979's Mad Max], but he made his action look astounding by focusing on clarity," noted Kevin Lincoln in the Dissolve essay "What modern action films could learn from the original Mad Max." In Fury Road, which was filmed on location in Namibia, Miller has much more money, but his action sequences continue to focus on clarity--instead of opting for something like ultra-fast cuts that end up making everything incomprehensible--and they emphasize old-school stuntwork and old-school practical FX in the age of 007 windsurfing a fake-looking CGI tidal wave and Indiana Jones being chased through an equally fake-looking CGI jungle. Fury Road is 80% practical FX and 20% CGI, and most of that CGI was used not for explosions--or animating Max's leaps and dives in the same way that animation was used to create Spider-Man's movements in live-action Spidey movies--but for removing stunt rigs and creating Furiosa's mechanical left arm.
There's a purity to Fury Road's action sequences that's as appealing and intriguing as the purity in both the film's dialogue (part of me wishes Miller made Fury Road into a silent movie like Buster Keaton's The General, which he's cited as an influence on his "western on wheels" and has already been mashed up with one of Junkie XL's Fury Road score cues by some genius over on Vimeo) and the characters' motivations. So it bugs me when I stumble into a criticism about the purity of those motivations, like Leonard Maltin's complaints that "I didn't care about any of the characters" and "They are so sketchily drawn." Are you basically saying, Mr. Maltin, that Fury Road could have used more exposition to get you inside the characters' heads? Because Fury Road really doesn't need more. Just like Short Term 12, it's a film about survivors of abuse and PTSD sufferers learning to overcome their difficulties with both communication and trusting others--or turning those difficulties into their strengths--to fight their adversaries together and regain their agency. There's no time for speechifying or letting everyone know at length how they feel. They've got a Green Place they need to drive to.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. This week, I drew the ticket that said "Thor." But I feel like I've said all I could say about the first Thor movie in my discussion of Thor: The Dark World a couple of weeks ago. Also, I'm tired of talking about superhero movies. So I'm ditching the movie I drew--it's my blog, I can do what I want--and focusing my attention this week on a smaller-scale movie about a completely different kind of hero. Even after its release two years ago, it still deserves as much attention as the kind a superhero movie always gets from the press before its release, and if you're not familiar with this little movie, familiarize yourself with it now on Netflix streaming.
There was only one word that kept surfacing in the mental notes I took in my head as I was watching Short Term 12 for the third time, in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, and that word was "economical." Asian American indie filmmaker Destin Cretton's second feature film, the story of a group foster home counselor (Brie Larson) and her determination to save her facility's newest resident (Justified's Kaitlyn Dever) from the same kind of child abuse she herself used to be subjected to, is a triumph of economical storytelling, a film that prefers to show rather than tell, while many other films with similar subject matter opt to smother the audience with dollops of on-the-nose exposition, speechifying and worst of all, mawkishness.
Destin Cretton (center), the Short Term 12 cast and the film's SXSW Grand Jury Award
Neither of those three things show up to ruin Short Term 12, which Cretton based on his own 2009 short film of the same name. The only major exposition the audience receives at the start of the film is the terse instructions Larson's character Grace gives to Nate (Rami Malek), the facility's newest staffer, about how to handle the at-risk kids they're assigned to look after ("Remember, you are not their parent, you are not their therapist; you are here to create a safe environment, and that's it"). None of the backstories of the film's four main characters--Grace, her good-humored co-worker and boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr.), Dever's character Jayden and Marcus (Keith Stanfield), a resident with both musical and ichthyological aspirations who's turning 18, so his new age requires him to move out of the short-term home, but he's deeply troubled about having to leave--are unveiled in clumsily written infodumps or pointless flashbacks. They're unveiled gradually, piece by piece, and at believable moments. For example, when Marcus refuses to celebrate his 18th birthday with a party or cake and simply requests to have his head shaven, the film withholds for a while from the audience Marcus' reason for his request. When the film finally makes clear--after the haircut--why Marcus wanted it, it's an unexpected and quietly devastating moment.
Nobody in the film says "My dad's been hitting me" or "I was raised by the system" when they first appear on screen. It just wouldn't ring true. Grace, Jayden and Marcus are survivors of abuse who have difficulties with communication and trusting anyone, so Jayden and Marcus prefer to express the pain they're experiencing through the art they create. In Marcus' case, his art takes the form of a mesmerizing freestyle Cretton shot in one long uninterrupted take.
The believable and stripped-down dialogue is a great example of the verisimilitude Cretton aimed for in Short Term 12 (Cretton himself once worked at a similar facility for at-risk youth, and his experience with social work is evident in moments like Grace's thorough inspection of the kids' rooms for drugs and the scene where Mason and Nate have to carefully restrain Jayden when she has a meltdown in her room). This is the kind of off-kilter film where a character like Mason introduces himself not in a monologue about how his foster family saved him from the streets--that monologue is saved for later, for the most fitting occasion--but in a monologue to Nate about a comedically disastrous workday: the day he shit his pants in front of a kid who tried to run away from both him and Short Term 12, to be exact. It's a brilliant way to establish Mason's compassion and doggedness--a doggedness that surfaces later when he has to deal with Grace's sudden reticence about both being pregnant with his child and accepting his marriage proposal--without lapsing into the standard bad-movie-writing method (ridiculed most memorably by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story) of having Mason declare that "I'm compassionate and dogged."
Grace is equally compassionate and dogged in both her attempts to help the introverted Jayden, who's too scared to report her father's abuse, and her interactions with another similarly introverted charge of hers, Sammy (Alex Calloway), who frequently makes escape attempts that are foiled by Grace, Mason and another counselor, Jessica (a pre-Brooklyn Nine-Nine Stephanie Beatriz, who bizarrely looks and sounds 10 years younger than how she normally looks in her leathery, Emma Peel/Catwoman-esque cop outfits on Nine-Nine). But because Grace didn't grow up with the type of loving and nurturing parents Mason was lucky to have and she still bears emotional and self-inflicted scars from the years of physical and sexual abuse she suffered, social work is more of a challenge for her emotionally and mentally than it is for Mason. Margaret Cho recently said in an interview that the late Robin Williams, one of the kindest comedians she knew in the business, "knew how to give but he had a problem receiving." That perfectly describes Grace.
The film's implication that artistic expression has saved and will continue to save these troubled kids' lives--including Grace's--is never spelled out in dialogue either. It's nicely conveyed in only visual terms. Speaking of which, as someone who'd always get huge pencil stains on the sides of the hands while doodling or sketching with pencils, I love how Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak let the audience see the pencil stains on the sides of Grace and Mason's hands while they're relaxing at home by sketching portraits of each other.
Larson's performance is another one of those performances that make you say, "Why, Academy? Why the hell did you sleep on this performance?" The SXSW audience was far more attuned to Short Term 12's stripped-down wondrousness. They awarded Short Term 12 with Audience and Grand Jury prizes in 2013. This gritty but life-affirming film makes me eager to see what else Larson, Dever and Stanfield have up their sleeves acting-wise, as well as any of Cretton's future film work. It's hard to dislike any film where a character names his pet fish after a certain legendary Queensbridge rapper who happens to have a way with telling a story, just like Short Term 12 itself.
None of Joel P West's minimalist score cues from Short Term 12--which, to borrow the words of animator Timothy Reckart regarding Ry Cooder's Paris, Texas score, don't dictate the emotions of the film and instead suggest the depth of those emotions--are currently in rotation on AFOS, but they ought to be.
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
The 2010 coming-of-age flick Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is an interesting anomaly in the work of Edgar Wright, the great British director behind the innovative sitcom Spaced and the irreverent Cornetto trilogy with Spaced stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World's End). It's his only adaptation of someone else's creation so far, it doesn't take place in England, neither Pegg nor Frost are in the cast and it was his first studio movie, so that meant he had to deal with the often absurd American test screening process.
I recently listened to Wright discuss gauging audience reactions in his Blu-ray audio commentary for Scott Pilgrim's deleted scenes, which include the film's original ending before it was reshot (should Scott have ended up with Knives Chau or Ramona Flowers?: I think the film should have ended either with Scott being single or Scott, Knives and Ramona becoming a threesome because a fight like the ones they had versus Gideon Graves is bound to make everyone horny). Something during that commentary didn't sit right with me. A brilliant and unique comedic filmmaker like Wright should not have to make decisions based on test screenings, even though he has said he considers it "a good thing to do because you see where the laughs are and where you can change things by half a second to get a bigger laugh."
Aside from comments from test screening audience members to DreamWorks Animation that Hiccup should be left disabled at the end of the first How to Train Your Dragon movie, have those test screenings ever been really useful? If Martin Scorsese tried to win back the 40 GoodFellas test screening audience members who walked out after the movie's first 10 minutes, GoodFellas wouldn't have been the GoodFellas we know and love. Unless I'm mistaken, neither of Wright's Cornetto flicks were tweaked due to test screening reactions (in fact, when Hot Fuzzdid go through the test screening process in America, Wright defied a suggestion to change Hot Fuzz's title). I hear those movies turned out okay.
While Wright has said he's proud of Scott Pilgrim's final cut, that first experience of trying to please studio execs during the making of that movie had to have colored his heartbreaking decision to quit directing his longtime pet project, this summer's adaptation of Marvel's Ant-Man, where Wright was replaced by Bring It On director Peyton Reed. While squabbling with Marvel Studios execs over the direction of Ant-Man, I'm sure Wright was thinking, "How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?"
It's remarkable that a movie as inventive as Scott Pilgrim survived such a maddening process where the comments from test audiences and studio execs often win out over what the filmmakers want--and did so with all its inventiveness intact. Scott Pilgrim is such a perfect marriage of source material and filmmaker. Bryan Lee O'Malley's original Scott Pilgrim graphic novels feel like a Toronto indie rock scene version of Spaced. Scott and his roommate Wallace are basically Tim and Mike, except Wallace isn't obsessed with joining the military and is aware he's gay. While Spaced imagines that time when you're trying to navigate yourself both professionally and romantically through your 20s as silly fan film-ish versions of either Star Wars, Hong Kong gun fu, a George Romero flick or The A-Team, Scott Pilgrim cleverly envisions relationship drama as both Kung Fu Hustle and an 8-bit Nintendo game. Wright's film really gets video games like the 8-bit ones I grew up playing. (Speaking of 8-bit, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich's original score for the film, which can be heard during both "Hall H" on AFOS and "AFOS Prime," effectively combines 8-bit with orchestra, especially during the "Boss Battle" cue for the climactic moment when Gideon is handed his ass, and it goes completely 8-bit at times, like during that amusing cover of Jerry Goldsmith's Universal logo music at the start of the movie or the source cue Dan the Automator created for Scott and Knives' Ninja Ninja Revolution video game.) Along with Run Lola Run, The Raid: Redemption, Edge of Tomorrow and maybe Dredd, Scott Pilgrim is one of the best video game-style movies not based on an actual game.
Wright's understanding of another kind of visual language, that of comic books like O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim novels--and his ability to figure out which parts of that visual language work on screen and which ones don't--fortunately turn the Scott Pilgrim film into the opposite of Ang Lee's lead-footed overstuffing of 2003's Hulk with screen panels and visible page breaks, or as Stop Smiling magazine's Justin Stewart described the screen panels and page breaks in my favorite takedown of Lee's Hulk, "the cinematic equivalent of Karl Rove dancing." Also, thanks to action filmmaking skills he previously demonstrated in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and even a few Spaced episodes, Wright makes convincing fight scene combatants out of the least likely actors you'd ever imagine to be in a fight scene, whether it's Michael Cera as Scott, Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter or Jason Schwartzman as Gideon the girlfriend-beating music producer douche (Wright went on to do the same with Nick Frost during his fight scenes in The World's End, transforming him into the most agile rotund action star who's not Sammo Hung).
As believable as Cera is in his fight scenes, he's overshadowed in his own movie (it was supposed to turn the gawky and conservatively dressed teen from Arrested Development and Superbad into a bigger movie star, but nobody outside of Scott Pilgrim novel fans flocked to the movie in the summer of 2010) by funny turns by Ellen Wong as Knives, Kieran Culkin as Wallace and Brandon Routh as dim-witted vegan bassist Todd Ingram, one of the Evil Exes who used to date Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and are now challenging Scott to a duel. Scott Pilgrim proves that Routh, who brooded through all of his passable impression of Christopher Reeve in Superman Returns, is at his best as a light comedic actor, which is why I'm glad Arrow's current season is having him tap into those comedic gifts again as the Atom (it's refreshing to see a revenge-minded superhero--Ray Palmer's in the game to avenge his wife's murder--who's not brooding all the time).
As Knives, the clingy, too-young-for-Scott schoolgirl who doesn't take being dumped by Scott very well, Wong is a real find, and she deserves to go on to bigger and better things (since Scott Pilgrim, she's been a cast member on both the Canadian-made 2011 Afghanistan medical drama Combat Hospital and The Carrie Diaries). Part of me wishes the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels and movie version were mainly about Knives instead of Scott. It's interesting to read Asian moviegoers' varied reactions to Wong's performance as Knives five years after the movie's release. They were as divided about the Knives character as black moviegoers were divided about Denzel Washington's heel turn in Flight in 2012.
Writers from YOMYOMF would say things like "Ellen Wong alone was worth watching the film. She was freakin' ADORABLE. Dolls should be made of her," and Asian American Scott Pilgrim fans dug Knives so much that they've cosplayed as her. Meanwhile, a discontinued Asian Canadian collective of bloggers that called itself "the invazn" felt that "It's kind of sad to see Asian women be the 'exotic in-between' girlfriends who aren't even real girlfriends, but pure ego boosters for the main character's lack of masculinity" (someone should have told them O'Malley himself is half-Asian and not some white graphic novelist writing from the outside about people of color he's never interacted with), although the blog's reviewer enjoyed seeing Knives take charge towards the end of the movie and battle both Ramona and Gideon.
"I was just super-proud that I had created a plum role for someone like Ellen Wong, who otherwise may never have been in a major movie, just by being born Asian and Canadian," wrote O'Malley in a fascinating 2013 Tumblr post. He admitted in that post that the cast of mostly white characters and a few Asian characters in the original novels reflected an unenlightened attitude towards race he had for the first 20 years of his life, and he ended up being appalled by how white the movie looked. His willingness to admit those things must have taken as much guts as it does for Scott to admit to his exes Knives and Kim Pine (Alison Pill), the snarky and sullen drummer in Scott's band Sex Bob-omb (notice how all the drummers in the movie are female), that he shouldn't have been so careless about how he treated them when he dated them. Scott Pilgrim gets some flack for being an overly noisy and hyperactive movie that doesn't take enough time to breathe and be more naturalistic, but that scene where Kim briefly sets aside her snarky and sullen demeanor and wordlessly accepts Scott's apology is one of several human touches in the movie that make Scott Pilgrim more human than the average video game-inspired movie. It's also an example of how great an actor Pill is (watch her also command the screen in a much more broadly played way during her one scene as a fascist schoolteacher in Snowpiercer).
Scott Pilgrim does so many things well as a video game movie, a comic book adaptation and a coming-of-age farce that it's easy to forget what it also accomplishes as a movie about small-time rock bands. I knew Scott Pilgrim would be a solid battle-of-the-bands movie right when it had characters attempting to talk to each other inside a club, and they couldn't hear each other, a typical aspect of modern-day nightlife Hollywood rarely gets right. The running joke of the unenthusiastic MC who's as excited about introducing musical acts as Robert De Niro is about sitting through a press junket is another funny, straight-out-of-real-life touch during the movie's band scenes, as is the way that Beck, who wrote and recorded Sex Bob-omb's material, purposely downgraded the quality of his own sound to capture what a not-so-great band in the Toronto indie scene would sound like. Scott and his bandmates view the glitzy Clash at Demonhead--led by Scott's hot ex-girlfriend Envy Adams (Brie Larson)--to be evil corporate sellouts, but the ironic truth is Envy and her band don't sound as mediocre as Sex Bob-omb do, as we discover during "Black Sheep," sung quite nicely by Larson very briefly in the film (while it's sung on the Scott Pilgrim ABKCO song album by Metric frontwoman Emily Haines, whose Toronto-based band provided material for The Clash at Demonhead and whose fashions O'Malley used as the basis for Envy's in the novels). I wish the regular release of the ABKCO song album included the Larson version of "Black Sheep" as a bonus track, but fortunately, it can be heard in its entirety as a Blu-ray extra or right below.
You also have to be in lesbians with a movie that riffs on Goldsmith's Universal logo music not once but twice. While rewatching Scott Pilgrim in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, I completely forgot about Chris Evans cracking his neck to the pounding drums of the Universal logo music and laughed my ass off. What other movie has done a sight gag like that? It's also a moment where you're so relieved that those meddling kids from the test screening audiences who have attempted to ruin so many perfectly decent movies didn't get to intervene.
Selections from the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."
