Game Changer

[Jesus Phish]

I don't think this movie did anything all that new or inventive and I don't think it's going to impact alot, if any, movies in the future.

Ten years down the line, maybe some movie will be written and SPvsTW will get a mention, but that's about it.

Being honest with you, I don't even see this movie lasting much longer in the cinema. It will soon be on shelves placed between Donnie Darko and The Nightmare Before Christmas as a cult status movie.

And I don't know if it's just me but I feel bad for the actors from Superbad, as since then they seem to pretty much be type cast in a similar vein to what they were in that movie. Cera is the shy, quiet around girls type who gets flustered rather easily. Hill is the "fat man fall down go boom"/"I love vag but I dont get any" guy and Mintz is the new age nerd.

It'll be a damn shame if these guys don't break their molds and try other stuff out. Cera doesn't bug me half as much as he seem's to bug other people, but if he keeps playing the same annoying character he'll start to annoy me alot more.

 

[rabidmidget]

See, I came out the far end of Scott Pilgrim seeing it as a parody of hipster culture by simply being self-aware of it's hipster apathy. I have a feeling most of the hate comes from two sides.

1. People think it's a stright up hipster film.
2. Hipsters realize they're being mocked.
3. The hatred of a popular Michael Cerra.

This pretty much covers my opinion.

Every single hipster related joke in the movie is at its own expense, but it seems that "hipster" is the new social leprosy after "emo", so people simply dismiss it as a celebration of "hipster" culture rather than a satire.

*let it be noted that I'm not a hipster, although I do like indie music.

 

[Zolem]

Also, think about what this means for vid-game movies. "Nobody wants to see a movie that runs off the most bizzar aspects of videogame logic, that's why we cut it out to be more realistic." Oh yeah Mr Director? Have you seen Scott Pilgrim? It uses combo anouncements, fireballs, boss battles, power-ups, even a 1-UP, and nobody qestioned it. Why? Because nobody in the movie questioned it. They never commented on it, just like we don't comment on the lack of those things. To have the videogame elements present but not heavily comented on is a great way to use them in context without it being goofy. Otherwise, we wind up with stuff like The Legend of Chun Li that's as generic an action flick as you can get, has gmae names stamped on, and inculded a photoshop fireball as the grand finally that frankly I've seen done in higher quality and more realisticly on YouTube. So, yeah, if that's realism in videogame movies, I'd rather bust out a Gameshark. Or at least a SPinning Bird kick. Come on, even the cartoon had that!

 

[tehroc]

Deus Ex Machina endings always turns me off, this is nothing new.

 

[cobra_ky]

i like how Scott Pilgrim started off as a comic book about video games, but now that it's a feature film it's suddenly "hip". i also like how many people think hipsters are lame because they're too cool, when hipsters are supposedly cool because they ironically think lame things are cool.

Deus Ex Machina endings always turns me off, this is nothing new.

The Vegan Police are a deus ex machina. Using the 1-up is not.

 

[Axolotl]

All it means is that Hot Fuzz guy is a better director for the masses (okay, a better director, period) than Brazil guy,

I'm all for Edgar Wright but he is not better than Terry Gilliam. Sure he helped make Spaced but Gilliam helped make Monty Python.

 

[Crunchy English]

The movie is nothing special, the ending is nothing special and this is the first time in a long time I've disagreed with Bob. What's weird is that I'm not dramatically opposed to Bob's take on it, I just think its wrong. I don't think Scott Pilgrim is a horrible movie made by horrible people, I think it's a boring movie made by boring people. I have a pretty good tolerance for satire, I seriously enjoy abstract or surreal elements in my movies. Scott Pilgrim was forgettable.

In fact, let me troll Bob for a moment. This is being said purely to infuriate Bob, but that doesn't mean it isn't completely true:

The Expendables will be more memorable ten years down the line, because it had an incredibly recognizable cast. Neither Pilgrim nor the Expendables was even remotely important, interesting or entertaining. But Expendables is more familiar, so people will remember it, likely as "that Stallone movie with all the action guys".

 

[AquaAscension]

No one is really (save a couple) posting about the content of this article. At all. People are just throwing around the word hipster like they're homophobes and hipster is the new word for "gay." I'll get back to this later.

But big movements are made from small moments, and it's very possible that in this instance, Scott Pilgrim has done something to change the way we tell stories on film.

As stated on the first page of the article, Scott's death and rebirth is not a new trope at all. The movie that most prominently comes to my mind is The Matrix in which Neo dies but is reborn only to become stronger and save the day. What's interesting about Scott's death, however, is the way in which video game "language" is used to facilitate the language of the movie.

Here's an example of movie/film language from the article:A shot (or several) of the exterior of a location (building, house, whatever) followed by a cut (read: change of shots) to an interior location where, well, where some plot is going to happen, usually.

We all understand this as short hand for "these two places are the same; they are as the two sides of a single coin." This is movie language condensed into film and translated by your brains so that the film is imbued with meaning that makes sense to you. When Neo dies and is reborn in The Matrix, it's not hard for us to put meaning onto that incident. Perhaps he's brought back by the power of love, perhaps he's fated to (because the oracle poignantly tells him that he's waiting and, when asked why, she responds, "I don't know, another life maybe." We understand that he's been reborn without having to be told such because the film speaks a language that our minds have learned to translate.

Cue Scott Pilgrim's death scene. This scene gives us not only movie shorthand for death and rebirth, but it also gives us video game shorthand for another chance, another life, another run through. This all leads to:

A year after Scott Pilgrim, will more youth-targeted comedies be borrowing the shorthand of games and manga to pump up the story or rebrand tired metaphors?

In a sense, it's almost as if the title of this article is a pun. The real thing that's changing is that extra language/new ways of presenting old tropes are being presented by Scott Pilgrim.

With all these comments on how Scott Pilgrim is hipster and stupid or how Scott Pilgrim is amazing and awesome, it makes me wonder if people even read the article or just saw "Game Changer" and decided to whip out their allegiance to the movie like a crazed tween wearing a Jacob shirt does when she passes some other sparkling personality wearing an Edward shirt.

Was Pilgrim a game changer? I don't know. But I do think it tried something new and succeeded on many levels although failing on the broad market appeal factor. It's too bad though; I don't see any other movies offering new takes on tired tropes like this one.

 

[Flamingpenguin]

I loved it, but I didn't really see the 1 up thing as revolutionary or anything. I guess it's because it was buried under all the other video game references. But hey, one thing is for sure. It's a way better explanation for the death/rebirth thing than say... the way Harry Potter ended. There was no reason he should have come back to life. I mean seriously, WTF?

I loved this movie, but only because it seemed like it had everything for me. Not revolutionary, but damn good.

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

I doubt it. It was a great movie. But i don't see the extra life thing becoming a staple...especially considering how bad the movie did in the box office.

 

[The Random One]

The fact that movies targeted at teenagers aren't borrowing language from games is a huge oversight. The fact that games are borrowing language from movies (indiscriminately) is a huge mistake.

Is Annie Hall that one movie that was envisioned as a three-hour whodunnit that ended up so badly that the editor suggested to Allen that he cut out the entirety of the main plot and made the movie from what would have been a romantic subplot? If so, it's already on my to-watch list (which is composed roughly half of Moviebob's suggestions anyway) and the comparison between it and Scott Pilgrim is even stronger, since one of my favourite things about the comic is that it inverts the action story paradigm by making the hero's quest a subplot and the romantic shenanigans the main plot.

 

[Weaver]

Sorry Bob, I just can't STAND Annie Hall. Hell, just about all of Woody Allen's films bore me. I don't find him funny, especially when my film class used that film as an example of comedy....I didn't crack a smile the whole movie.

I agree, like all Woody Allen movies, Annie Hall is just bland, unfunny and kind of boring.

 

[Axolotl]

I'm all for Edgar Wright but he is not better than Terry Gilliam. Sure he helped make Spaced but Gilliam helped make Monty Python.

Gilliam is a much better artist than he is a director. Gilliam is to Wright as George Lucas is to Steven Spielberg. (ie: if Gilliam storyboarded and Wright directed, ALL WOULD BE WELL.)

I guess you're right. Althrough it is weird how similar Wright's career has been to Gilliam's.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Spoiler warning adhered to, I will return and edit this post when I have seen the movie. Before then, however, I will say that it probably won't change cinema in the short term as Hollywood is most likely going to stick with the old tried and true techniques of making millions of dollars.

I shall return.

 

[octafish]

Sorry Bob, I just can't STAND Annie Hall. Hell, just about all of Woody Allen's films bore me. I don't find him funny, especially when my film class used that film as an example of comedy....I didn't crack a smile the whole movie.

I agree, like all Woody Allen movies, Annie Hall is just bland, unfunny and kind of boring.

Oh Max. Don't say that Max. Annie Hall is one of those perfect films that comes along very rarely Max.

 

[Fygar]

I wish Movie Bob would stop talking about Scott Pilgrim. I really do.

 

[sszebra]

Scott Pilgrim distilled down the rebirth/second chance, to it's simplest form, the extra life. Which is itself is a console replacement for the arcade gamer's next quarter. Which also, perhaps unintentionally, represented the life blood of the 7 Exes.

Despite which side of the unusually polarizing film you're on, two things are true. 1ilgrim invoked a trope in a way that was unique and audacious. 2: It will never be duplicated in film. It's ballsy for a protagonist in a surreal, one of a kind film to come back to life thanks to an old NES gameplay device. But doing it twice would mean it's both silly and unoriginal.

 

[MasterChief892039]

I highly doubt we'll see 1-UPs become a staple plot device in the movie world. Even in Scott Pilgrim it felt a little cheesy, and that was a expressly videogame-esque world. In a film that had nothing to do with video games, a 1-UP would be ridiculously out of place and intellectually offensive to the viewer. And in terms of the 1-UP being likened to "hammerspace" - perhaps hammerspace was once considered innovative, but you would never see it used in a serious movie. That's because it's corny and a cheap way of making things happen that, according to common sense, should not. Same with 1-UPs in films.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy Scott Pilgrim though.

 

[The Austin]

Wow, I missed the spoiler warning at the top of the article. Fuck.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

It may have sucked, but the Max Payne movie did feature some game elements, notably the screen flashing red to indicate injury.

That said, it was based on a game anyway, and did horribly, but still.