Whether you hate him or love him, Michael Cera is quite good at playing some awkward teen in love. The film adaptation of a comic book, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opened to a very disappointing weekend while the big name action movie took the top spot. Even still, the movie has garnered an irrevocable cult following amongst geeks, for which the movie seemed heavily marketed towards.
The action comedy is about Scott Pilgrim, played by Michael Cera, who meets the girl of his dreams, the ever-changing hair color, quite nonchalant, American, Ramona Flowers - played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead. In order to date Ramona, Scott must defeat her seven evil exes, who have formed a league to kill Ramona’s new boyfriend.
The geeky references in the movie; such as the 8-bit Universal scene at the beginning, lots of video game references from t-shirts to quotes to the Zelda theme, the movie’s target audience was certainly kept happy throughout. The comic book sound effects were kept within the movie which offered a refreshing quirkiness that would be expected for a movie of this kind. The uncanny cuts that were used made it seem like we were reading a comic instead of watching a movie, although very awkward at first.
As already stated, Michael Cera is a perfect Scott. The character is the 23-year old bass guitarist for the band “Sex Bob-omb”. Quite a great deal of people are tired of Cera, who plays an awkward “teen” in most of his movies including Juno and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I, personally, find him highly enjoyable. If you do something well, keep doing it, and Cera knows his roles well.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead was a good Ramona…to an extent. It was hard to love her character amongst all the other very enjoyable characters within the film. Winstead performed well and certain parts of the movie, but at others I found her bland.
Ellen Wong as Knives Chau, the high schooler Scott dates until he meets Ramona, was a clear success. She role as a love struck teenager to a broken hearted stalker to an amazing martial artist defending her love was remarkable.
I could continue on and on about the entire cast, because it was perfect.
Also, a movie about bands and music of course must have some good music, right? The music within the film was pretty good. The soundtrack is amazing and worth listening too. My personal favorite song would be the one performed by the fictional “The Clash of Demonhead”. Called “Black Sheep” and actually coverd by the band, Metric, the song is catchy, but fit’s the tone of the movie.
So, why was this film not the top spot this weekend? Lets go back to the audience it was marketed towards. We geeks can only do so much. I will support geeky and fantastic films till my last breath, but if the mainstream audience can not be brought to the theatre then it will be difficult to make the movie “successful”. Scott Pilgrim is a successful film in my books and I honestly thought it would get higher the number 5 on its opening weekend (with number one being The Expendables, two being Eat Pray Love, three being The Other Guys, and four being Inception) . It was slightly disappointing to see those numbers, especially with the film only making $10 million opening weekend, but it will hopefully not take long for a wider range of audiences to enjoy this quirky film that has a message for everyone in a relationship.
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