Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Transferring a beloved graphic novel to the screen can work, or not work, or sort of work, or whatever. Uh, stuff. And Scott Pilgrim, and all his six volumes, is well-beloved by the PPCC. We don't remember how he came into our life, but one day, he was there, and we were in love. Scott Pilgrim!

A lot of people love Scott Pilgrim, actually, and his Canadian exploits full of indie bands and Mortal Kombat and the archetype of the 20something quarter-life-crisis-ing slacker. Such as Brianosaurus or the director of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright. Wright's well known to us as the director of the Simon Pegg (another SP!) classics, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, though the style he uses in Scott retains only the deadpan portrait shots and super-rapid cuts of his previous hits. The rest of Scott Pilgrim's aesthetic is very much... Scott Pilgrim. That is, the Bryan Lee O'Malley graphic novel version of Scott: pixelated, 8-bit, abstract, absurd and very ADHD.

The story: Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 20something slacker, going nowhere. He lives in a basement flat in Toronto with his gay roommate, Wallace Wells (a glorious Kieran Culkin). Scott's dating a 17-year-old Chinese Catholic school girl, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who, after hearing Scott jam with his stereotypically bad-in-a-charming-way band, Sex Bob-Omb, gets sparkles in her eyes and falls in love. Meanwhile, Scott's starts falling for a rollerskating American girl with kaleidoscope eyes hair, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).

What begins as a standard adolescent love triangle soon becomes a multi-level Nintendo game: Scott must defeat each of Ramona's seven evil exes in order to continue dating Ramona. These battles are much like scenes from Mortal Kombat or Naruto: defeated exes explode into jingling coins, the soundtrack is 8-bit techno, and opponents mostly power up, run really fast towards each other, and then explode away from each in melodramatically slow motion while a bass-voiced narrator bellows, "K.O.!" And it's all a clever parable for the emotional baggage we bring to relationships blah blah blah. OK, we actually read that somewhere else, but it makes sense so we're repeating it.

For the most part, the film is a super-faithful reproduction of the graphic novel: scenes exactly mimic frames, the narrated "SO ANYWAY..."s float above the actors, pages from the actual comic book are used in the flashbacks, and sounds are often emphasized with floating closed-captioning ("RIIIIIIING"). For this reason, for a lover of the graphic novel, the movie just feels rushed, superficial and unoriginal. The only novel ideas which the movie can provide are: (1) Broken Social Scene provides the music for Sex Bob-Omb, and that's great, and (2) the climactic final duel with Gideon (Jason Schwartzman), the Big Evil Ex, turns very annoyingly, boringly Hollywood, and that sucks. This is kind of a shame. A new medium (movies) could have built up some cool stuff, if only Edgar Wright had been a bit less slavish to Bryan Lee O'Malley and the Standard Hollywood Narrative and had branched out a bit more. It's a very conventional take on a story which broke, and teased, conventions.

That said, this movie is also pretty much required viewing for hip, young 20somethings suffering their own quarter life crises, as seen through the prism of Super Mario Bros. The graphic novel is hilarious, and, if you've never read it, the movie will probably be eye-popping and very funny (did we mention it's very funny? thank Kieran Culkin and the vegan police for that). So watch it! Read it!

Daybreakers (2009)

What is it with vampires these days?

Daybreakers is the logical conclusion of our current pop obsession (popsession?) with vampires. Told from their viewpoint, they are the mainstream, the norm, the mundane. They are the bureaucratic drones and the police force. In other words, they are The Man.

The year is 2019, and it's been ten years since this film's release the outbreak of vampiritis. Since then, most people have turned into yellow-eyed undead with prominent canines. The blood of humans is quickly running out, and the few humans left are farmed in big Harkonnen-style warehouses owned by the Sam Neill Corporation of Exploitation. In other words, The Man.

Into this dystopian setting we thrust the usual bureaucratic minion, Edward Cullen Dalton (Ethan Hawke and his cheekbones). Edward is a sensitive, thoughtful pacifist/feminist/insert your sensitive, thoughtful cause here, and he's gone vegetarian. Unfortunately, not drinking human blood makes you turn into a ye olde vampire, the silent film kind, complete with no hair and horrible wings. Edward's brother, police force Frankie (Michael Dorman), severely disapproves of this counterculture tendencies. Edward himself feels pretty lost, until he bumps into the Requisite Female Emancipator, this time a human named (apparently) Audrey (Claudia Karvan), who introduces him to the man (did you read that, right? MAN. it's a MAN, people! the ladies get no love anywhere, it seems) who purports to have found the "cure" for vampiritis. By the way, this man is played by Willem Dafoe.

So there you have it! Is it worth the price of admission or the price of a DVD? Not really. It's a popcorn-churning, bloodgushing B-movie that delights in itself with some self-aware levity (did we mention vampires explode when a stake goes through their hearts? THEY EXPLODE.), though it never manages to break into truly eye-opening weirdness or truly coherent satire. What oppressed class are the humans supposed to be? We thought they were tuna or salmon for much of the film.

Ethan Hawke is a boring hero; imagine Keanu Reeves on a lot of Valium. Our beloved Sam Neill is his usual glorious self, though he does get involved in a very questionable sequence involving his human renegade daughter (Isabel Lucas), Policeman Frankie and a sort of Medieval "I sell you my daughter's virginity" prison rape. Was this eroticized vampirism and dodgy morals supposed to stick it to the Twilight people? Maybe.

Actually, the whole movie feels like an un-Twilight: a reaction to and play against the tired old vampire tropes that seem so pervasive in our fantasy genre these days. While it doesn't take itself as seriously as Twilight, and therefore is slightly less ridiculous, it still takes itself way too seriously: it is, after all, about a brooding vampire anti-hero stuck in the grind of a desaturated life. A little more sparkly color and slapstick might have been a better choice (or a little more feminism/postcolonialism; just sayin'). Overall, it's a C+: not as crafty and clever as other, better B-horrors (Shaun of the Dead, the almighty Slither), but not horrible either.