Scott Pilgim Vs. The World (5 out of 5)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is awesome, which begs the questions, as raised by Stephanie Zacharek in her negative review of Inception, if that is enough? A better response may be: so what? In the grand scheme of film and culture and art does awesome really amount to anything but a two hour confectionery that, like lightening, strikes with swift brilliant force and then is gone? It’s maybe the very problem that gnaws at all classical minded film critics as they forge on into the future. I guess, if we are to rate Scott Pilgrim in a vacuum, sealed off from the last hundred, or even ten, years of film history, the answer is that yes indeed, it’s awesomeness is truly enough, or at least under the (maybe sad?) realization that if most, if not all, films are becoming no more than flashes of noise and colour than they might as well at least strive to be cute and hip and funny and hurdle images at the screen that are just a little unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. So, there you go.

The story revolves around Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) a geeky bass player from Toronto who has just hooked up with a 17 year old Asian girl, Knives Chau, who also doubles as Pilgrim’s number one fan. His band is called Sex Bah Bomb and they play local gigs hoping that there will be at least one non-band member in attendance that hopes they won’t suck.

Then Scott lays eyes on the Technicolor haired Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and its love at first sight. He constantly dreams about her, stalks her at parties, ignores Knives who is so infatuated that she hardly notices and orders packages on Amazon just to fill the waste basket when he finds out she’s the delivery girl.

Eventually, Ramona agrees to go out with Scott but he soon finds that there’s a catch. She moved to Toronto from the U.S. in order to escape her past and rediscover herself. As it turns out, she is running from seven evil exes who have all teamed together into one league in order to fight Scott Pilgrim to the death. This makes up most of the body of the film despite the fact that a fight to the death is a fight to the death and an evil ex is an evil ex and once you’ve seen two or three you’ve seen about as many as you probably will ever need to.

The story isn’t a whole lot more complex than that. What makes it interesting is that its director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) takes great, excessive pains in order to make this material actually feel like a video game or a graphic novel. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, like Speed Racer before it, is one of the few films that know how to use special effects for all they are worth, creating, not so much a film, as, for better or worse, an experience that completely immerses you in it’s spell. Scott Pilgrim is a lot of things. Boring it is not.

If there’s any problem, it’s that Wright does too good of a job. He spends so much time on visual details: the split screens, the accompanying words that go with sounds like the phone ringing or the door knocking, the video game aesthetics, the bright lights and so on, that he kind of forgets to do anything with the material going on underneath.

Thankfully Wright is in the company of good stars who manages to make the material funny and sweet and give it a bit of a human element that can at least propel it for two hours. Michael Cera does his typical loveable goofball routine, Winstead is perky and cute while still always being one of those girls who can never quite be trusted to still be there the next day, Kieran Culkin plays deadpan of Scott’s gay roommate and gets away with it and Anna Kendrick shows up for a few scenes of quirky, fast talking funny business.

But a film like this doesn’t exist as its parts. It’s a whole package that you either let in or reject outright. It’s so busy that it doesn’t have much time for character or plot, but what a lightshow it provides. In the end, Wright has a good eye for visual comedy and Cera is as endearing a presence as any but the film ultimately rises and falls on just how spectacular and inventive it can be. It is spectacular. It is inventive. It’s also like nothing you’ve probably ever seen. Sometimes, that’s all it takes.

Up In The Air (5 out of 5)

One of the things they teach you when studying human resources is that if firing someone ever gets easy, you should maybe consider re-evaluating your career path. Like almost everything learned in the classroom setting, I took this advice at face value and logged it in the proper annals of my brain without ever considering the elegiac implications of such a statement: the very thing that Up In the Air, as subtle and biting an overturning of contemporary North American corporate culture as there has ever been, is all about.

The hero of the story is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who acts as the guy who is called in when big companies outsource work to downsize their staff because they don’t want to deal with the mess themselves. It’s his job to fly into town, inform the recipient of his company of the bad news, console them, alert them to their options and bid them adieu, never to see them again.

This is Bingham’s life for all but a handful of days of the year: always flying, never stagnant enough to ever become attached to anything of worth or value to him except his job. He essentially has no home, no past, no future and no definition: a man adrift in a world whose only loyal inhabitant is himself. Consider him a merge between William Hurt’s Macon Leary from the Accidental Tourist and, maybe more accurately, Marcello from Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolche Vita. He's always drifting from one encounter to the next, never staying put, never feeling anything, never being anything to anyone. Life is essentially getting from one necessary banality to the next on the way to either retirement or death, which, to men like Bingham, may be about the same thing.

Bingham is the typical archetype for the North American corporate success story. He’s married to nothing but his work, which his does with cold, unaffected precision. In between he hosts informational seminars in which he tries to convince people that life is essentially carrying a backpack: you must fill it only with the most necessary items in order to travel lightly and without strain. Pictures are only for those with bad memories, Bingham advises, so throw them out and make room for something you need.

The heaviest object that can be carried in the backpack is personal relationships. Not only do they weigh you down and slow you up, but they require extra baggage costs. And sure enough, when Bingham meets a similar minded girl Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel lounge their flirtation involves debating which rental car service is superior, their attraction revolves around their collections of VIP cards and their eventual sex seems more out of a need to pass the time between firings than any sort of lustful desire.

There is, however, one thing of meaning that propels Bingham. Because of his constant travelling he wants to be the seventh man in history to accumulate over 10 million Frequent Flier Miles. Such an achievement would provide the only kind of elite status he has to prove he is anything more than nothing.

Then something happens. After the young, aptly named, Natalie Keener (Twlight’s Anna Kendrick) is hired, she brings with her plans to save the company money by setting up Internet connections with clients in order to do their work without the constantly high travel expenses. Bingham is quick to reject this proposition and for good reason. Not only is the sole human connection he ever makes going to be taken away from him and automated, but the chance to achieve his goal would be ripped out from under him.

Bingham is soon assigned to take Natalie out on the road with him to teach her the ropes of the business. The two initially clash. He can’t understand her naivety and optimism: looking for perfect love, thinking she can change the world, etc, and she can’t understand how his life has become so simple and meaningless, and all the while we are reminded of that virginal young girl in the café across from Marcello in La Dolche Vita.

Along the way Bingham subverts his course in order to take pictures of a cardboard cut-out of his sister and her fiancé (ala the dwarf in Amelie) against famous American backdrops for their wedding. Bingham is estranged from his family, has never met his brother-in-law to be, and can’t understand why anyone would want pictures of themselves in places they have never been before.

The answer to Bingham’s ignorance comes during the wedding (the film's center and best section) in which it is revealed that the reason for the gimmick was because the couple could not afford a honeymoon, but still wanted something symbolic in it’s place, and the power of the symbol is both salient and enlightening: the pictures are fake but meaningful, while Bingham’s life is real but empty. It’s the turning point of the film.

Up In the Air thus becomes a gentle meditation of the importance upon which North American culture places on career-mindedness and high salary living. The film is only the third from Canadian director Jason (son of Ivan) Reitman after Thank You For Smoking and Juno, who by now should be considered within the upper pantheons of great contemporary directors and here strikes an even balance between what was most rewarding about those two films. It both satirises corporate culture to great humorous effect but also delves deep into the personal psyche in order to examine the toll that such a life takes on the very fundamentals of living. The American Dream, it is shown, has failed us again.

Thus, Bingham, through his relationship with the two woman and his life and from his time at home with family, he slowly grows to realize that life is nothing without, not only things to be proud of, but people to share the pride along with. Like Marcello, he’s seen too many things and been around too long to even break out of the mould he’s set for himself, yet his story is not one of tragedy but one of hope. It’s too late for him, but there’s still life beyond the flight schedule board for the rest of us.