This film is an energetic void, full of lights and words and images, with bodies that bounce and scatter into coins, a punky girl that seems open to about everything and a high school girl that will do just about everything (she is Pilgrim's number one fan; sort of in the "Misery" sense, but less crazy and homicidally busy). While we’re in the mood for references, let’s look at another. And I bring this guy up cause he is Canadian and this movie is Canadian, and maybe, just maybe the creators of the film (Michael Baccal and Edgar Wright) or graphic novel on which it was based (Bryan Lee O'Malley) will have heard of this man: Norman McLaren. McLaren garnered some fresh cheers and created some serious experimentation in the last century where he would draw and scratch directly on the celluloid film stock, creating a really interesting variety of imagery –sometimes resembling cellular forms:
As well as sometimes looking like early video game graphics:
And so on. What’s the point of bringing this up? I think it's because movies (dating back from McLaren's prescient animations up to today's SPvTW) have, in some ways, embraced the video game throughout history. I think it’s interesting that here is a movie, SPvTW, that celebrates computer games, and this comes around the same time as TRON Legacy, another movie that embraces the world of video games, particularly the old, classic ones. Are we moving towards something new in our culture? – maybe video games that play on screens as big as those in movie theatres, and the projector wears the controls and leads the movie/game along through his/her decisions; or even there would be a whole cadre of remote story-makers up in the wall!? There could literally be a "Drama Queen” to keep the game from just meandering into mundane Search & Destroy activity -- plot-less and flat; maybe video games will, over time, morph into movies and vice versa!
I hope not. I mean, we’d need to add a whole lotta drama to appeal to the general public. And this is why - any good movie has some kind of pacing to the unfurling of the plot. The classical narrative line is stuck to by the majority of filmmakers, though often independent and dramatic movies tend to limit the intensities of their rises and falls; however, their aim is verisimilitude (reality in the everyday sense, of course), not fun. What I missed in SPvTW was a sense of pacing. I found the bells & whistles –i.e. the video-gamey stuff - to really pack a lot of audio-visual information into every scene, constantly whipping & beating a dying horse, and this horse petered out before the half-way mark. The filmmakers sacrificed energy and verve for mundane and dramatic conventions of story-telling and this took a toll on my attention. I had a similar problem with Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life”. The detail of the visuals overloaded my senses – up to the point that I couldn’t pay attention to the material any longer – every gnat-sized moment had millions of swirls and undulations of activity going on, and it refused to let up to catch one's breath, so to speak - not even in the stretches of minor drama.
I hope not. I mean, we’d need to add a whole lotta drama to appeal to the general public. And this is why - any good movie has some kind of pacing to the unfurling of the plot. The classical narrative line is stuck to by the majority of filmmakers, though often independent and dramatic movies tend to limit the intensities of their rises and falls; however, their aim is verisimilitude (reality in the everyday sense, of course), not fun. What I missed in SPvTW was a sense of pacing. I found the bells & whistles –i.e. the video-gamey stuff - to really pack a lot of audio-visual information into every scene, constantly whipping & beating a dying horse, and this horse petered out before the half-way mark. The filmmakers sacrificed energy and verve for mundane and dramatic conventions of story-telling and this took a toll on my attention. I had a similar problem with Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life”. The detail of the visuals overloaded my senses – up to the point that I couldn’t pay attention to the material any longer – every gnat-sized moment had millions of swirls and undulations of activity going on, and it refused to let up to catch one's breath, so to speak - not even in the stretches of minor drama.
SPvTW otherwise had some interest - some good acting (the exes were uniformly pretty good), particularly from the lead – Canadian Michael Cera – playing the eponymous protagonist as well as the actress playing his Asian girlfriend, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong); however, the new girl on the block, Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), seemed oddly uninterested, as if she kept trying to follow the movie along the way and just got bored and zoned out (making her the only sedate presence in the movie). Alas, I can’t blame her. It was a marathon, truly, and often I just wanted the game to be over; however, still, in its small and video-game-ish way, it may be a portent of what’s to come down the road -- the Video Game vs. the World of Cinema!
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