Hacker Cinema
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
2010 · Film · 113 min
Directed by Edgar Wright
As bass guitarist for a garage-rock band, Scott Pilgrim has never had trouble getting a girlfriend; usually, the problem is getting rid of them. But when Ramona Flowers skates into his heart, he finds she has the most troublesome baggage of all: an army of ex-boyfriends who will stop at nothing to eliminate him from her list of suitors.
6 positive2 neutralfrom 8 commenters
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8 comments on Hacker News
My fyp is mostly Scott Pilgrim clips and bladerunner2049-esque photography, which is weird because I've never seen Scott Pilgrim vs The World or either Blade Runner. Sure there's occasional dance memes just like there's also random pranks and animated memes which I'm sure everyone sees, but like, the algorithm clearly knows what I like somehow, because I ended up really liking both of those movies after being encouraged to watch them by my fyp.
It's one of the primary responsibilities of the movie to set up a universe that is compelling and believable. The fact that it's live action imposes some constraints, but they can be creatively worked around.
Just a few movies that do this well that come to mind:
* Scott Pilgrim vs the World.
* Kick Ass.
* Ella Enchanted.
* Amelie.
* Thor: Ragnarok.
* Space Jam
* The Mask
As a 30s something person, the movie had me rolling my eyes. It was designed for the now in vogue Gen Z crowd. A group that apparently don't remember the 80s and 90s when computing was more unstable, there was a lot less software and that you had to internalize that the lower layers were more fragile and built on a bed of sand.
These people live their lives entirely in the application layer and come up with all these fantasies of Virtual Reality and all the magical stuff it entails. I hate it and everything that comes with this new world and I want to re-live the simpler times of the 90s and the 00s.
I fear that time is long gone though. Just that feeling of millennials now beginning to be brushed aside in favor of the next generation's worldview is jarring because now I have to live in it or disconnect and try to retain the memories of the past. I guess every generation goes through it.
I miss the world of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. That took place during the beginnings of Obama's "Hope and Change". Things were on the upswing. Climate change was not in your face as much as it is now. No coming world war and economic collapse. Just a bunch of hipsters and a guy trying to overcome the baggage of his dream girl the old fashioned way: by battling her seven evil exes via old style 2d video game fighting.
Some of the films recommended in this thread..
- The Nice Guys
- I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore
- Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
- Don't Worry
- He Won't Get Far on Foot
- The Favourite (2018)
- Druk (2020)
- Amélie
- The Lobster
- Turist (2014)
- Parasite
- El Hoyo (The Platform)
- Quo Vadis
- Aida?
- 200 Meters
- Luzzu
- El robo del siglo (The Heist of the Century)
- Knives Out
- Us
- Get Out
- "Tokyo Story" (1953, Yasujirō Ozu)
- Aleksei German's Hard to be A God
- Edward Yang's A Better Summer's Day
- Maren Ade's Toni Erdman
- Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love
- Wings of Desire
- Do the Right Thing
- Drugstore Cowboy
- Gates of Heaven
- Beauty and the Beast
- Life Is Sweet
I could not disagree more with the author. I think their argument should be debated on the merits, but it bears mentioning that the author is still in their twenties, and has only seen ~74 movies a year since 2010. That's ... not a lot of movies, by cinema snob standards (or even by prolific Netflix viewer standards).
1. One simply does not run out of great movies to watch after 700 movies, even if all 700 have been great. You have to be way, way more in to movies than that for that to happen. When your go-to examples of great movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Pulp Fiction (two great movies to be sure, but they have over 300k ratings each on IMDb), the problem is obvious: your selections are too mainstream. You can definitely run out of blockbusters that are also great movies very quickly. This author didn't name a single movie I haven't seen, and I'm nowhere close to having seen enough to join the cinema snob club.
2. "Every couple of days I curl up on the couch at 10pm, scroll through Amazon Prime video..." Yes. This is the problem. Their source for movies is an aggregator that makes money primarily through getting you to stay subscribed while reducing the cost of content acquisition as much as possible. Most of what's on Amazon prime is trash, low budget attempts at blockbusters, with a handful of rotating blockbuster films to grab your attention on the front page. Meanwhile, The Criterion Collection has released over a thousand films on DVD and Blu-ray. Get your media from better sources!
Note that I'm not blaming the author for this specifically. The media landscape sucks right now. Everything is fragmented and if you only have access to one or two sources it's easy to see how you could get the idea that prestige TV is where all the serious work goes nowadays.
3. "Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story." Doesn't this claim go precisely against the claim made earlier in the article that the books you read just get better and better as you read more?
4. I can't agree that David Lynch is a hack. I'd say this goes beyond a question of taste into a factually incorrect account of a director who is obviously very capable and knows what he's trying to do. Some movies are going to require more work to appreciate than others. Ironically, the essay itself complains about movies being too accessible! Likewise, Lost in Translation is not unrelatable simply because the main character is older than you are.
5. The idea that we can't make good comedies any more is laughable culture-war nonsense. The idea that adult comedy must utilize irreverence is silly, to begin with. The Favourite (2018), Druk (2020), Amélie, The Lobster, Turist (2014), etc etc are all good comedies that aren't unduly irreverent. It's also strange to see Superbad and The Hangover given as examples of comedy done right in an article about a supposed dearth of good movies.
Even if you want out-and-out comedies (instead of my suggested serious movies with comedic tones), there were plenty of those last decade too. I liked The Nice Guys, I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Knives Out, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, and so on. Several of these are rather irreverent, I'd say. I guess if you're looking for more Hangover, they made Part III in 2013, less than a decade ago, and Jackass 4 is coming out later this year! I don't see what there is to complain about. (In the vein of low-brow comedy, there are some movies like Psycho Goreman and Mandy that are much more interesting than a lot of mainstream fare.)
6. Burnout is a thing. Maybe trying to write a review for every single movie you see can lead to enjoying them less, if you're not the kind of person who's wired to do that.
She's a B-list movie star who does some indie stuff.
* She was in two of the Twilight films.
* Pitch Perfect (trilogy).
* Mr. Right. The Accountant. (hitmen with a heart of gold movies).
* A Simple Favor. (stepford wife mystery).
* Drinking Buddies (a brewery drama, it's great)
* Scott Pilgrim vs The World
It's not purely the sampling that's doing it to Hollywood: In some fashion, it's the heavily-derisked blockbuster formula to blame, and technology comes along for the ride.
Tony Zhou's Every Frame A Painting [0] offered a take on how the tendency is to work very closely to a temp track and then ask for something identical, which of course can only get you increasingly similar sounds. Dan Golding responded to this by adding some nuance, noting that temp tracks have always been in use, so the answer has to be a little more complicated, and he points back to the technology. [1] I would say that the technology is just a piece of the puzzle; you can order in a different type of sound and get it, whether or not you're using a computer-heavy approach. That's aptly demonstrated by the variety seen in indie games, for example. This is a problem that movies have made for themselves by being focused on fitting everything to a formula. The occasional film does slip through that has a great score that draws on something bigger than other films(for one example: Scott Pilgrim vs the World).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vfqkvwW2fs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcXsH88XlKM
I love old fiction, however I cannot read old fiction that references or is inspired by modern events. The novel is as much an instrument of contemporary social commentary as much as it is anything and to ignore this is to confuse the entire subject.
Books like Dead Air by Ian Banks, or Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, are simply not available in earlier eras as their narrative reference points did not yet exist.
It is like looking for something in the golden age of Hollywood that closely resembles Scott Pilgrim vs The World. Without the culture of computer games to draw on, that film could not get made.