[REC] came out in 2007 in Spain, and it was popular enough to get a sequel and also an American remake called Quarantine. And I say good for them, because it’s a clever idea well executed. You can tell the filmmakers are fans of horror making a horror movie for other fans.

It’s relatively low budget and was done in the first-person-movie style, but unlike Cloverfield (which came out a few months later), instead of watching annoying 20-something New Yorkers get eaten by a giant monster, you’re watching annoying Barcelonians locked in an apartment building and attacked by zombies. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, they used a steadier camera (it’s a professional TV crew in the fiction), and you don’t have to wait until the end of the movie for something interesting to happen. Unlike Paranormal Activity, something actually happens in the movie, and it doesn’t make you angry and sad about the gullibility of the American public that a movie so stupid and pointless could become so inexplicably popular.

Quarantine is the reason the movie’s easy to find in the US, but I can’t imagine why anyone would want to see it instead of the original. I’m not saying it to be one of those people on the internet talking about horror movies — the fact that I’m just now writing about a 4-year-old movie should be evidence enough of that, plus I think The Ring is ten times better than the original — but because just looking at stills from the remake annoys me. It looks like every cliche come to life about Hollywood taking a pretty novel, original idea and ruining it.

And by that I mean that [REC] just works, even when it shouldn’t. It starts out as a scrappy indie film that tests the limits of the “found footage” gimmick, works up to a couple of pretty good scenes and then one fantastic moment. (If you’ve seen the movie: it’s the fall).

It starts to drift away from the gimmick a bit — sound effects, especially guns, that aren’t right; and a rewind/fast-forward bit that’s a little jarring — and it turns into a tight-but-predictable zombie movie. The tension ramps up, then it takes a brief side-trip into “Blue’s Clues” or “Dora the Explorer,” as the two ostensibly smartest characters keep asking each other for a bit of information that one of the other characters mentioned earlier, but they can’t remember. As they’re standing in front of the guy who’s been recording everything that happened that evening, and already re-wound the video once.

After that, it’s about 15-20 minutes of full-on Halloween haunted house. Right down to the climax, which sounds like something a teenager, or the designer of a Japanese survival horror game, would come up with. I’ve got to give them credit: they kept to the main storytelling gimmick and still managed to give the ending some exposition.

But at the end, you won’t miss the clever indie zombie movie you may have been hoping to see, because the cheap-scares haunted house is so well done. Pacing is excellent throughout, and the make up and sound effects are well done. Plus there’s just something inherently scary about first-person shots, and they take advantage of every variation, right down to the Silence of the Lambs night vision.

So ultimately, it’s not some obscure burst of creativity like The Devil’s Backbone, or a plucky low-budget upstart like The Blair Witch Project. It does, however, feel like an old-fashioned, fun B-movie, and it’s worth reading some subtitles to avoid seeing a slick Hollywood production drain all the life out of it.

Edit: When I say that looking at the stills of the remake annoys me, this shot is exactly what I mean. What TV video camera has depth of field like that? Or lighting like any of those shots? That’s not being picky, either, it’s just completely missing the central gimmick of the movie. Like explaining where The Birds came from.

When In Bruges came out in 2008, I was looking forward to seeing it because Bruges is one of the few cities in Europe I’ve been to. I must’ve been around 11 or 12 years old, and I’ve remembered it ever since as being fantastic, right from a fairytale, the perfect setting for a movie. I didn’t make a big effort to see it at the time because I’d assumed it was just another British gangster movie like Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch.

I think I was right on both counts, to some degree. In the special features, writer and director Martin McDonagh says that the impetus of the story was his own vacation to the city. He says that part of him was enchanted by the city and enjoyed sightseeing, but eventually he grew to hate it and just wanted to get back to a real city. The two sides of his character are represented by the two main characters. They also, conveniently, represent my own opinion of the movie: part of me was very pleasantly surprised and impressed by the movie’s depth and soul. The rest of me won’t shut up with my various criticisms and irritating nitpicks.

All of the performances were good, especially Colin Farrell, who was excellent. Except for all the whispering in heavy Irish accents, which made subtitles necessary. And more significantly, it didn’t take long to realize that Farrell’s charisma and looks are the only things that make his character tolerable. Since the entire movie hinges on having sympathy for his character, everything falls apart once you spend any time thinking about his character as if he were an actual person.

It’s a story with a very unconventional premise and structure, and you’re intrigued from the opening narration. But then, once you get past the twist at the halfway point, the rest of the premise plays out pretty much exactly as you’d expect it to.

One of the movie’s strongest aspects is the way it humanizes its characters, turning a gangster story into a character study about honor and a meditation on morality, childhood, and lost innocence. But again, once you think about it for a few seconds, it evaporates. It tries to have it both ways with the whole schtick of being offensive on the surface but with a heart of gold on the inside; the movie tries to play the message of we’re-all-in-this-together but ultimately just says it’s okay to make fun of gays and overweight people. And the all-encompassing problem: it’s based on this idea of a warrior code of honor among gangsters, which isn’t just hopelessly over-used at this point; it’s a concept that’s total horseshit.

There’s a wisely deleted scene on the DVD with the current Dr. Who playing Ralph Fiennes’s character in a flashback. It’s interesting because it shows just how close the movie was to being just another millennial gangster movie: it’s inept and affected, as if it were aping Quentin Tarantino without his flair for visuals, or Guy Ritchie without whatever it is that made Guy Ritchie famous. Any aspirations to depth simply disappear; what seemed like a genuine, heartfelt, humanizing message suddenly feels like empty hipster artifice.

Despite my complaints; I did enjoy the movie and I’d still recommend it. I just would encourage everyone in the audience to watch it to its conclusion and refrain from thinking about it at all the moment it ends.

Incidentally, I didn’t link to the Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB page for the movie like I usually do, because each has a minor spoiler right on the front. One of the most clever aspects of the screenplay was how it gradually set up the mystery of why the characters are in Bruges in the first place, then doled out relevant bits of the back-story at exactly the right times. It’s best if you know nothing about the movie other than that it’s about hitmen and a city in Belgium.

I don’t have a lot to say about True Grit other than that it’s more evidence that Joel and Ethan Coen are the greatest living filmmakers.

I don’t like it quite as much as Miller’s Crossing — I doubt that’d even be possible, since Miller’s Crossing was as close to a transformative experience I’ve ever had watching a movie — but the two films have a good bit in common.

They’re both filled with a love of dialogue: not just language, and not even the interplay of two interesting characters, but the energy that the heightened unreality of film dialogue makes as the words bounce around a scene. They both have moments of inexplicable eccentricity that spin the story out of complacent realism and back into fantasy.

They both have scenes that seem like the Coens are just showing off with their ability to handle drastic changes in tone — a straightforward bit of plot development, or even comedy, that quickly becomes absolutely horrific. And they both have images so striking it’s as if they’ve been seared into your mind, like an implanted memory — the most notable for me in True Grit was a patch of trees arched like the crumbling walls of a cathedral, with a dead body hanging from the highest branch.

The performances are all excellent to outstanding, even for the Coen Brothers, who routinely have everyone giving the best performances of their careers. The standout is Hailee Steinfeld who’s the real co-star of the film along with Jeff Bridges. She repeatedly tells characters that she’s fourteen years old, and I would’ve naturally assumed she was an actress in her mid-20s playing younger until I got back to IMDB and learned that she was thirteen when the movie was filmed.

I’ve got to confess that, much like my reaction to Miller’s Crossing, I’m not sure that I entirely get True Grit, assuming that there’s something to get in the first place. I’d seen a small bit of discussion about the epilogue online — some people complaining that it served no purpose, other people saying that it made the whole film. I can’t say I agree with either. Unless I’m missing some deeper meaning, the epilogue doesn’t really establish anything that isn’t already adequately said by the rest of the film. Of course I’m glad that no one says anything like, “It’s been you all along, Mattie Ross, who has True Grit,” but I still kind of wish I’d been able to reach some kind of epiphany that tied it all together.

I like Andrew O’Hehir’s review on Salon.com, even though I don’t entirely agree with it. He says that the Coens are formalists above all else, essentially that the Coens aren’t “saying” anything with True Grit other than “We’ve made a Western.” All the meaning is encapsulated by the genre itself.

That ignores the consistency and uniqueness of their body of work, not quite reducing them to parodists but implying that there’s nothing inherent to their films other than their references to other films. But apart from The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and parts of O Brother Where Art Thou?, their movies aren’t just homages or even interpretations. True Grit is a western only so much as Miller’s Crossing is a gangster movie: they’re primarily Coen Brothers movies, and they have more to say about the characters and the Coens’ individual outlook than they do about a genre or some self-reflexive ode to cinema. Even towards the end of the Western’s popularity, when all the films got more navel-gazing, it was rare to see one in which the most exciting moments weren’t shoot-outs or scenes on horseback, but two characters arguing with each other in a bedroom.

I have yet to read the original novel, so I can’t tell exactly how much of the dialogue and how many of the situations were invented in the Coens’ adaptation and how much were part of the original. If the new film is as faithful as the reports I’ve read make it sound, then I’m amazed that it’s taken the Coens this long to make an adaptation. Because it never feels like an adaptation, but a story written specifically for them to interpret. Seeing “an old one-eyed fat man” and a young girl confronted in the snow by a man in a bear suit offering to trade them a dead body from which he’d already removed the teeth — that seems perfectly “Coenesque.”

Trash-talking movies isn’t nearly as enjoyable as playing them up. I made a list of favorites before, but that was back in 2007. There’ve been plenty of times since then that I’ve seen or been reminded of a movie and almost called it “one of my favorites,” but BAM. The list is already out there, on the internet for God and everyone to see.

So here’s the absolutely up-to-date version (until I hit post and remember four or five that I’d forgotten). Plus I’m rescinding my rule about not putting in too many movies by the same people.

Miller’s Crossing
The best screenplay ever filmed. I can still remember just about every second of the first time I saw this movie, almost 20 years ago now.

The Empire Strikes Back
I can remember every moment of the first time I saw this one, too. Premiere night at Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, waited in line for at least two hours, and the crowd went nuts every time a character came on screen, not to mention at the big reveal.

Star Wars
I liked this movie enough to abandon my friends and family to move across the country to a strange city just so I could (indirectly) work for the company that made it. And I still never worked on a Star Wars game.

Raiders of the Lost Ark
The people making this movie were so committed to it that they’d eat bugs just to keep the cameras rolling.

Aliens
Everybody knows what a great science fiction movie it is that it’s easy to forget what a perfect suspense movie it is, even without going the horror route like the original. The fact that it’s one of the strongest female characters in any movie is a bonus.

Rear Window
You can appreciate what a great movie it is the first time you watch it, and then the more you learn about it, you appreciate it even more. The weird thing is that with Grace Kelly in it, you didn’t really need it to be such a good movie.

Raising Arizona
The first Coen Brothers movie I ever saw, and like thousands of other devotees, I spent most of the 90s quoting it.

His Girl Friday
Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant are amazing, and it’s one of the only movies that feels contemporary no matter when you see it.

The Silence of the Lambs
Everybody in it is giving the best performance of their careers, especially Ted Levine. It knows exactly how to be horrifying without turning into cheap scares.

The Return of the King
The most epic of movie epics.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The crest of the Wes Anderson wave — after he had enough money to do everything he wanted, but before all the self-conscious quirkiness collapsed in on itself. “I wonder if it remembers me” still makes me cry every damn time.

Up
The best Pixar movie to date; it’s just a shame about the villain. I’ve seen it about a dozen times now, but I’ve only been able to watch the first 15 minutes twice. And still, it gets me at “I was waiting under the porch because you are my master and I love you!”

Adaptation
I’ve already written loads about Adaptation on here, but the brief version: it’s the perfect example of how to do meta-storytelling without falling apart or ending up so slight as to be meaningless. And it actually manages to be a reasonably good adaptation of the book, too.

Yojimbo
I admire all of Akira Kurosawa’s movies I’ve seen, but this and the sequel Sanjuro are the only ones I actually enjoy watching.

Big Trouble in Little China
The best of John Carpenter. I can’t believe I spent so much of the 80s and early 90s feeling ashamed for loving this movie so much. So much wasted time.

Airplane!
I think Top Secret! is actually more clever, but Airplane! wins on joke density alone.

Young Frankenstein
I can tell what a great movie this is because I loved it for years before seeing The Bride of Frankenstein and realizing that it was also a great parody. Another one where everybody involved is doing the best of work of their careers.

Singin’ in the Rain
The best movie musical ever made, mostly because it’s more fun than other Gene Kelly movies, and because Debbie Reynolds is kind of awesome.

The Shining
You’ll come for the river of blood pouring out of an elevator, you’ll stay for the guy giving fellatio while wearing a bear mask.

Ghostbusters
Has anybody ever put as much effort into a comedy as they did for Ghostbusters? Also: it seems odd to me that the most memorable moments now are the ones with Harold Ramis.

Pom Poko
Japanese raccoons attack humans with their magic testicles.

The Big Lebowski
I can never remember that this is one of my favorite movies, until I remember a brilliant moment like “obviously you’re not a golfer.” Also, it’s easily Julianne Moore’s finest performance (and best entrance). Also: phenomenal soundtrack.

Stairway to Heaven/A Matter of Life and Death
Powell and Pressburger are amazing, and Roger Livesey is a total bad-ass in this movie.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I was one of those people who couldn’t stop quoting this movie, before I discovered Raising Arizona.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
This is the one I’m probably going to regret, but dammit, I’ve seen it twice now and loved it each time. It is directly targeted at a relatively small audience (and I’m still not exactly sure I’m included in that audience), but in terms of what it sets out to do, it’s practically flawless.

Would Be On the List If It Didn’t Stop At 25 Because Really, Having More Than 10 Things on a List of Favorites Is Kind of Silly

The Night of the Hunter
The Thing
Kill Bill: Volume 1
Casablanca
Robocop
Lilo & Stitch
Toy Story 2
Casino Royale (2006)
Children of Men
Vertigo
Top Secret!
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Starship Troopers
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
The Man Who Would Be King
Moulin Rouge

My friend Matt Dessem, who knows a lot more about movies than I do, linked to an article by another Matt (whether he knows more about movies than I do is likely, but I’m not yet convinced), Zoller Seitz on Salon.com. It’s called “Trash Talking Nine Classic Movies”, although the URL “Movie Heresy Slide Show” is a lot more compelling. He chooses ten movies (the first two Godfathers are counted as one) that are critically acclaimed and/or extremely popular, some of which he loves, and either points out a fatal flaw or claims he just doesn’t get the appeal.

He also encourages discussion. I’m inferring he was hoping for discussion in the comments section, but I’m paying for a blog and I’ll damn well use it. I’m not going to spend a lot of time recapping his points, so I suggest going through the slideshow first. (Also, there are spoilers in here, but seriously: if you haven’t seen these movies by now, it’s kind of your own fault).

Where He’s Wrong

To start with, here’s where I disagree.

The Silence of the Lambs
I completely disagree with his take. For one thing, you can’t blame a movie for the actions of its sequels, or even for its source material. I happen to think that The Silence of the Lambs is one of the best examples of how to adapt a book to a movie, since the book and movie are roughly equal in quality — I’d say the movie is a bit better — and each one best uses the strengths of its medium. (What’s scariest in the book isn’t scariest in the movie, and vice versa, and because each knew what kind of scares it was best at delivering). However, everything after that is just plain awful. Hannibal was such a loathsome book that I never bothered watching the movie, so bad in fact that I lost interest in the whole franchise. But that doesn’t change the fact that Silence of the Lambs still holds up, any more than Silence of the Lambs automatically made Red Dragon and Manhunter more than simply mediocre.

To his main point, though: one of the most remarkable things about Silence of the Lambs is that they deliberately avoided making Hannibal Lecter an antihero. The scenes with him and Clarice are straight-up traumatic, and it’s key to the whole tone of the movie: she’s entered a world of unrelenting awfulness. And even the final scene avoids turning Lecter into an antihero — actually, the movie does a much better job at this than the book. The key to the final scene isn’t that Lecter escapes, it’s that he calls Clarice. It’s not “look how cool he is,” it’s “oh shit she’s opened Pandora’s Box, and she knows it.” Her whole story is about her being surrounded by evil without getting stained by it herself, that’s why the shot where she and Lecter first touch stands out as so electric even with so many other horrible scenes fighting for your repulsion. Now of course, the sequel basically takes that great concept and then shits all over it, turning Lecter into an over the top anti-hero and Starling into basically an idiot, but that’s something that’s most definitely not present in Silence of the Lambs.

District 9
I don’t know if I’d put it on the same level as the other “classics” in the list, but I liked District 9 a lot. The whole reason it worked wasn’t even its plot or subject matter as much as its presentation: it felt like an independent production, and it deftly side-stepped being predictable or formulaic any chance it got. Starting with the setting: sure, South Africa is the obvious setting for a parable about apartheid, but then, how many science fiction movies have been set in South Africa? And the main character: he stays pretty much an unredeemable bastard long past the breaking point, when lesser movies would have had him repent. Plus, the overall tone is unconventional: if you expect it to be an action movie, you’ll be surprised at how much time it spends on character development. And if you’re expecting a message movie, you’ll be surprised at a guy in a mech suit doing a one-handed catch of a missile, which remains awesome.

Pulp Fiction
Actually I mostly agree with his take, but the whole bit that doesn’t work for me is Bruce Willis’s story. Especially the scenes with his dull, dull girlfriend in the hotel room. They could’ve taken him completely out of the movie and not lost anything, I think. And yeah, Quentin Tarantino’s scenes are just awful, but you don’t need to be a professional film critic to realize that.

To Kill a Mockingbird
His complaint here is just bizarre. “A fine lesson if you’re devout, but what if you’re not?” Then this movie is not for you. It’s a morality story, almost a parable. There’s no place nor need for shades of gray here. Why not let a good message movie just deliver a good message?

Where I’m Right

And here are a few movies that I love except for one thing, or movies that have near-universal acclaim but I just don’t get the appeal.

Up
Still my favorite Pixar movie, but I still hate how the villain was handled. He just turned too evil too quickly.

On the Waterfront and Breathless
I’m lumping these together not because they have much in common, but because I’ve already talked about them on this blog. Each is almost universally hailed as a classic, but I thought both were boring and relatively pointless. I’m assuming they were remarkable in their time, and just don’t work as well out of context. But I still fail to understand how Brando’s performance in On the Waterfront became so iconic, because there’s just nothing all that remarkable about it.

Primer
This one isn’t nearly as well-known as the others, but it’s mentioned in Zoller Seitz’s article. I’ve had it recommended to me several times as being excellent, intelligent, intricately plotted, a real mind-bender, etc. I’ve never heard a bad review from someone who’s seen it. But I hated it. I thought it was pondering and dry, and the set-up was too contrived to be interesting (it’s about the most boring form of time travel imaginable). Plus, I usually try to give low-budget movies a pass, but here, the lack of money just seemed glaring.

Inception
While I’m thinking about “mind-bending” movies, I’ve got to mention Inception again. Because I liked it fine after I saw it, but I’m growing to hate it the more I read about it. I just don’t get why everyone is making such a big deal about how mind-expanding it was. Sure, it’s impressive how meticulously planned and plotted the whole movie is, but it’s just plain not confusing. My biggest problem with it, in fact, is that it was so afraid of letting the audience be confused for one second, that everything is over-explained.

And also: the bit about the theme music mirroring La Vie en Rose? So what? The music is a relentlessly ponderous dirge, just like the beginning of an old French pop song. There have been plenty of clever things done with movie music before, and they didn’t make you leave the theater feeling like you’d been beaten about the head and neck for the past two hours.

Chinatown and Full Metal Jacket
Both are fine movies, I just don’t get why they’re so widely regarded as classics. Each has iconic moments, sure. But Full Metal Jacket basically falls apart after boot camp; I doubt I could tell you one thing that happens once they actually get to Vietnam, even though I’m pretty sure that’s where all the meaning of the movie is stored. And Chinatown seems like such a straightforward detective story, that every time I hear it described as one of the best screenplays ever written, I just have to nod in an attempt to keep the conversation from going on any longer.

And that’s probably more than enough negativity for one blog post.

The internet is dumb, and by all accounts the movie industry is even dumber. When you combine the two, you end up with all the people bemoaning the “lamentable” box office for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and trying to figure out what went wrong. I think it’s a gross overreaction, since this might be the quintessential “long tail” movie. There’s an audience (myself included) that completely loves it and will see it multiple times in the theater, then buy it on Blu-Ray. It’s a drag that there’s so much focus on the opening weekend, since it encourages studios to make disposable movies like The Expendables: completely frictionless product that does exactly what it says in the ads, no more and no less, and will be forgotten by the next box office weekend.

But I don’t want to pick on io9 or Cyriaque Lamar, the author of that article — io9 the only Gawker blog I can still stand to read, and looking for trends in pop culture is what they’re supposed to be doing. Plus, their review of the movie is dead-on correct. What I do want to pick on is one of the posts Lamar gives far too much credit to by calling it an “intriguing essay.” It’s a post by blogger Abigail Nussbaum wondering why she enjoyed the movie despite its “misogyny”; it calls the movie “toxic” and says “there is no defense” for it; and it’s just awful. It also spoils pretty much the entire movie, so I only recommend reading it if you’ve already seen the movie.

The “intriguing essay” is exactly the kind of feminism-via-self-righteous-victimization that would justifiably be ignored except for three things: 1) It oversteps its bounds by so recklessly tossing around the word “misogynistic”, assuming that a woman’s interpretation of a movie as offensive to women automatically becomes an unblockable combo move. 2) As evidenced by my last two blog posts, the topics of feminism and Scott Pilgrim have been most on my mind lately, so I found Nussbaum’s post (and her reactions in the comments) particularly offensive. 3) It gives me an excuse to keep talking about and try to better explain what I liked best about the movie.

What’s best about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it doesn’t try to explain everything. Even after all my complaints about box office being irrelevant, it’s interesting — and, if I’m being honest, a little frustrating — that Inception made more money last weekend, because the two movies are almost complete opposites in that regard. Both have dream sequences and fantastic breaks from reality. But Inception goes out of its way to make sure that absolutely no one is left behind. It has to make sure that everyone in the audience knows exactly what is going on at every second, up until the very last moment, when it finally trusts us enough to leave us with a tiny sliver of ambiguity. And it still has a distressing number of people calling it “mind-blowing.” (To be clear: I liked Inception a lot, I just wish it’d been able to relax and let itself get fantastic).

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World starts out by assuming that everyone in the audience has been alive and conscious in the past 30 years, and that we’re all on board. It doesn’t stop every few minutes to ask the audience, “That was a flashback. Did I just blow your mind?” I can only recall two points in the entire movie where any of the characters even acknowledge that anything particularly weird is happening: once, Scott asks “is this really happening?” and later, he asks the perpetually-cursing Julie Powers “how do you do that thing with your mouth?” In anything else, this would be an example of breaking the fourth wall. But this is a movie that has already shattered the fourth wall by the time the Universal logo has stopped playing. It’s not stepping out of the movie, it’s actually pulling the audience back in. It reminds you that all of the visual effects aren’t just cinematic tics layered on top of the story, they’re an integral part of the world these characters are living in.

That distinction is crucial to understanding why the movie works as more than just visuals an in-jokes. It’s what changes the story from an underdeveloped slacker romance that makes a lot of references to videogames and comic books, to a very sincere love story that’s told in the language of videogames and comic books. It’s also why Nussbaum’s arguments fail, and I’ll pick out a few of the most egregious ones:

The fights between Scott and Ramona’s exes are explicitly described as duels in which Ramona is the prize…

Scott Pilgrim is explicitly shown head-butting a guy so hard he explodes into coins. This is not a movie for people who do not understand metaphor.

The seven evil exes are a metaphor for the baggage that Ramona and Scott are bringing to the start of a new relationship. That is hardly a mind-alteringly insightful observation; it’s said explicitly in the trailer. Several commenters — all of them male, Nussbaum is quick to point out — mention that the entire premise of the movie is a metaphor, but she quotes a different line from the trailer as an attempt at counter-argument: “If you want to be with me, you may have to defeat my seven evil exes.” She insists on a literal interpretation of a line in a movie that defies you to take anything literally.

Even outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view, the film’s treatment of its female characters leaves much to be desired. Ramona is a near-blank whose attraction to Scott never really makes sense.

There’s no going “outside of Scott’s self-absorbed point of view,” as that’s the entire movie. The movie assumes that audience will understand the concept of an unreliable narrator, even in a movie without explicit first-person narration.

And this is a story told from Scott Pilgrim’s — not Edgar Wright’s, and presumably not Brian Lee O’Malley’s — viewpoint. Your first clue: the title of the movie. Your second clue: the little title card that pops up saying “Scott Pilgrim Rating: Awesome.” The third clue: everything else. It’s a story told from the viewpoint of a self-absorbed slacker who relates everything to videogames. (Again, this stuff is pretty much all self-evident; I’m not exactly venturing into Cahiers du Cinema territory here).

Ramona is a near-blank because Scott doesn’t understand her. It’s not a case of the movie excising so much of the comic, either — I’ve gotten through four volumes now, and it’s only at the end of the fourth that she progresses past “mysterious.” (Seriously, her character introduction is “Age: Unknown. Is still relatively mysterious.”) She has more lines of dialogue in the comic than in the movie, but it’s mostly the kind of early-20s slacker babble that fills up space in real conversation. And hey, there’s even a line from the comic that’s used in the movie to that effect: “I know you play mysterious and aloof to avoid getting hurt.”

That’s not to say Ramona remains a cipher for the entire movie. We (meaning Scott) get flashes of insight into her character, what she used to be like, all the way from childhood up to right before she came to Canada. It happens six times, in fact. Almost as if these battles against the seven evil exes were a representation of Scott finding out more about Ramona as a person, instead of just as an object of desire or a prize to be won in a videogame. I only wish there were some word to describe when something is used to represent something else without explicitly saying you’re making a comparison….

Finally, Ramona’s behavior in the film’s last act is inexplicably out of character, and turns out to be the result of mind-control, a condition whose significance the film all but ignores and which is resolved with no fanfare whatsoever.

Here, I don’t know whether to be annoyed or sad. I like to think that all of us have been through at least one experience of being so completely, inexplicably infatuated with someone that we do things against our own better judgement. If not, I’d hope at least that the concept isn’t so alien to us that we can’t relate to it. And I’d especially hope that we don’t need to elevate a simile to a metaphor, and explain that being attracted to someone who’s bad for you is only like having a mind control chip implanted in the back of your neck.

The other stuff potentially spoils the end of the movie — it’s not a particularly plot-heavy story, so revealing the ending won’t ruin the movie by any stretch. But the very end is well done, and I was glad I didn’t know what was going to happen. So read on at your own risk.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World came out this week for those of us who didn’t catch a preview at Comic-Con or elsewhere. This article on NPR is the best thing you’ll read about it.

I do have a little bit of sympathy for the old people reviewers though, since it’s a movie that constantly makes you question whether you belong in the audience. I mean, I love videogames and comic books, so I’m part of the group, right? But then… I am pushing forty, and if not for arrested development I’d have kids the age of the people in this movie, and I’m not even a little bit Canadian (thank God). Did any young people see me walk into the theater? They’ll know they’ll know!

It even gets worse: I’m not a particularly big fan of the comic book. I only got three volumes in before I had to give up — there was a lot I loved about it, but the rest just kept pushing me away from it. And most damning of all: I’m not a big fan of Edgar Wright’s other stuff, either. I always feel like I should like it more than I do. Spaced was the most frustrating, since it seemed overwhelmingly targeted at me. Directionless videogame-obsessed manchildren; I even had almost all of the music on the soundtrack. But again, every time I’d find myself enjoying it, it’d just take it a step too far, crossing the line from being in on the joke, to trying way too hard.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World definitely isn’t subtle. Or understated. And I think that’s a big part of why it works so well. It’s so gloriously sure of itself that you’re just forced to go along with it or be left behind. There’ve been so many attempts to be The Voice of My Generation that never got it quite right, we basically ended up without one. So I guess we have to hitch a ride on the next generation and borrow theirs.

What killed most of the attempts is that they could never just jump on the spiral of self-awareness without keeping a hand out to steady themselves. There’s always been a sense of people appointing themselves as ambassadors, explaining this nutty world of videogames and comic books to the Normals out there in Real Life. So everything gets buried under layers of reference and parody. For all the people who are complaining that the movie is inaccessible, all they see is a bunch of references to and parodies of stuff they don’t understand, and they’re pissed that the movie doesn’t step out of itself to pull them in.

And that’s pretty much how I felt about the comic book. The movie gets it right by not treating itself as an extended reference. In the scene where Scott meets Roxy Richter, she says something and he asks, “Where’s that from?” Her answer: “From my brain.” On the surface, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a comic book movie slacker love story overloaded with audiovisual references to comics, music, and videogames. What it really is: a love story about people whose entire world is steeped in videogames, comic books, music, movies, and irony. The Zelda music and 1-Ups and pixellated effects aren’t really references any more than I’m making references to English when I write this post. At some point, you’ve got to stop pointing at what a novel sub-culture you’ve created for yourself, and realize that it’s really not that novel anymore.

That doesn’t make them any less impressive: the movie is pretty fantastic throughout, and I was grinning like an idiot the whole time I wasn’t laughing out loud. Just because it’s not constantly, self-consciously saying “look how cool this is” doesn’t mean it’s any less cool. The penultimate fight (with the Katayanagi Twins) is a lot more spectacular than the actual climax, but the ending is still satisfying. All the casting is pretty much perfect. And the part that seemed like the biggest false note in the comic — the extended Dragonball Z/vegan parody — was wisely toned way down for the movie.

This review on the AV Club complains that the movie seems like it should be better than it really is, but that there’s no emotional center to it: it’s buried under irony and special effects. I say that that’s a perfect example of being on the inside looking out and looking back in. The target audience for Scott Pilgrim has always prided itself on being this insular group, extremely self-aware, targeted by Outsiders for their purchasing power. That mentality is so ingrained, that it seems completely foreign to have a movie that tells its story without translating it for anyone else.

He says “the intensity of Scott’s feelings for Ramona are never articulated,” which is absurd. The movie is the most self-evident allegory possible for infatuation and the beginning of a relationship. And characters frequently say exactly what they’re feeling. It just so happens that they all sound sarcastic while they’re saying it. Anybody who’s been on the irony carousel as much as an Onion AV Club writer should get that.

If The Other Guys had stopped about 5 minutes in, it would’ve been the best Funny or Die video ever made. If it’d stopped at about 15 minutes, it would’ve been a great action movie parody. If they’d cut it off around an hour, it’d be a really strong Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy. An hour forty, and it’s a definitely-not-their-best-but-one-of-the-better-ones Will Ferrell and Adam McKay comedy.

But at some point — I’m guessing very close to the end of the process — somebody decided that this didn’t have to be just another silly and forgettable movie and could very easily be turned into Relevant Social Commentary. They tacked on a jab at the government bailouts, literally at the last minute, which would have just seemed like another gag that wasn’t quite inflated enough: I was left thinking, “Really? That’s all they’re doing with that whole Anne Heche subplot?” But then over the closing credits, they pounded it home with a series of animated infographics about Ponzi schemes, Bernie Madoff, and the cost of bailing out AIG and others.

The whole movie is built around not knowing when to quit. You can tell they’ve got their own little formula going, making movies based on the idea that if you get Will Ferrell in front of a camera with a bunch of reasonably funny people and a sliver of a concept, you can just let the camera roll and eventually you’ll end up with gold. And it mostly works. Sure, the scenes tend to go on a little bit too long, and there are several you can tell aren’t as funny as they were hoping they’d be, and the movie doesn’t really arc so much as gradually deflate. But there’s nothing that falls absolutely flat, everyone in the cast does a good job with the material, and there are several moments that are really funny.

But it’s not strong enough to outweigh the bad taste left by that ending. It’s like having a pretty good but not outstanding dinner and not finding the hair on the plate until the last few bites. Because these just don’t seem like people who can get away with complaining about excessive spending.

I doubt that Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are pulling in the ludicrous salaries of corporate execs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t work cheap. And the rest of the cast (apart from Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, who pretty much had to be in the movie for it to work at all) aren’t super-expensive A-Listers, but most of them were at one point or another. Even discounting the fact that most of them are probably friends of the filmmakers or people treating it as an extended Funny or Die project, it seemed like kind of a waste of casting money. Throughout I kept thinking, “Did you really need to spring for Anne Heche for such a small part?” Or “Titus Pullo should either have more action scenes or better dialogue.” Or even “That’s the woman from all that stuff whose name I can never remember. She should have more than four lines.”

What’s weird is that I never think about that kind of thing during movies. But all through this one, even before the ending, I kept going into producer mode, thinking how expensive everything must’ve been. There are at least fifty demolished cars, and at most five of them were needed for a punchline. (No seriously: they have a Prius drive over the tops of two other cars after a gag is over, just to show it driving away). At least one helicopter explodes, and I don’t have any idea many real-world helicopters that ends up being. Multiple buildings and storefronts are blown up or demolished. Scenes are filmed in penthouses and soon-to-be-demolished offices which can’t be cheap. I had a dollar-to-joke-payoff counter running through my head the whole time, and after the first thirty minutes or so, it wasn’t giving a very good return on investment.

But even with all that, they didn’t know when to quit. After all, being expensive isn’t the same thing as being evil, and I’ve got little doubt the movie will end up making money, even without the product placement money from Bed Bath and Beyond. (And Toyota, assuming all the exposure for the Prius outweighed having characters compare it to a vagina). I got about ten bucks’ worth of entertainment out of it, the theaters were pretty full so no doubt the investors will make their money back, everybody wins. It’d be hard to equate even an over-budgeted movie with large-scale corporate corruption.

Except the little infographics at the end tried to put a populist spin on everything. They had a little chart showing how everyone’s 401(k) is worth half as much as it was before the sub-prime mortgage collapse. And a little elevator showing the increasing pay disparity between corporate CEOs and regular employees. And a businessman on a hammock with a big number over his head showing how much CEOs of failed companies made in bonuses.

And that’s where they lost me. Because I couldn’t help but take a couple zeroes off that number and reckon that that’s how much Will Ferrell or Mark Wahlberg have made for a couple of movies. Or that just one of those scenes with a gag that didn’t quite pay off probably cost as much as I’ll make in two years of working. Or that some guys made millions from running their companies into the ground, and other guys are making millions by making repeated jokes about TLC in 2010. Either way, they’re seeing a lot more money than I am. And that’s not exactly something you want to be drawing attention to.

I guess in the end, I would’ve rather seen a movie about the first guys. Because every second of Samuel Jackson and The Rock going over the top was worth every smashed car, bus, and facade of the Trump Tower it took to make it.

I’d heard plenty of people say that The Princess and the Frog was surprisingly good, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. Now I wish I’d seen it sooner, because it’s pretty great.

It was pretty aggressively marketed, and you can see that there was a lot riding on it as the first in a resurgence of hand-drawn animation at Disney, but I get the sense it didn’t make quite as big a splash as people were hoping. That’d be a shame, because this could be exactly the shot in the arm Disney animation needs.

I’d been afraid that in their attempts to make Disney more “contemporary,” that the movie would come out Dreamworksian. That’s definitely not the case; this is a Disney animated feature, almost self-consciously so. It’s got Disney animation in its DNA; it’s practically an homage to the classics, a sampler of all the animation and background styles the studio has used since Snow White.

Did you like the CG-heavy stuff like the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast, or do you prefer the looser and sketchier style of 101 Dalmatians? Doesn’t matter, because they’re both in there. Or the more cartoony and elastic characters in Hercules and The Emperor’s New Groove? They’re included in a sequence with a voodoo priestess. Maybe you’d rather have The Jungle Book, in which case a trumpet-playing alligator makes a fine Baloo substitute. Did you like the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp? So did they, so they made a version with frogs. The “Under the Sea” number from The Little Mermaid? Have two of them, Bayou-style. How about Fantasia? Which one: there’s a good bit of the early 20s style characters from the 2000 version, and shadow creatures that evoke the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence from the original. And of course you can’t have such a swamp-heavy movie without being reminded of The Rescuers.

That might make it sound like a rip-off, or at best a muddled pastiche of a ton of disparate art styles. But that’s not the case: it all somehow works together, and it feels like a real homage instead of uninspired cribbing.

And while the art stays close to the past, the story does a great job of avoiding the Disney formula. The decision that got all the attention was making a Disney movie with African-American lead characters — that could be a pretty big deal, and luckily it was handled extremely well. The movie doesn’t ignore race, but doesn’t make a big issue of it, either; Tiana’s at a disadvantage because of her lack of money, not because of her race. Even better, her best friend since childhood is a spoiled rich white girl, and she’s never reduced to the villain or wicked stepsister role.

Best of all, the story takes a long-past-due break from the “Don’t be afraid to be different”/”Be true to your dreams” moral that’s become rote in pretty much every piece of family entertainment made in the past few decades. Tiana’s problem is that she’s gotten too attached to her dream, and everybody but her knows it. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a Disney movie with such a fully fleshed-out female character. Especially one who couldn’t care less about being a princess. It’s actually pretty risky to propose an animated movie about a woman whose biggest flaw is that she works too hard to make her dreams come true. Somehow they pulled it off.

Not to mention that the “meet cute” involves frogs being chased by alligators and beating the crap out of redneck hunters.

One of the things I can see keeping it from reaching classic status is that there are no real standout songs. It’s got a Randy Newman-composed, Dr. John-heavy soundtrack that’s fine, but without anything that’s particularly memorable. I have heard two of the songs, “Almost There” and “Dig a Little Deeper,” sung at Disneyland by their own Tiana in New Orleans Square, and I’m genuinely glad to see the movie taking hold like that. But without a real show-stopper, it just has to stand as a good, entertaining Disney movie.

It doesn’t hit any false notes (remarkable on its own), its attempts at contemporary humor actually work, the characters are appealing, the story keeps moving, and there’s enough imagination for something new happening almost constantly. I found myself genuinely surprised in places, which I didn’t think was possible from a Disney movie. It’s hard to imagine The Princess and the Frog becoming one of the most revered Disney classics. In spirit, it’s more loose and fun, much like the movies of the Robin Hood/Aristocats era, but it’s got enough meat to it to keep it from being a lightweight.