Scott Pilgrim vs The World

My review of Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Michael Cera kicks ass for the girl he loves in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

Credit: Supplied

SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD

Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jason Schwartzman
Directed by Edgar Wright
Fans of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s six-part graphic-novel series, Scott Pilgrim, have been nervously anticipating its film adaptation, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, for over three years. Reasonably enough, there were some legitimate questions, including: How does one condense six books that rely heavily on video-game references, metaphor, and music-geek culture into a two-hour movie? The answer, it seems, was to hire director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), who brings O’Malley’s deceptively simple novels to vivid, eye-popping life.

Scott Pilgrim (a surprisingly physical Michael Cera), the titular hero, is a 22-year-old slacker bass player in a Toronto-based garage-rock band called Sex Bob-Omb. He shares a bed with his gay roommate, Wallace (Kieran Culkin), is unemployed, and has a 17-year-old girlfriend, Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), who’s still in high school.

Scott first sees his soulmate, Amazon.ca delivery girl Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), in a “dream” (it’s actually a portal in his brain) and finally asks her out after running in to her at a house party. Before they can be together, however, Scott learns he must defeat her seven evil exes, brought together by her latest ex, music executive Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman).

Translating the stylized “graphic” elements of the original graphic novel from the page to the screen is a daunting task, but Wright and his team provide a look that’s positively fierce. Whether it’s the remarkable cinematography (ho-hum Toronto is practically picturesque), CGI video-game homages (as exes are felled, their bodies dissolve into coins), or the frequent nods to O’Malley’s art and design, Scott Pilgrim is a visual tonic for the ADHD generation — in the best possible sense.

As a fan of the graphic novels, Wright makes some intriguing decisions about how to condense the series. The opening 20 minutes are almost entirely faithful to the first book, but, out of necessity, he moves away from O’Malley’s narrative structure without losing the story’s heart. Even those going in cold are likely to be wooed if they allow themselves to be.

Scott Pilgrim is the kind of movie that could very well define a generation, perfectly capturing that potentially lethal combination of naivete, cynicism, fear, and apathy that gets in the way of growing up.—Andrea Warner

Scott Pilgrim's Musical Little Life

My cover story for August's Exclaim! features Edgar Wright, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Jason Schwartzman, and more talking about the music of Scott Pilgrim.

Scott Pilgrim's Musical Little Life By Andrea Warner Scott Pilgrim will knock you on your ass. His superpower? Being awesome. Thanks to Bryan Lee O'Malley's six-part graphic novel series, the 23-year-old slacker musician has become the unlikely literary hero for a new generation ― a jobless bass player in a band called Sex Bob-omb who transforms into a lover and a fighter when he falls for ninja delivery girl Ramona Flowers and learns he'll have to defeat her seven evil exes. This month he embarks on the coveted, if rocky, path set out before him by the likes of Batman and Spider-Man when director Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World hits the big screen on August 13. A live action adaptation of all six books, filmed and set in Toronto, the movie features Brampton-born Michael Cera, the young prince of awkward comedy, in the title role, Jason Schwartzman as a big bad evil ex, and a host of high profile Canadian bands in the background. Scott Pilgrim's ascent to the top of the pop culture pyramid is the culmination of six years of slow-building buzz. The series is perhaps the first to successfully meld all aspects of geek culture, from videogames to comic books to music, in a humorous and heartfelt way. The story also flirts with a slightly alternative reality: a Toronto with subspace travel, where defeated exes dissolve into coins the hero can collect. Think of it as the precursor to the popularity of The Big Bang Theory and a further indication of the importance of San Diego's Comic-Con: geeks have inherited the earth, they are the harbingers of cool. What really attracted me is that the books are amazing and the central premise is really interesting," director Wright says. "It was a chance to make a comedy that was really magical and fantastical. It has a great sense of metaphor and there's this fantastic chance to be really visually interesting with it." If the British filmmaker (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is successful, he will have accomplished more than just making a hit out of his biggest film to date. Wright will be presenting a new blueprint for the Hollywood blockbuster: make it all about the music. "I'd done comedy and action before, but I hadn't really had a chance to do a film that indulges my passion in music as well," Wright says. The writer-director got his wish when he was recruited to adapt Scott Pilgrim. Both the film and the books are in essence a love story set to music; the universe of O'Malley's creation was ultimately inspired by just one song: Plumtree's "Scott Pilgrim." And like all the best love stories, this one started with a mixtape. "I made this mixtape called Scott Songs before I even started writing [the books], so I had this mood board I would go back to all the time," O'Malley says. Scott Songs became the sonic foundation for the architecture ― thematic, visual, and narrative ― of Scott Pilgrim's "precious little life." It included everything from '70s AM gold to '90s Canadian indie rock, including Plumtree, the relatively obscure and long defunct, all-girl Halifax band. (See sidebar.) Plumtree's songs are way more complicated than they seem," O'Malley says. "They seem like harmless pop songs, but there are complicated guitar parts and the lyrics have a lot more shading. Obviously I listened to them in high school and that was a big influence on the way I view the world and the way I write." The band also featured prominently on the first mixtape O'Malley gave Wright, and their shared penchant for playlists helped forge their initial bond. "Scott Pilgrim's" lyrics ("I've loved you for a thousand years") are a faint blueprint for the series, which follow Scott and Ramona's tumultuous relationship and the ongoing fight against her evil exes. As their collaborative relationship deepened, Wright and O'Malley bonded further over music. According to O'Malley, songs from those initial compilations were played on set during filming, and several became the bones of the film's soundtrack, itself the last word in Scott Pilgrim mixtapes. An energetic explosion of indie rock, snarling garage punk, and Britpop, the album features a diverse group of award-winning musicians, from Beck to Broken Social Scene. Wright wanted to stay true to O'Malley's books by filming in Toronto, though as of press time we can't confirm which local haunts made it into the movie. We can confirm that it was Canadian filmmakers and music aficionados Bruce McDonald and Don McKellar who pointed Wright towards Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning of BSS to help authenticate the film's Toronto vibe. "Someone arranged for Edgar and I to go have dinner and we kind of went on this blind date," laughs Drew. The "date" went well, and BSS ended up working on the film's score with music supervisor Nigel Godrich (famed Radiohead producer), as well as writing the music and performing as rival punk band Crash and the Boys with actor Erik Knudsen. "In the book there's this joke that Crash and the Boys do songs that are 0.4 seconds long and stuff," O'Malley laughs. "Kevin and Brendan, they really embraced that. Like, really ridiculous, songs that are only one note. Their longest song is, like, 50 seconds... It sounds kind of like the shitty bands I used to play in, but way better obviously." Grammy-winner Beck wrote the music for Pilgrim's fictional band Sex Bob-omb, as well as writing and performing an original song. "When I first heard Beck was doing it, I was like, wow, that's really weird," O'Malley admits. "I was a fan of his Mutations, and his singles, like the crazy over-the-top stuff, but I didn't know the breadth of his work." Wright was convinced that Beck was the right choice, particularly when he revealed that his inspiration for Sex Bob-omb's songs came from the first book where O'Malley had scrawled 'The Archies' across a drum riser. He ended up turning the songs around in just 72 hours. "I think it goes back to some of his earlier, more punky garage stuff," Wright says. "The Sex Bob-omb songs are very much in that raw and rough sounding garage-bubble gum mode." The actors portraying Sex Bob-omb also needed to know how to play, so Wright hired Sloan's Chris Murphy to run his own school of rock on set, working tightly with Cera, Alison Pill, and Mark Webber. "Michael can play guitar and he's a multi-instrumentalist, but Mark and Alison both had to learn their instruments," Wright explains. "The Canadians in the cast ― well, like, Alison was extremely dumbstruck that Chris Murphy was going to be her teacher." According to Wright, music became such a huge part of the process that everyone kept rocking behind the scenes, thanks in part to the numerous actors who happen to lead double lives as musicians. "Michael's a really good guitarist, and you can see he really goes for it," Wright says. "There are two scenes in the film where he's playing live and he sings the Beck 'Ramona' song himself live on guitar, and he sings the whole thing in one shot. He was completely on top of it. There was a lot of music on set. Even people not playing [in the movie], like Jason Schwartzman ― there were all these guitars around, either prop guitars or people just bringing them in, so there was a lot of music in between takes." Schwartzman, a long time fan of Wright's work and a musician himself (The O.C. theme song "California" is by his former band Phantom Planet), plays Gideon Graves, the leader of Ramona's evil exes. He bonded with the director the same way O'Malley did: through mixtapes and play lists. "We met in Los Angeles, and we found a lot of the same things funny and liked a lot of the same music and it just seemed like, you know, we could be friends," Schwartzman says. "My dream was to work with Edgar one day and we became friends after having that meeting, emailing each other movies to see and records to listen to and it was an exciting friendship. One day he called me and we had a Scott Pilgrim discussion. He described the movie, gave me all of the books, and he gave me the script. It was very unusual. That's not usually how ― or at least for me ― that seems like how a lot of the big stars get a movie, you know what I mean? I'm used to auditioning ― and failing ― a lot." The sixth and final book, which came out July 20, is the first one to prominently feature Schwartzman's character. It hadn't even been written when filming began, though O'Malley provided an outline to help finalize the script. Schwartzman says he relied on music to help him flesh out the character. It's a practice he's come by honestly after a long working relationship with filmmaker Wes Anderson. "When I first met Wes, right after I got the part in Rushmore, he gave me a cassette tape of the soundtrack to Rushmore," Schwartzman says. "We would shoot the movie with the songs actually playing on set, and I think that just kind of spoiled me or conditioned me to make music so much a part of what I do. One thing that I find really helps ― well, it's a really dumb thing, but, like you hear about Robert DeNiro gaining all this weight or Christian Bale losing all this weight ― I like to make iPod play lists for my characters. So it's not as in-depth, but I make these play lists and then I listen to that music exclusively." (For the record, Gideon's play list includes Pulp, Stereolab and Blur.) And, also just growing up in the '80s and then the '90s, and watching really cheesy TV shows and the girl walks away so queue the song," Schwartzman laughs. "When I was in high school and a girl would leave me, I would queue the song in my own head. I've always done everything to music." Exactly like something Scott Pilgrim might say.
******************** Who is the real Scott Pilgrim? Carla Gillis of folk-pop group Sister is a little floored. Her former band, Plumtree, a female power pop quartet from Halifax, broke up ten years ago, but suddenly they are the second song on a soundtrack to a movie they inadvertently inspired, sandwiched between Beck and Frank Black. "It's crazy!" Gillis laughs. "Never in our wildest dreams did we ever imagine something like that would happen." It's all thanks to their song "Scott Pilgrim," a catchy ditty with driving guitar riffs, an earnest low-budget video heavy on cheesy charm that has over 40,000 views on YouTube. There isn't really a Scott Pilgrim," Gillis reveals. "It's just a general feeling of pining for people but feeling a bit helpless on acting on those feelings." In fact, the song title came after the song, the result of an inside joke. "We had a friend named Scott Ingram, and someone was telling a story about him at practice," Gillis explains. "We'd also been recording with a guy named Philip Pilgrim, and whoever was telling this story about Scott mixed up the two names and said Scott Pilgrim and we thought it was the funniest thing, just trying to imagine these two guys merged as one, and we were like, okay, that'll be the name for our new song." The real Scott Ingram, himself a former Exclaim! writer, has another "starring" role in the book series: after author Bryan Lee O'Malley met him, he named Ramona's third evil ex Todd Ingram. "I read online that he chose Todd because it's a bigger, more bad-ass version of Scott," Ingram laughs.

Scott Pilgrim music news: Edgar Wright, Bryan Lee O'Malley, and Kevin Drew

My story appeared on Exclaim.ca yesterday!

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Edgar Wright and Kevin Drew Talk the Music of Scott Pilgrim 7/21/2010 By Andrea Warner Comic book fans and music geeks, get ready to unite. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World hits theatres August 13, and we have a little under two weeks before we can snuggle up to the soundtrack, coming out August 10. As previously reported, the compilation is a kick-ass assembly of specially penned songs for the film courtesy of such artists as Beck and Broken Social Scene, as well as previously released indie pop and rock songs, many of which appeared on mixtapes exchanged between Scott Pilgrim author Bryan Lee O'Malley and director Edgar Wright during their collaboration for the film. When it came time to create the music for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Wright hired Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich as music supervisor. Godrich then recruited Beck, who wrote the music for Scott Pilgrim's band, Sex Bob-omb, while Wright tapped Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning to write the music for rival band Crash and the Boys. "Someone arranged for Edgar and I to go have dinner, and we kind of went on this blind date,” Drew laughs in a recent Exclaim! interview. “Obviously I knew his films and told me about what he was doing with Scott Pilgrim and I wasn’t very familar with the books, but my brother was very much into graphic novels. Edgar said, ‘We’re looking for music and we hear that you’re Toronto,’ and he sent me all the books and that was how it started.” BSS signed on, but had precious little time to create an impression, since Crash and the Boys’ signature songs are short bursts of violent, ironic punk. The longest song is under 50 seconds. Perhaps this is why Drew insisted that the actor who played Crash in the movie, Erik Knudsen, record the vocals. “Because the songs were so quick and punk and fast, I knew he didn’t need to be a singer to pull this off,” Drew says. “It had to be the character’s voice. Eric was such a sweet kid and I called up Edgar and was like, ‘I’m just going to get this guy to come in, because spontaneity’s the whole point behind Crash and the Boys and what we were doing.’ We had 47 seconds. We didn’t have a lot of time!” As Drew explains, he and Canning also ended up infusing a bit of Toronto into the film's second soundtrack, featuring Godrich's instrumental arrangements, which will be released as an iTunes exclusive, the same day as the song soundtrack. "They were using stuff from [our album] Feel Good Lost, and Nigel wrote an email to us saying, 'Look, I'm writing the music right now, people are coming in and out, there's a whole bunch of Social Scene, so why don't you just come down? Why am I trying to get your vibe? Just come down,'" Drew says. "So we went for week and just jammed and it was amazing." Like with Broken Social Scene, Beck’s Sex Bob-omb songs find him unleashing a pent-up garage punk sound that's like a vacation from his usual fare. “I think it goes back to some of his earlier, more punky garage stuff,” Wright tells Exclaim! “He’d seen the books and the artwork and knew what Sex Bob-omb were supposed to be like. Here’s one of the things that inspired Beck: [in the book], Sex Bob-omb have a drum riser that says ‘the Archies,’ so Beck’s idea was, 'what would the rock version of the Archies be?' So they’re very much in that raw-sounding and rough-sounding garage bubblegum mode. Beck just wrote all of his songs in 72 hours.” The most classic-sounding Beck song in the film is beautiful ode “Ramona,” which appears twice on the soundtrack, with Beck performing an acoustic version and a full orchestral version as well. “I’m pretty sure the ‘Ramona’ acoustic track was not just the first take, but him singing it improv,” Wright laughs. “It’s definitely the demo track on the album, it just sounded so beautiful.” O’Malley adds, “Neither Edgar nor I knew that he added words until we heard the soundtrack. It was amazing. Like, 'wow, he added lyrics.'” As for the soundtrack’s selection of previously released tunes, Wright tells Exclaim!, "With the exception of Plumtree and Beachwood Sparks, which I had no knowledge of before Bryan gave them to me, four of the tracks are what I call 'crossover' tracks: ones that Bryan had on his list that I happened to be a huge fan of those songs. The Bluetones, who, completely separately from Bryan liking them, I happened to do two music videos for about ten years ago. And Frank Black; I was obsessed with the song 'I Heard Ramona Sing' back in art college. I absolutely loved that song. Then I saw that he had 'Under My Thumb' on his playlist, which happens to be my favourite Stones song; there was just a lot of great overlap. “Some of the other tracks there are my picks, like the T. Rex track ['Teenage Dream'], but a lot of it is just the overlap between the two of us. Both of us are fans of the Black Lips and the Broken Social Scene song ['Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl'], obviously. The Blood Red Shoes song ['It's Getting Boring by the Sea'] was one I had sent to Bryan that reminded me of the books, in a way." According to O'Malley, "I had more [influence] than I expected. The songs from my original mixtape just stuck in his brain, and I was really happy about that. I was never sure if my songs would make it in... Plumtree especially. It was an ongoing... well, I wouldn't say struggle, but I always wanted them on the soundtrack and I was never really sure that was going to happen, but Edgar wanted it too. I wasn't sure at first because he's kind of inscrutable, but it's really gratifying to have it there." The Scott Pilgrim vs. The World soundtrack is due out August 10 via ABKCO. A deluxe version is due out on September 7 and will feature a selection of bonus material.