Fanboy Contra Fanboy: The Genius of Edgar Wright

Managed to get this done just before leaving for Toronto. I loved The World's End as I have loved all of Edgar Wright's work, as ever for its critique of fan culture as its embrace of that culture's irascible childishness. Writing about the director's latest thus necessitated an overview of his entire career, which I find to be a subversive comment on everything the filmmaker holds dear. To call The World's End (or any of the others) "mature" is to miss the more complex relationship with nerdiness that Wright explores, and that he explores it with such exciting, seemingly forgotten mainstream chops only makes him more engaging.

My full piece is up at Movie Mezzanine.

The Adventures of Tintin (Steven Spielberg, 2011)

Written as one extended climax, The Adventures of Tintin can be a draining experience, and one generally bereft of traditionally dramatic human elements. Yet the film bursts with such exuberance and imagination that even the Uncanny Valley limitations of motion-capture animation vanish in Brobdingnagian sequences so vast they make the special effect showcases of the Indiana Jones films look like the Super-8 pictures Spielberg made as a teenager. However well or poorly Spielberg's crack team of British writers capture the spirit of Hergé comics, Tintin is remarkable first and foremost for allowing one of cinema's biggest dreamers the opportunity to do anything he wants to do.

Spielberg's camera, already so active and eager in his live-action films, is here unmoored from any hindrance, be it spatial dimensions, production safety or physics itself. Every shot swoons, tilts, zooms and soars with elegance, creating such fluid motion that scenes routinely flow into each other through sudden inversions of  scale and setting. A massive setpiece shrinks into a puddle of water stepped in as the focus shifts, or a camelback trek through an endless desert forms on the back of a hand. Such segues make the film even more vertiginous, a dizzying, unabashed exercise in style over substance, one constantly in motion as the 3D communicate the unstoppable momentum, not unlike action lines in a comic. But when the artist in question is one of the medium's great stylists, sometimes it's more rewarding to simply sit back and be wowed.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Made only a decade after he first garnered attention for his Britcom, Spaced, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World could serve as a bookend to his brief but infinitely rewarding career to this point. Spaced was about the VCR Generation, late-Gen-X slackers who communicated solely through pop culture references to cult movies and genre T.V. shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Scott Pilgrim, adapted from Bryan Lee O'Malley's comic series, plays like Spaced jumped forward a generation, charting millennials whose basis of shared knowledge is video games, animé and the Alpha and Omega of the Internet.

The key difference between Wright's breakthrough series and this film, of course, is that in the interim between them, he create two of the funniest, wildest and most visually astute genre films of the last 25 years. Shaun of the Dead turned a minuscule budget into a zombie spoof that worked perfectly as a zombie film, and therefore it also worked as a piercing social critique. The same slackers who wandered around dead-eyed in Spaced were now equated with zombies, forcing the protagonist to beat down creatures whom he somewhat resembled. Hot Fuzz, of course, was about a hero cop foisted onto a calm hamlet where the police force was made up of slackers of all ages, as if the refuse of each generation somehow trickled down their separate paths into the same delta.

With these films, Wright stands with Quentin Tarantino as the most daring and insightful genre movie director around, and both work so well because of layers not easily gleaned from their wild rides. As I argued in my defense of Tarantino's masterpiece, Inglourious Basterds, the director is a surprising moralist in the vein of Sam Peckinpah, capable of reveling in everything he's subtly warning us against. If Peckinpah warned us against fascism by becoming fascist himself in Straw Dogs, Tarantino left glimpses of meditation in the middle of the animé lunacy of Kill Bill, and he celebrated his Jewish revenge fantasy even as he condemned the good guys for becoming terrorists to fight terror. His fans are routinely as blind to this as his detractors, hence the proliferation of movies that simply glorify violence entirely.

Wright, on the other hand, eschews moralism for a sense of empathy. Beneath the wild mash-ups of Spaced is an interest in character that develops a cast of oddballs to the point that their quirks no longer seem an added flight of fancy to give the material a hook but genuine, identifiably human traits grounded in feelings of loneliness and doubt. Shaun of the Dead may have suggested that only something as destructive as a supernatural holocaust could snap youth out of their self-consumed reverie, but it nevertheless advanced its characters, touching upon responsibilities in relationships both Platonic and romantic. Hot Fuzz played up the latent homosexuality rampant in buddy cop films, but Wright developed the story until the two leads felt more convincingly like friends and partners than in nearly any "legitimate" buddy film.

Now, without Simon Pegg helping as his writing partner, Wright tackles material that almost seems as if it were written to be filmed by him. Scott Pilgrim follows a world so similar yet so completely removed from '90s geekdom that even the older siblings of teenagers may feel culture shock. Where the layabouts of yore connected through all those geek movies and TV shows, now the linking element is YouTube and video games. People form clans on World of Warcraft, discuss battle plans for Modern Warfare 2 as if actually going into a fight and communicate through written snippets sent instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Skype and other programs. Everything is flashy, pixellated and brief, and the kids who grow up this way are attention deficit and emotionally transient, capable of moving from fad to fad so quickly that even the fading pop culture items of the '70s and '80s seem permanent hallmarks in comparison.

Within minutes, one can see that Wright understood all of this. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World has a kaleidoscopic, kinetic mise-en-scène to shame the previous example of mainstream sensory overload, the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer. A mash-up of video games, action movies, frenzied electropop, comic book drawings that blend American styles with manga and everything else that occurs to Wright, the film borders on the avant-garde in its visualization of the modern worldview. You cannot focus not because you're dumber than your parents but because you have access to all the world's information simultaneously. The Internet's capacity for storage and real-time access may well be the equivalent to hearing God's voice, an endless void of knowledge and power suddenly forced into a gray, mushy bundle of synapses and nerves that cannot handle the strain. Much of the comedy of the film and the comic series comes from Scott's perennial inability to retain anything, but that's not because he's an idiot but because his hard drive simply crashed.

The first thing you should know about Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that it is funny. Damn funny. As Gene Siskel once raved about Kingpin, every time it wants you laugh, it will make you do so. Visual gags litter the screen, from hipster-flecked title cards to sidebars indicating characters' ages, coolness ratings and fun facts. This is a film where the protagonist goes to the bathroom, and his bladder capacity is shown via a "Pee Bar" that drains as the young man urinates. We even see his thoughts visualized as a roulette wheel that spins through a series of excuses to give to his girlfriend and what appears to be a voltmeter that jumps from "No Clue" to "Gets It" when something finally sinks into Scott's thick skull.

When we meet Scott, he's a 22-year-old nobody who plays bass in a band he cheerfully admits is terrible, showing up for gigs that may or may not pay and not bothering to support himself with anything so ridiculous as a "job." His bandmates -- ex-girlfriend Kim Pine (Alison Pill, so frosty that the constant snowfall in the film's Toronto setting may be her mental projection), bandleader/only person with any emotional attachment to the group whatsoever Stephen Stills (Mark Webber) and hanger-on Young Neil (Johnny Simmons), whom no one can consistently recognize despite the band's practice room being his apartment -- are just as shiftless. When Scott brags at the beginning of his new girlfriend, a pure-as-the-driven-snow Chinese-Canadian named Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), only Kim has much to say, and all of it about how she's only 17 (and a Catholic schoolgirl, no less).

His short-lived quasi-romance ends, however, when he sees a strange, roller-skating woman in his dreams with hot pink hair, a seemingly innocuous occurrence until Scott begins to spot her in real-life. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) is too cool for Scott -- so is Knives, frankly, but Ramona has the added points of being hip and from America -- but he manages to win her over and enters into a new-new relationship that seems great. Until a strange Indian man crashes a band gig and challenges Scott to a fight for Ramona's hand, that is.


In cramming the six graphic novels of the comic series into just under two hours, Wright devotes most of the film to these battles with the League of Evil Exes, seven specters from Ramona's past who make normal ordeals with dealing with partner's exes seem trivial in comparison. Because so much of the movie involves various fights, Scott Pilgrim can feel repetitive, or at least it could have if Wright hadn't been in charge. Understanding the need to keep things fresh, Wright brings something different to each fight: one plays as a sort of dance-off, another a competition between bassists, yet another as a fight with an action star (Chris Evans) who forces Scott to fight all of his stunt doubles. Each fight has its own moves, unique color palettes and a host of contextual jokes that don't let the humor flag for a second.

From a writing standpoint, the percentage of one-liners that land with precision accuracy in this film is stunning. Rare is the film that can make a decently filled theater laugh incessantly, but the barrage of Scott's vacuous incredulity, Kim's venomous put-downs, Ramona's bemused observations and the contributions of everyone else ensure that every scene, even the more serious ones, get at least one good chuckle. Characters rarely speak for longer than a sentence or two, reflecting a generation raised to express themselves in 140 characters or less, and poor Knives' face even turns into a shocked emoticon when her musical heroine (and Scott's conniving ex-girlfriend) comes to town.

Everything about the film, in fact, plays off of the idea of a generation prescribed ADHD medication en masse. Film courses could and should use Scott Pilgrim to demonstrate match cuts, as the opening arc of the film jumps time and place as conversations continue seamlessly, noting how little Scott ever seems to remember and how often you just seem to end up where you were going without processing the journey there. Reality breaks apart more often (and with more oneiric an atmosphere) than in Inception, with Scott slipping in and out of dreams, walking through eerily pitch-black, snow-covered Toronto streets and surrounding by flying streaks of onomatopoeic letters whisking about for telephone rings, landed punches and the rarely changing D chord he pounds out of his Rickenbacker. Wright's usual trickery slips into the film, such as his penchant for using his quickest edits for the most banal moments, ridiculing the action movie conceit of the superhero suiting up by quickly showing Scott zipping up and slipping on armbands and then arduously drawing out the boy tying his shoe until it becomes the funniest bit in the film. In one instance, Scott returns to the apartment he shares with his roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin, playing Middle America's worst nightmare as a gay man who can instantly seduce heterosexuals with his charm), and Wright plays a sitcom laugh track over it, recalling its usage in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, previously the most daring and experimental mainstream feature on the market. Incidentally, experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage purportedly loved Stone's deliberately overcooked satire, and the influence of Brakhage creeps in here too, with an opening credits played over jarring and jittering displays of pure color and a devil-may-care attitude toward traditional film grammar.

Beneath the rambunctious battle sequences and the endless one-liners, however, is that same empathy that powers Wright's previous efforts. While not as prominent as in Shaun of the Dead or Spaced, the heart of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is as vital to the film's memorability as its gleeful destruction of whatever boundaries still existed for action films. The entire arc of the film concerns Scott's growth from a listless twentysomething who cannot process anything other than his own desires into someone finally reading to accept maturity. Ramona, too, has an uncertainty about life she needs to figure out, and while Scott has a right to be indignant when she sums up their relationship by saying, "You're what I need right now," he doesn't understand that she's just as confused as he is. As I approach the end of my collegiate years, I understand these feelings: you think college will prepare you for life, then you leave and realize that, even if you excelled, you spent 4-6 years with routine breaks between classes, nap times, endless trips to coffee houses, partying. I'll go into the job market less prepared for a full 9-5 occupation than I would have been after high school with its rigid scheduling. These young men and women reached some imaginary border and were told, "Now you're adults!" and then cast into the void, and they don't know what to make of it. If their journey looks flashier than ours, it's no less daunting.

Nary a hair is out of place in the film. Michael Cera's presence has been a sticking point for many I've spoken to, citing Cera burnout, but he works in charm in a way he hasn't before: Scott Pilgrim is once entirely innocent and incredible corrupt, so attention-deficit that he cannot really remember how many people he's actually hurt -- in a way, he recalls the amnesiac Leonard from Memento. Winstead finds a similar balance, never apologizing for her life but not remotely proud of it either, and the fact that she's more clearheaded than Scott only makes her sadder and more filled with regret. The supporting cast are uniformly excellent, from Culkin's incessant witticisms to Pill's bitter musings to Aubrey Plaza's foul-mouthed Julie ("Has Issues," as a bit of text helpfully explains) and Anna Kendrick's lovable bitchiness as Scott's Sister. Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brandon Routh and more make for film villains, all with enough personal and physical differences to prevent the lineup of Evil Exes from feeling samey; Schwartzman in particular hasn't been this hilariously smug since perhaps Rushmore. Wong deserves to break into some other work, effortlessly conveying Knives' naïveté and overall sweetness and playing off young actors with years more experience without once flagging.

Remarkably, they all understand what the story is really about as much as Wright does. Only just in their own adulthood, the actors realize that we all spend our youths trying to find our identity through movies or the Internet, objects that are paradoxically shared experiences even though we process them alone (and I loved the moment where a character says something witty and Scott asks, "What's that from?" expecting a movie title, only for the other to spit, "My brain!"). Then, we enter into relationships, but they're not yet serious because we're feeling our way around new territory. Only when we finally expand our perspectives to wonder how the other people in our lives see us do we ever figure ourselves out. This is a revelation more thoroughly covered in the comics, but the beauty of Wright's film is how deftly he manages to fit the core of this theme into a movie that could easily have been two hours of flashy nothingness. Instead, he mixes the avant-garde with the tangible, crafting his most frenzied genre mash-up yet but never losing sight of the heart that gives it meaning, and even the seriousness adds to the exhilaration of one of the most purely enjoyable films in years.

Shaun of the Dead

Inglourious Basterds so renewed my love for Quentin Tarantino that I find myself even going back to directors I can indirectly tie to him. For example, I went back to Breathless -- after all, Tarantino is the dumbed-down American version of the French auteur -- and finally connected with it, insufferable pretension and all. But if Godard inspired Tarantino, so too did Tarantino unleash a wave of imitators looking to score big in the post-Pulp Fiction "indie" scene. And if the transition saw tributes to philosophy and art give way to television and kung-fu movie send-ups, so too did the passing of the torch from the Weinsteins' golden boy to the next group of Sundance hopefuls result in a significant drop-off.

To be honest, the majority of, well I don't want to cheaply dismiss them as "clones" but sometimes that's an apt description, were simply awful. The one that will forever reach through the fog of my mind like the half-remembered nightmare that it is to haunt me in my quiet moments is of course Troy Duffy's nauseating effort The Boondock Saints, which apparently everyone I interact with loves because hell is truly other people. One of the few movies to mine the non-linear narrative and rapid-fire dialogue of Pulp Fiction successfully was Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a film so fun Ritchie got away with essentially making the same film twice with Snatch (admittedly, bringing on Brad Pitt as a nonsensical gypsy street fighter didn't hurt). But even Guy Ritchie failed to grasp that what made Pulp Fiction, and the rest of Tarantino's canon, so special was the utter joy that was tangible in every frame. Sure, Tarantino may muddle his morality until it's unclear whether he's reveling in his madness or using it to some method, but no one seemed to even try to figure that out. All the imitators, they just gleaned the surface and left out the glue that bound it together.

The chief exception to this is the team of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. They made names for themselves with the superb Britcom Spaced, which Pegg wrote with Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson) and Wright directed; a glorious mix of film and television quotation (with some big homages to Tarantino, of course), Three's Company and Friends, Spaced is truly unlike any other series I've ever watched, with well-defined characters that never allowed themselves to be swallowed by the referential revelry. And for a series that so deeply mined geeky subjects like comic books and video games, it contained an effortless feminine touch courtesy of Hynes, who crafted her Daisy into someone just as nerdy as the fellas without calling any attention to herself, since *gasp* female nerds do exist.

After Spaced, Hynes went on to other projects, while Pegg and Wright took a bit from one of the episodes, in which Pegg's character has junk food-induced hallucinations of fighting zombies, and expanded it into what now must be acknowledged as a modern comedy classic. Its title suggests that Shaun of the Dead will be little more than a skin-deep parody of horror flicks à la the increasingly awful Scary Movie series, a cheap collection of pop culture references gleaned from whatever's hot in the tabloids or trash TV at the moment.

References certainly abound in the film, from the obvious cues to Romero's Dead series as well as works as diverse as James Cameron flicks, The Deer Hunter and the standard of film nerd quotation, Star Wars. There's at least one shot directly lifted from Halloween. But what Wright and Pegg understand about the zombie film is that zombies only work 1) in large numbers and 2) as satire. Danny Boyle's low-budget 28 Days Later fulfilled the second, but it got around the first by revising zombie rules to allow them to run, thus negating the need for large swarms. Shaun of the Dead also works on a small budget but, purists that they are, they found a way to cast swarms of extras to play the walking dead. Amazingly, despite the way in which every zombie appearance is turned into a gag of some sort, these throngs of zombies to pack some scares in them, because Wright and Pegg treat the subject seriously.

Wright spells out the satire of the film in the superb opening title sequence: in gentle tracking shots, he moves through the streets of London, touching on those who will soon fall to the outbreak, as they shuffle through streets completely indistinguishable from the zombies they're about to become. The titular protagonist, played by Pegg, plays like a projection of his Spaced character Tim, down to his directionless career path and vaguely homoerotic relationship with his best friend (played in both projects by Nick Frost). He's pushing 30 and working a job otherwise filled by teenagers looking for some pocket money on weekends, and he spends every night at a dusty old pub, much to the mounting outrage of his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield).

Pegg's slacker is the ideal protagonist for the film, as he personifies its underlying message. Already disaffected at work and incapable of concentrating on his relationship, Shaun responds to the realization of the outbreak by running back into his flat and turning on the television. When he finally decides on a course of action, he schemes to use the zombie plague to re-ingratiate himself with both his girlfriend and his mother (Penelope Wilton). Shaun slowly morphs into a capable leader over the course of the film, but the real focus is on Shaun's relationships with Ed, Liz and his mother Barbara, which works on both a sentimental and satiric level: it gives the film a more intimate feel even as it emphasizes the self-absorption and obliviousness of the current generation.

Now, listing off all the gags would be boring for both me and you, and I'd save time by just posting the screenplay, because barely any moment passes without something worth a laugh or at least the smirk of recognition that comes with spotting a reference. Even the sentimental moments have an underlying humor that makes the scenes funny without spoiling the severity of the moment. The best bit is, of course, the synchronized beating of a zombie to the tune of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now," a comic dance routine that has gotten a laugh out of me after a good eight viewings. But I'm also quite partial to an early scene before the outbreak, where Shaun attempts to fill in for his manager -- who ominously called in sick -- and finding himself terrified of his younger co-workers. The idea of intimidating teenagers is a holdover from Spaced, and the idea that, when a grown man is as much of a slacker as a teen, even the younger guys will mock him. I also enjoy Shaun's inability to shoot when he finds a gun late in the film: too many action and horror films give the ordinary man far too much an understanding of weaponry and fighting under stress.

If I have any complaint about Pegg and Wright's films, it's that their post-Spaced work lacks the understated feminism of that series. Granted, both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz deconstruct the heterosexual male relationship and subvert the idea of the unstoppable masculine force, but I miss Hynes' touch. However, I noticed this time around -- my first viewing after watching Spaced -- that the women are the only ones who, for the most part, keep their heads in the situation. When Shaun fends off a zombie who attacks his mother, the women are the only ones who help him fight while the men stand idly by, either absorbed with their cell phones or too craven to act.

Like Tarantino, Wright isn't what you would call "subtle," but his frenetic style and frequent quotation is put to thematic use. His breakneck editing hysterically makes mundane activities such as brushing and cooking a light breakfast as action-packed as a shootout, but he also leaves items in the background that subtly recall other films without making a show of it. The equation of Shaun's uninteresting life with action via editing further emphasizes his banality even in an apocalypse, as well as, perhaps, his inflated opinion of himself; as Shaun must face truly horrible scenarios, Wright switches to filming in longer takes that remove the sheen from the first half and offer moments of reflection and cold reality. The film also excels because of its cast: Pegg and Wright must have won themselves quite a reputation with Spaced, because some big names signed on for the project. Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis of The Office have parts (Freeman appears in a cameo), as do Matt Lucas of Little Britain and Dylan Moran of Black Books. Even Bill Nighy turns up for a significant role as Shaun's stepdad. Every actor is perfect for the part, and the cameos manage to get all that name recognition in without distracting from the movie itself.

Their subsequent Hot Fuzz was more a thorough takedown of a genre, but Pegg and Wright crafted with Shaun of the Dead a movie built upon genre and references that somehow emerges totally original. Its seamless blend of romantic comedy and zombie film -- two genres so rigid in construction they practically come with rule books -- breaks the confines of both and makes a movie that is at once funny, meaningful, sentimental and spooky; it mixes the satire of Romero's Dead films with the over-the-top comedy of Evil Dead II, filtered through the impish charm of Spaced. Despite its grand climax, Shaun ends largely as it began, with the world getting back to normal, and the characters return to their lives of enslavement to television, which is changed insofar that the reality programs now have leftover zombies to fuel their concepts. For Shaun at least, this is a happy ending.