I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World on Saturday and really enjoyed it. I think the best movie adaptations of other properties are ones that capture the spirit of the original material while still functioning as an entertaining movie independent of that source material. I think Edgar Wright got it exactly right while still doing his own creative thing. (There’s a great interview with Wright in Time Magazine, which is one of the many major media outlets to give the apparent flop a very positive review.)
I also loved the supporting cast, particularly Ellen (Knives Chau) Wong, Kieran (Wallace Wells) Culkin, Alison (Kim Pine) Pill, and Ben (Other Scott) Lewis. The evil exes were all fun to varying degrees, and my only major complaint would be that things dragged a little at the end. But movies almost always drag a little bit at the end anymore.
I’m a little shocked at all of the schadenfreude over the movie’s box office performance, like coming in fifth – out of all of the movies in current release in the United States – is a bad thing. It doesn’t strike me as an instant blockbuster by design but as a movie that gains in reputation over time. Maybe Hollywood just hates sleeper hits or cult hits or whatever it is that I suspect the movie will become, but I don’t think the people who made the movie have anything to worry about in the long run. Shaun of the Dead didn’t rake it in right out of the gate either.
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Speaking of movies adapted from other media, I could barely sit through Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s terrific novel, The Lovely Bones. It was painfully overwrought and grindingly slow at the same time. I did appreciate the presence of Susan Sarandon, doing that thing where actors of a certain stature give a performance that would fit the kind of movie they’d rather be making than the one they happen to be in.
