Sliming the Young and Driving the Culture Into the Garbage Dump

My wife and I thought it would be fun to go to a movie and we'd seen the trailers for "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" and they looked innocent enough. The movie was rated PG-13 which seemed innocuous enough. So we went.

Basically this movie didn't show anything ... it just slimed everything. It reminded me of nothing so much as "Pulp Fiction" in terms of the total lack of any redeeming merit. The subtext of this movie is that any kind of sexual activity among the young is OK (in this case twenty somethings, but the first girlfriend is said to be 17 in the movie and made out to be sort of up-tight because she is Chinese and a Catholic. So we manage to get two sterotypes for the price of one.)

The movie is suggestive in the extreme. Promotes multiple sexual liaisons. Throws around the Lesbian word and the Gay word and has implied homosexual sex and implied heterosexual sex in the context of an on-going motif of extreme if not very explicit violence somehow made OK by having a sort of video game motif overlaid so that it seems to be an illusion or imagined experience rather than real. The female lead is supposed to have had serious relationships with a whole bunch of guys who are all out to get Scott Pilgrim. BTW motivation isn't very clear. Apparently if you ever date this gal whose hair is in varying psychedelic colors you lose your mind and want to kill her current boy friend. The band sells its soul to some guy near the end.

If you have not walked out then you find at the end that Scott Pilgrim is claiming to being unfaithful for going out with one without telling the other which is about the extent of any recognition that anything in the whole world might be wrong. Drugs are talked about as if they are quite acceptable, only they have not been used. The movie seems to be aimed at teenagers.

If teenagers buy into this world view then we are doomed as a culture. This is a thoroughly scummy movie, not even that well made and should be rated "R" but then no-one would go to see it, which would be a good thing.