newjerseynewsroom.com

BY JOE TYRRELL

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Based on Bryan Lee O'Malley's graphic novels about a slacker bassist and a girlfriend with a not-quite-past, "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" rocks. It pops. It Pop Rocks.

Countless modern movies owe their very existence, aimless as it might be, to video games. With "Pilgrim," the movies finally return the favor, and rack up points in the process.

Where so much Hollywood product shares a limited, stuttering visual vocabulary of jump cuts and smoke machines, director Edgar Wright leads "Pilgrim" on a happy dance across a landscape of Atari, Bollywood, Marvel, Peter Max and John Woo, not to mention Toronto.

In the process, mild-mannered Michael Cera becomes a leading man and a video game avatar, even as he remains his hipster doofus self.

Cera's Scott shares a basement apartment, and its lone bed, with suavely gay Wallace (Kieran Culkin), whose calm assertiveness braces Scott's drift.

The film's joyful mash-up of styles gives us computer-screen click tags for the room's spare furnishings: except for Scott's jacket, everything in view belongs to Wallace. A telephone doesn't merely ring, it rrrrrrrrrrings across the screen in graphic art lettering.

The 23-year-old Scott is pining for his lost love Nat, a singer fronting the latest disposable pop concoction and now known as Envy. Scott does.

But he's making do with a 17-year-old Catholic schoolgirl Knives Chau, in part because she's young enough to be impressed by his discourse on the origin of "Pac-Man." Alternatingly guileless and guileful, Knives eventually will live up to her name in Ellen Wong's fun portrayal.

Their dates consist of the dance and kung-fu games at the local video arcade, introducing the element of on-screen scorekeeping that will continue into the rest of Scott's love life.

Except to poor Knives, that hardly rises to the level of a relationship, but it's enough to bring concern from Wallace and disapproval from Scott's sister Stacey, the reliable Anna Kendrick.

In contrast, the members of Scott's barely there band, Sex Bob-Omb, as artfully clumsy as their name, seem glad to have at least one follower. Well, except for dagger-eyed Kim, Alison Pill in another dead-on performance, their small, freckled firecracker of a drummer.

As a measure of quality, their music is supplied by Beck Hansen, a little heavier on the power chords than usual, and bounces you around the club floor without knocking you senseless. But their numbers are probably among the 20 he wrote that hour. It's not that you won't remember them after the movie; you won't remember them as soon as they end.

(The music provides a good clue as to whether you might enjoy this movie. If you want Gershwin or Smokey Robinson or Michael Bublé, this might not be for you. On the other hand, it's where your culture is at.)

Life as Scott knows it comes to a screeching halt when Scott encounters mysterious, diffident Ramona, an American cool enough to freeze his fumbling lines. Given the set-up, there could still be a story if this were the real world, and Ramona went off with someone hipper than Scott could ever be.

But the pairing of nerdy guy with hot girl appears to be the current socially acceptable mass media delusion, and I certainly am not one to object. This is our century's answer to phrenology, what of it?

Let's face it, really cool guys and girls are out there racing cars, stopping crimes, starting wars — and often getting fatally mangled in the process — not safely making movies about all that.

Maybe Charles Boyer was cool, or Catherine Deneuve, or (I want to believe) George Clooney. But not Michael Cera.

On the other hand, cool girls may also be out there doing things. Certainly many of those in movies have issues beyond those that can be addressed by buying babies around the world.

As Ramona, Mary Elizabeth Winstead does her own dance, and is skillful enough to blend concealment and revelation, to put distance in her seduction. She knows she's hotter than Scott, but she's taken a liking to him. And she's carrying plenty of baggage.

That begins to show up, first by e-mail, in a series of challenges to Scott from the "League of Evil Exes," anyone Ramona has ever been involved with, going back to 7th grade.

These drolly elaborate fight scenes play out like levels of video games, with arcade blips and beeps, running point totals, losers who explode into showers of coins. In fact, they are Canadian coins, because for once, Toronto is playing itself in a movie.

We have seen it on screen often enough as New York, but Canada's second city (recent municipal government aggrandizement aside) has been Anytown, USA for decades.

"They make movies in Toronto?" Scott asks in one of this movie's many throwaway lines. When one of his confrontations takes place on a film location, a New York backdrop is stretched across the camera shot.

With their inventive graphics and constant interruptions from other characters from the relatively real-life portion of the plot, the fight scenes work better than could be expected.

The heart of this movie is not the set pieces, though, but the observations and realizations that characters reach about themselves and others. Many of the other male characters join Scott in sharing a bed with Wallace, sometimes packed as closely as sardines.

After each of Scott's many references to her "evil ex-boyfriends," Ramona corrects, "evil exes," with good reason. In the 21st Century, love is a many-gendered thing.

"Pilgrim" may take the long way around on a journey to understanding, but the offbeat track makes it a trail-blazer.

Joe Tyrrell may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it