Scott Pilgrim's Box Office Performance

(or, Joe Grunenwald & The Infinite Sadness)


So Scott Pilgrim vs. The World came out this past weekend. While I have not been talking much about it (or, really, much of anything lately) here, I have been talking about it pretty much everywhere else possible, because I'm excited. I love the graphic novels, and the movie looked awesome, and when I saw it (at a preview screening on Tuesday evening), I was not disappointed. The film is FANTASTIC. The translation of the material from page to screen is perfect, but at the same time the movie isn't hindered by an adherence to the source material (something that, save for the changed ending, I found to be one of Watchmen's big problems). The performances are strong - Michael Cera is less Michael Cera-y than he usually is, Ellen Wong is perfect as Knives Chau, and Kieran Culkin steals every scene he's in as Wallace Wells - the fight scenes are extremely entertaining, and the style of the film is unlike anything I've ever seen before.


So, naturally, it tanked. And I mean, HARD. To the tune of only making back 1/6th of its production budget in its first weekend. That sucks. That really, really sucks. And it makes me really sad.

I feel sad for Edgar Wright. Watching Scott Pilgrim, I got the feeling that Edgar Wright made exactly the movie he wanted to make. The movie is packed to the brim with pure creativity, and it flies off the screen, unable to contain itself, and it's wonderful. Wright is a fantastic director - Jennie and I watched Shaun of the Dead again this past weekend, and I'd forgotten both how funny it is and what a great zombie movie it is - and the movie is by no means a creative failure, but to see it fail so grandly from a financial standpoint is really a letdown.

I feel sad for the movie itself, because it is so entertaining and so well-done, and because not many people are probably going to see it. So I suppose I feel sad more for those people than for the movie itself. When I see something that is of such high quality as Scott Pilgrim, I want everyone to see it, because everyone should see things that are high-quality. But given this movie's poor performance, who knows how long it will be in theaters for people to see. Sure, it will enjoy a long life on DVD (where it will almost assuredly attain cult classic status), but a large portion of the population - people who would probably really enjoy it - will probably never see it. And that's depressing.

My hope for Scott Pilgrim is that it gets a lot of strong word of mouth (on that front, I'm trying to do my part) and that people go see it in the coming weeks before it disappears from theaters completely. I know I'll definitely be seeing it at least once more. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend it. Between it and Inception, there's a nice selection of highly creative movies out there right now.


Or, I guess, if you like explosions, you could go see The Expendables. Whatever makes you happy.

On The Land Before Time

When I was in preschool, The Land Before Time was THE SHIT. It was, if memory serves, the biggest movie that had ever come out ever, at least to my five-year-old mind. The thing was, I didn't really have all that much interest in it.

Until all of my friends started talking about it. They talked about how amazing it was. They described all of the characters, and I didn't get it when the girls in my class kept saying "Yep yep yep!" They were all scared of Sharptooth, but that just made him the coolest of all of them (we were boys, after all). And most of all, whenever I told them I hadn't seen it, they implored me to see it.

I caved. I suddenly really wanted to see it. You have to remember that this was 1988, a year before Tim Burton's Batman was released and I learned what it was like to really, truly want to see a movie. As far as 5-year-old me was concerned, The Land Before Time must surely be the be-all and end-all of movies, and I knew this because all of my friends had told me so. I begged my parents to take me. Begged. And they wouldn't have it. Which, of course, meant that I would just beg even more and even more incessantly.

Then, one Saturday, they had a surprise planned for me. They were going to take me to see The Land Before Time. A joyful day for Joe, right? Well, not really, at that point. For some reason, I didn't want to see it anymore. I think, looking back on it, that the peer pressure that had made me want to see it to begin with had worn off. So when my parents told me that they were taking me to see it, I cried - cried - with not wanting to see it.

Boy, did I get in trouble that day.

Twenty-two years later, Jennie and I watched The Land Before Time. She was shocked that I'd never seen it, and I was pretty excited. And it was a decent, if not really, really short, movie. But I'll never be able to think of that movie without first thinking of what a total brat I was as a five-year-old. I can only imagine - and probably apologize for - how I was for Batman.

A Review of Watchmen

Before I start this review, I thought I would mention, for the three people that don’t already know this about me, that I am a huge comic book fan. I’ve been reading them for most of my life, and I love them. I first read Watchmen when I was in high school, and I enjoyed it, but I didn’t think it was the most amazing thing ever. Then I read it again when I was older and I loved it. There’s a cinematic quality about Watchmen the book that is fairly common in comics now but that I’m sure was astounding at the time of the release of the series. I look at reading Watchmen now like watching Citizen Kane now: you have to consider the time period in which the work was created in order to fully appreciate how ahead of its time it was.

So let’s talk about Watchmen the movie. As a movie adaptation that remains faithful to the original book, it was amazing. After years of missteps and averted disasters, and after master filmmaker Terry Gilliam called Watchmen the book unfilmable, director Zack Snyder has created a near-perfect Watchmen film. Shots were framed to exactly match panels of Dave Gibbons’s nine-panel grid, and dialogue was lifted directly from Alan Moore’s scripts. I expected this of Snyder, though, after 300 came out and was extremely faithful to its source material (so I’ve been told, as I’ve never seen that nor do I particularly care to). Snyder is a director who respects his source material, and who adheres to it almost fanatically, and that respect shone through on the screen. There were aspects of the book that had to be removed for the sake of time, but overall Snyder managed to pack so much story into just under three hours that I more or less forgave him for it. My favorite part of the film was probably the opening credits, which are spectacular in their simplicity. You can watch them in their entirety here. Each of the snapshots shown in the credits has a full story behind it, but knowing that full story isn't essential to understanding the movie. Despite the parts of the book that were left out, watching Watchmen the movie was like watching the comic book come to life.

So why did I leave the theatre with such an empty feeling?

Maybe it’s because, where Watchmen succeeds as an adaptation of a graphic novel, it fails as a movie. Watchmen the book was slow. There’s not a lot of action in the book. It’s mainly about character development and the relationships between them. Therefore, there’s not a lot of action in the movie. Unfortunately, though, a lot of the wonderful character development that makes the book so enjoyable is lost in the translation to the screen because of time limitations. As a result, I had a hard time relating to any of the characters in the movie, which is strange, since I already had a relationship with them as a result of having read the comic.

When the film ended, I just sat there. I had no idea what to say. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but this time I really wanted to have something to say. The story of the film was exactly the same as that of the book, but I didn’t think it had the same impact on the screen as it does in the book because I didn’t feel any attachment to any of the characters. The performances were all very good, save for that of the actor playing Ozymandias, who couldn’t seem to decide if he wanted his character to have an accent or not and so decided to have it both ways, which was distracting, especially during Ozy’s monologues towards the end of the film. The film was very well made. It was well-acted and well-shot. The choices of music were brilliant. And yet I still felt like it was all a little flat. I needed to connect to the characters, and I could not. I found them fascinating, but not relatable. I go to the movies because I want to feel something, and I didn’t feel anything when Watchmen ended.

All of that said, I’m still extremely conflicted about the whole thing. I thought that writing down my thoughts would help me to sort them out, and it did, to a degree, but I still don’t know what conclusion to come to. I think I enjoyed the movie. I really do. But I think I enjoyed it mainly because of what a faithful adaptation of the book it was and because of how well-made it was, not because any of the characters were engaging or because of the pace of the story. As a book, Watchmen is still a masterpiece. As a movie, Watchmen reaches for the stars but falls just a little short.