Get out your clippers, it's sideways brohawk time

I wasn’t able to attend SXSW because one of my stupid friends got married like an idiot, but virtually everyone I heard from who saw Attack the Block, the Edgar Wright-produced tale of an alien invasion striking a South London housing project, said it it was the movie of the festival.  At the time, it didn’t have a distributor, and there was even talk of possibly adding subtitles to make the British slang and accents more comprehensible to American viewers.  (Also, can you make them look fatter in post?  Otherwise I fear people will be confused.).

If you know anything about headline-question-mark etiquette, you already know we don’t have an answer to the subtitle question, but we do know that Screen Gems will handle theatrical distribution.

Sony announced today that they have picked up the film and that Screen Gems will distribute it; there’s no release date yet in place, but it sure seems like a good late-summer offering to me. Here’s what Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper had to say about the film: “Steve Bersch screened this film for me and I fell completely in love with it. The film is, at once, charming, scary, funny, hip, clever and completely hits its mark. I hope this is the beginning of a long relationship with these incredibly talented filmmakers.” [CinemaBlend]

It seems the sideways brohawk rally helmet I’ve been wearing has worked.  And I should hope we won’t be needing subtitles. I understood everything in the trailer fine.  I mean, it’s not like they’re speaking Scottish.  I would, however, welcome seeing an American film translated into Cockney gibberish.  “Oi, da puntah’s quaffed da wicket, ‘e ‘as!  Fetch da bobby’s knickaz, blokes, we’s snoggin’ lorrie crisps tonoight!”

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Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim) has always seemed sincere and not-pandering (*cough* Olivia Munn! *cough, cough*) when nerding out with other movie nerds, and as if to cement his nerd cred even further (usually accomplished using a fine paste made of dandruff, Cheeto dust, and semen), he recently posted to his website the above mash-up, called “Gun Fetish”, which he made in 1993 when he was just 19.

POSTING MOVIE MASH-UPS?  OMG, YOU GUYS, EDGAR WRIGHT IS JUST LIKE US EXCEPT RICH AND SUCCESSFUL AND BRITISH!

Recently I have been sent, have enjoyed and have reposted lots of filmic mash ups and montages. Some of them by editors as young as nineteen, such as Joel Walden who gave us this most recently.
The montages I’m sent make me a little nostalgic, because that’s exactly what I was doing at age 19. In between making amateur no budget films as a teen, I’d teach myself to edit by cutting together montages of movie clips on a theme.
The following clip I edited together while at Bournemouth Art College. Way before I’d ever seen an Avid suite, this was done over some long weekends locked in a VHS tape to tape editing suite. Yes, VHS!
So if you are wondering about the low quality of the sound and visuals in the following montage, there’s a simple answer. All of the clips were sourced from either films I’ve recorded off the TV, sell thru VHS tapes I had bought and also films that happened to be in the college library. I literally had piles of VHS tapes in the edit suite. So that explains some of the glitchy clips.
As for the audio edits, hey it was VHS and I was 19. This is the first time I used a ‘real’ editing suite.
So cast your minds back to the last century and see how I misspent my youth; cutting together bullet ballets to John Lennon’s melodic attack on the NRA.
I give you my 1993 mash up; ‘Gun Fetish’.
I haven’t, as is customary, included a list of the clips, as I thought you guys could guess them all. First one to guess them all in order, including close ups, I will send a little prize. [EdgarWrightThere]

And if I know Edgar Wright, and I think I do, that “little prize” is a text message of his penis, though it’s no prize if you ask me. Oh, and don’t get your hopes up, someone already won.  You can see the full list of films used below.

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I Hate Camp and Bells and Whistles and Comic Books and Video Games, but I Loved Scott Pilgrim, So F*ck You.

Of all the tricks Scott Pilgrim ever pulled, his greatest was making me love a movie I should hate.  It’s campy.  It’s cutesy.  It’s made to look like a video game.  It has a linear, predictable plot. It uses fistfights to resolve conflicts that can’t be resolved with a fistfight.  It has that visually-dazzling-but-simplistic-plot that nerds love so much.  The pander-y glorification of the slacker/nerd/hipster.  Stupid haircuts.  The fighting for a girl we don’t like that much.  Scott Pilgrim is just a giant pile of all these things that I hate, and yet… it works.

Me and other film critics, people who type words for a living, we tend to focus on the storytelling aspect of movies more than anything else. That’s not all there is, that’s just what we know.  And it’s much easier to point out problems with the logic of a story than it is to explain why a certain edit or visual doesn’t work.  What makes Scott Pilgrim so impressive is that it’s not really the storytelling that makes it so great.  It’s all those other little things that are much harder to explain that come together just so and make it watchable from start to finish.  Perhaps the best compliment is the simplest one: it’s just competent filmmaking.

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I skipped The Expendables panel in favor of the much less cluster-humpy Children’s Hospital panel yesterday, which was scheduled to end at 6:00 (it was awesome, more on that in a bit).  That was the same time the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World panel was scheduled to start.  I figured I wouldn’t get in, but after I cut in line in front of some disabled kids, I managed to get inside just as it was starting.  That’s right, crippies, these legs do run.

My first thought once I was inside: holy crap this is a big room.  I did not know they made rooms this big.  I’m not sure I could’ve been further from the action had I been in the nosebleed seats of the Rose Bowl and Edgar Wright the coin they flip at the 50-yard line.  I’m not exaggerating.  This is with the camera zoomed in a bit in order to see the stage.

Allegedly, that very very small speck at the center of the frame is Edgar Wright.

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Twilight wasn’t the only thing happening at the MTV Movie Awards, there was also the premiere of this new clip from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  I like Michael Cera, I like Edgar Wright, and I’ve heard the comic is funny, but up until now, all I’d seen from this movie was gimmicky graphics and obnoxious hair.  That said, this was the clip that won me over. Chris Evans plays a-holey movie star ex-boyfriend perfectly and Edgar Wright’s staging is spot on like it was in the last part of Hot Fuzz.  There’s also the line:

“He’s good, right?  Sometimes I let him do the wide shots — when I feel like getting blazed back in my Winny.”

You made me enjoy the guy from Fantastic Four and Push.  Touché, Scott Pilgrim, touché. As long as you don’t try to make Cam Gigandet happen, this could work out between us.

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