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Another Earth
Another Earth is a rare, perfect balancing act between genre decadence and indie melodrama. The genre elements are obvious from the title and the poster art, and they are schlocky enough to make the staunchest defender of sci-fi weirdness run for the hills. Another planet is discovered nearby that can support life. Soon it becomes apparent that this planet is in our solar system and has a continental structure mirroring our own. As the planet draws closer—but never, for some reason, too close—we can see cities and other indications of intelligent life, though there is a bizarre amount of radio interference preventing us from contacting anyone on the planet. It’s not long before this planet is dubbed “Earth 2,” as it becomes more and more obvious that it is an exact replica of our home world. An Australian billionaire begins planning a shuttle flight to Earth 2, with a public essay competition for choosing other passengers.
Even the indie elements are cliched to anyone who has watched enough independent films. Rhoda Williams is a 17 year old high school student who causes a drunken car collision after a party celebrating her acceptance to MIT, coincidentally the same night Earth 2 is discovered. She spends four years in prison, after which time her spirit has been broken and her guilt has eaten her from the inside out. Subsequent to her release, she seeks out the only other survivor of the car crash, a music professor and composer who has since left his university post and spends his days in a drunken stupor (shades of Kieslowski’s Blue, perhaps?). Too cowardly to admit who she is when she first meets him, she instead pretends to be an employee of a cleaning service, and she begins working out a sort of penance by putting his house in order once a week. The way their relationship progresses from there will not be a surprise to indie fans.
Despite the genre decadence on both the sci-fi and indie sides, the movie still pulls together unpretentiously. Perhaps it even works because of the genre predictability, much as how Shaun of the Dead worked so well because each of the genres it mashed together—romance, horror and comedy—integrated all the predictable cliches. Playing various genres off of one another is something comic book writers have been doing for decades, and now filmmakers are beginning to toy with the idea in larger productions like Cowboys and Aliens. Maybe we’re seeing the start of a trend.
At its core, Another Earth is a story about the choice between forgetting the past and honestly facing yourself. When we do something horrible, can we face that courageously or will we hide from the world, even when it comes racing at us through space? Highly recommended.
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
[This review was originally published on my blog The Photo Play.]
Imagine, if you will, a world in which video game fights are very real, and interrupt the normal flow of life much like songs in a musical, sweeping the world along into its bizarre unreality until it is completed, at which point life and the world return to normal. That is the bare minimum of what the viewer will need to prepare himself for as he walks into a showing of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Directed by British filmmaker Edgar Wright, Pilgrim is full of the manic energy of his earlier films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, while adding layers of deftly-wrought magical realism which conjure comic-book aesthetics and video game narrative. It’s all so much muchness that upon leaving the theater one might be forgiven for wondering what just happened.
Ostensibly Pilgrim is a love story in which the protagonist has to deal with his new girlfriend’s previous lovers, but instead of a love-triangle, the story gives us a love-nonagon. Scott Pilgrim, our fearful hero, must battle the Seven Evil Exes of the lovely Ramona Flowers in order to win the right to court her. Each fight is a mix of comic book superhero tropes and old-school (8-bit) video gaming, with some chop-socky martial arts thrown in. Defeated nemeses shatter into a pile of coins–“You just headbutted my boyfriend so hard he burst,” says the surviving girlfriend of one defeated Ex–or into other common gaming objects like weapons or powerups. All this stuff threatens to overpower the movie and destroy any meaning outside of itself, but Wright manages to keep it under control, if just barely.
The weakest links in this story are unfortunately the two main actors, Michael Cera as Scott and Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona. Scott is obviously written to be a self-centered jerk who has left his own trail of exes behind him, and who has little empathy for the plights of his friends and family. Sadly, Cera’s usual comic schtick is to act almost psychotically self-conscious and aware of everything around him, constantly worried of being taken the wrong way, and whenever Cera tires of acting the jerk in Pilgrim he reverts to the awkward teenager he portrayed in Arrested Development. Winstead’s problem is that she seems to have neither the beauty nor the charisma to embody a woman who could both force Scott to leave his current girlfriend and also create an impressive collection of exes who hate her enough to band together in violence against her current beau.
The actors chosen to portray the League of Evil Exes, on the other hand, are superb. Satya Bhabha as the first Evil Ex is hilariously creepy and ridiculous. Chris Evans (Fantastic Four) as her ex-turned-action-star Lucas Lee is a good-looking bully you love to hate. Brandon Routh is cast perfectly as a super-powered vegan who can fly and punch people so hard the highlights are knocked out of their hair, and who wears a shirt obviously reminiscent of his breakout role. While the Katayanagi twins seem to fill the shoes of the two exes Ramona dated at the same time well enough, they don’t have enough screen time to make an impression. Mae Whitman as Roxy Richter is worlds away from her morally-upright wallflower role of Ann Veal in Arrested Development, which only makes the contrast that much more amusing. Finally, Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, The Darjeeling Limited) as Gideon Gordon Graves perfectly embodies the self-centered jerk that Scott is meant to be, and then takes it to another level. I suspect that the parallels between Scott and Gideon are supposed to be clearer than they are, with Scott finally overcoming his nemesis by a choice of will, but unfortunately that subtext is lost by Cera in the actor’s confusion.
The greatest misfortune surrounding Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is that it was released in the same weekend as The Expendables and Eat Pray Love. Most men looking for an action movie went to see the former, and most women wanting a film with romance went for the latter. Little did all these moviegoers know that both could have been found in spades at Scott Pilgrim. If this film continues to do poorly in theaters, one hopes it will at least have a long and rich life on video. It’s a breath of fresh air in a room that has gotten far too stale, especially if its box office competitors are to be taken as indicative of the times.
