NOT SO LONG AGO IN THE MYSTERIOUS LAND OF NEW YORK, FELIX VASQUEZ JR. WROTE A SCOTT PILGRIM ARTICLE…
At this time I’m still trying to decide if I love or hate “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” for what it is. I am convinced years from now young kids will be declaring that Edgar Wright’s film is something of a cheer for their culture, a love letter to the nostalgia obsessed Canadian hipster society, but many will fail to realize or even admit that in reality this movie is a practical joke. Deep down while it looks like a celebration of our nostalgia obsessed technology based generation, Edgar Wright actually makes fun of people he purportedly appeals to with his 2010 action romance movie. While many have described it as a bright and colorful movie, it is actually the most cynical statement about our culture in years. Many won’t accept that or be willing to even admit it’s a possibility since Edgar Wright is a pop culture fanatic and has always hung around pop culture fanatics in his early years.
For the past four films, director Paul WS Anderson has taken what was once a very entertaining horror franchise and turned it in to a series of movies fetishizing his wife and doing nothing more than further his muse-like view on her. We nearly saw her naked in the first movie, she was a bad ass in the second, a goddess in the third movie, and in the fourth we’re given an army of Milla’s, presumably a concept Anderson got his jollies off of. That said “Afterlife” is a movie that continues to drag on this wasted concept and posit the question: Why is Umbrella continuing their research if about ninety-nine percent of the world consumed by hellfire and the walking dead? What do they further have to gain beyond being evil for the sake of being evil?
Robert Rodriguez proves with “Machete” that his and Tarantino’s little experiment entitled “Grindhouse” was much more of a failure than fans originally suspected. While both of their original films were basic flops at the box-office, Rodriguez is given another shot with “Machete” a film that began life in popularity as a mock grindhouse trailer before “Planet Terror” and eventually became a feature length film. And much like most of Rodriguez’ films, he takes what could have been an amazing premise and turns it in to a scattered, confusing, and muddled piece of action cinema that throws a host of characters at the screen, all of whom he can barely keep up with at one time.
