Twee-tastic!

Rating: 5/10 (23 August 2010)

A new adjective has entered the language relatively recently. It is "twee". It's a new enough word that the definition of it isn't entirely settled. Well, at least it used to not be settled. That's because Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the ultimate example of "twee". All usages of the word must now be made in relation to this movie. The "tweeness" of all things will now be measured on a scale of 0 to 10 where 0 = Lawrence Tierney and 10 = Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. If "twee" were Christianity, this movie would be Jesus Christ.
Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a 22 year old feeb who's sponging a place to live off his gay friend Wallace (Kieran Culkin) and platonically dating a sheltered 17 year old girl named Knives Chao (Ellen Wong). He also has a sister (Anna Kendrick) who really doesn't need to be in this story. Oh, and Scott spastically plays the bass in a band alongside a lead singer (Mark Webber) desperate to make it big and a drummer (Alison Pill) that's like a caricature of the Janeane Garofalo role in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion.
That's an lot of set-up for a simple yet fantastical plot. Scott meets the woman of his dreams (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and, despite Scott being the Sarlacc Pit of pathetic nebishness, she likes him. In order to date her, Scott must defeat her 7 evil exes in a series of video game/comic book battles royale.
This is the sort of movie that when a phone rings, the word "RING" appears on screen. It's the sort of movie that starts imitating an episode of Seinfeld for no reason. It's the sort of movie that constantly references a subplot for the first half of the film, but that subplot turns out to have absolutely nothing to do with the resolution of the story, like a Return of the Jedi where all references to Darth Vader being Luke's father were removed from the last half hour or a Godfather II where Fredo doesn't get killed.
Now, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is extremely well executed, visually creative and occasionally funny. But because there's no unifying theme to its elements of fantasy and because the main character just treads water until an epiphany is forced on him by the script, watching this film is like looking at a merry-go-round. It's fast and colorful but you just get tired of it after a while.
One definition of "twee" is "something meant to be ironically cute where all the irony has been removed". That's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. There's a self-conscious, unwarranted and unearned distance that's woven through it. The viewer isn't supposed to identify with Scott. You're supposed to self-awarely recognize that you're meant to identify with him. You're supposed to self-awarely recognize that you're meant to nostalgically respond to the film's invocation of 1990s video games. But nothing is ever done with that distance. It's only there to make the people who made the movie and the people watching the movie feel smarter and more sophisticated than they really are.
And that's really twee.