funny, very offbeat combo of kung fu movies, comic books and hipster attitude

Rating: 8/10 (1 December 2011)

What to make of this movie? I really liked it, it's fun and funny and stylishly made. But what on earth is it? A love story? A martial arts parody? A living comic book? It's all of those, really. And a movie about nerdy hipsters (I know hipsters are supposed to be "cool," but they all seem like nerds to me) playing indie music and coping an attitude. The movie is sweet and silly, but outside of that it's tough to categorize, because it just comes from some weird place I've never been.
Which is fine, except it kept me a little out of the movie. None of it makes any sense, the male lead is a bit of a jerk, even if his nebishy persona makes that seem less objectionable, and The Girl is just some girl with colored hair who acts mysterious but doesn't come *across* as mysterious. And of course, that's much of the point, that these ordinary people are involved in this bizarre alternate world that's not really an alternate world but just this world with fights the way musicals are this world with song and dance. But part of me wanted to care about these characters and I often felt the movie was getting in the way of that.
So I enjoyed it, and appreciated its cleverness, and would recommend it, and yet, part of me found it opaque, perhaps because I'm a middle-aged guy who isn't the right generation to have absorbed these varied influences to the point where they make sense together.
Worth watching.