MOVIE REVIEWS: SCOTT PILGRiM VS. THE WORLD

It’s a given, according to most box-office forecasters, that Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, starring Michael Cera, will wage a losing battle against the competition this weekend, but it’s a winner with many critics. “There are some movies about youth that just make you feel old, even if you aren’t,” writes A.O. Scott in the New York Times. But Scott Pilgrim, he says, “has the opposite effect. Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world.” Peter Howell in the Toronto Star shares that reaction. “Few amusements can top Scott Pilgrim for so squarely hitting the bull’s-eye of its target audience. The film may baffle regular citizens (and migraine sufferers), but it welcomes geeks of all ages and obsessions to its circus tent,” he writes. On the other hand, Kyle Smith of the New York Post clearly felt out of place in that tent. “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a big warm cinematic jelly doughnut stuffed with youth, vitality, style, whimsy and other equally alarming properties,” he writes. “I tried to love it. But after 20 minutes, I sensed I was intruding on the movie’s love affair with itself.” “Inventive” is an adjective used in several of the reviews. It’s used by Claudia Puig in USA Today, who goes on to write: “The film fuses an indie/punk rock sensibility with comic-book violence and video game energy, mixed with quirky humor and sassy pop culture references.” Several reviews claim that the film is too inventive by half and would have benefited from judicious editing. Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail “exhilar-austing and super-duper-ficial.” “The first hour of the film was so funny that my smile muscles hurt,” writes Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer, but after that, she says, she kept wishing that the movie would wrap up quickly. Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune says he had the same reaction. Although heaping much praise on the movie, he concludes that it “spins its wheels in the final half hour.” However, he adds, perhaps it “requires a certain too-muchness.”