Alright, let's get this out of the way right now. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World bombed. It tanked. It was a box office failure. It opened fifth, and took most of its earnings on its opening Friday, indicating a total lack of word-of-mouth buzz. It made $10 million over its first weeekend, earning back a paltry sixth of its budget. It lost out to not just The Expendables and Eat, Pray Love, but The Other Guys, in its second week, and Inception, in its fifth. If one were a Hollywood executive, Scott Pilgrim would be an unmitigated disaster.

Thankfully, however, this one at least isn't a Hollywood executive. And this one can report that, whatever the box office might have to say, as a film Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a triumph.



Now, right up front I have to admit that I have almost no familiarity with the source material; I've read volume one, and that's it. I've heard a variety of complaints regarding the transition from comic to film, particularly regarding the lack of development among Scott's friends and associates, and it's true, this is clearly Scott Pilgrim's movie, with others involved as appropriate, no more. But as I said, I don't really know what it's like in the comic, so I'm just judging this based on its standing as a film. And as a film, Scott Pilgrim works.

Unlike the man himself.

Scott is a 22-year old slacker, 'between' jobs, sponging off his gay roommate and playing in a band that is so un-established they're willing to take gigs opening for Scott's hated, 'she who must not be named'-style ex's band. The biggest ray of sunshine in his life when the movie begins? He's 'dating' 17 year old Knives Chau, a relationship that mostly consists of her telling him about the social drama of yearbook club and gushing over his band, Sex Bob-omb, while they ride the bus together and almost hold hands. Scott's nice enough, but there's clearly a jerky core to him, an almost 'Nice Guy' vibe hiding underneath Micheal Cera's amiable dorkiness. This comes out most clearly when Scott meets the rainbow-haired Ramona, a girl who the on-screen narration flat-out says he stalks through a party. After managing to harass his way into a date with her he continues to string along Knives, though it's more because he appears constitutionally averse to conflict of any kind than because he's actually interested in having two girls at one time. And then comes the revelation that in order to date Ramona, Scott 'may' have to defeat her seven evil exes.

And by may, of course, we mean will.

The movie uses the seven evil exes to frame Scott's progression from self-centred man-child to (semi-)mature adult, and it's handled quite well. The first two fights are pretty easy wins for Scott, reinforcing his early belief that he's fine as-is and doesn't need to grow and change, but as they progress they get harder, further testing not only Scott's committment to his relationship, but his own sense of self-worth. The finale makes this pretty explicit, even going so far as to have Scott himself lampshade that he's learned a valuable lesson, after-school-style. The setup is excellent as a character study of Scott Pilgrim, but it must be admitted that it does rather leave Ramona outside the film. She's less a character than a Maguffin, never more perfectly exemplified than in the finale. There, she literally stands helplessly in the background while Scott saves her, and the day, and he's not even doing it for her the second time around. It's a shame, because it prevents the watcher from really connecting to Ramona in her own right; she has to be appreciated solely as an object of Scott's surprisingly non-sexual desire. It's the one really glaring weakness in this film, frankly.

Still and all, the film is satisfying on pretty much every level. The fight scenes are excellently choreographed and intriguingly varied, the special effects are crisp and eye-catching, the music is sharp, the humour is understated but no less effective for it, and Micheal Cera's Scott manages to be simultaneously slightly seedy and dorkily loveable. Cera has actually come in for some criticism on this one, though it often seems to be less about his performance than about how darn many movies he's put out lately. I, however, really enjoyed his performance here, and I don't think anyone else could have managed that uniquely akward charm that is so essential to Scott's likeability. As the focal character, and the only truly developed one in the film, it's so important for Scott to be likeable. And thankfully, for the most part at least, he is.

So, go see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. If you still can, that is. At the local theatre here, it's coming down just two weeks after it went up, a sad indication of its commercial performance.

But hey, that's what dvd is for, no?

This Fringe season has been largely underwhelming; where last year presented us with a rather broad swathe of titles that appeared at least worth an hour of our lives and just under ten dollars, this year there has been but a tiny handful that have looked even half-decent. Yesterday we went to the only two Fringe shows we'll be seeing this seasons, Turne Around and Inbetween Places. Our experiences were decidedly mixed.

Turne Around struck my fancy almost immediately. The description talked of a man returning from WWII, a superman, disenchanted with life and beset by protests against him and his very existence as a superman. How interesting, I thought to myself; will this be a take on current military (mis)adventures, or perhaps more of a superhero deconstruction? Sadly, the answer was neither, as it instead seemed content to merely be a jumbled mess. There were fully four different plotlines running, and in a fifty-minute production that is three plots too many. There were the advertised issues faced by Sam Turne, the Unbelievable Radar Man, suffering from PTSSD (the extra 's' is for 'superhero') after the war and finding his relationship with his wife, secretly the superhero Lightning Woman and secretly pregnant with their child, under strain. But there was also a plot in motion to rob the world's heroes of their powers, orchestrated by a frustrated super-housewife who resented her powers and, for no particular reason, therefore those of everyone else. And there was the return of Turne's brother-in-law, the war-criminal superhero Mean Machine who wants to start a new war for superheroes to capitalise on to get the world's respect. And there was The Writer wandering about, making incredibly bland metacommentary on the 'Turne Around' universe, its status as a comic book and his position as its writer, a writer whose characters have taken on lives of their own and need to be put down. And as if these four plots all on their own weren't enough to occupy less than an hour, the play spends much of its time repeating conversations and whole scenes, using the Mean Machine's time-manipulation powers (a terrible idea for a stage show, by the way) to go over things again, and again, and again. The play ultimately ends with Turne and his wife happy, their secrets revealed, the power-draining plot foiled (sort of), The Writer powerless (though why the creator of a living fictionalised universe should lose all power just because he loses his notebook is a question never addressed), and the Mean Machine, with the magic notebook in his possession, off to start WWIII. So, a happy end? Sort of?

This play was a jumbled mess, from start to finish. The period details are grossly off; despite WWII having ended sooner in this timeline, thanks to the assistance of the superheroes, the 60's have apparently started already, with a 'Free Love' demonstration mentioned on the radio, cries of 'baby killer' directed at returning superheroes, and a motivational speaker admonishing a super-housewife that 'it's not the 19th century; get your husband to clean the bathroom'. In the early 1940's. The politics are equally awful, with the Mean Machine accusing Turne of being a hippy/peacenik-Democrat (nevermind that the presiding President of a post-shortened-WWII woudl still be Democrat FDR), and Turn accusing his brother-in-law of being a bloodthirsty imperial-minded Republican in response (nevermind that the Republicans of the time were isolationsists). And the character of The Writer is abominable, a shrieking Marx-inspired caricature who infests scenes and jabbers on metatextually, repeatedly stalling what little action there is in this production. Any one of these plots would have been sufficient to more than fill a Fringe-length show; any two of them would have been an incredibly ambitious undertaking. But the four of them together, combined with tone-deaf lines and subdued actions in the face of Silver Age-style strangeness, combine to utterly sink this production.

By contrast, while Inbetween Places does have its flaws, the excellent dialogue and spot-on delivery by the cast allow it to rise above them quite nicely. A one-room, one-act play, Inbetween Places focuses on a cubicle drone steadily working away his life, quite literally; he promises to stay all night to work in his first few lines, and his attempts to reach out to anyone outside his workplace are stymied when the only person he can think to call is his ex-wife, clearly embittered towards him. Settling in for yet another night of working oblivion, he is instead visitted by his childhood imaginary friend, an anthropomorphic raccoon, and three Liminals, a demi-chorus that alternately explain and mis-interpret pretty much everything around them. The ostensible desire of the raccoon is to rekindle the office worker's literary aspirations, but it becomes apparent that in fact the raccoon is there for no less a reason than to force the man to come to terms with his son's kidnapping and his need to make some kind of life for himself.

The revelation of the kidnapping is the only place this production really falls flat. It's simply thrown out there, admitted utterly from the first, and is never tied into the writing issue. There is no attempt at evasion, no repeated half-truths and distortions that could link the stories he tells himself with the stories he can't tell anyone else, nor is there any point of contact between writing and his son; the boy isn't snatched when his father, frustrated at being interrupted, demands he go outside and leave him alone, he's taken in a park, with the father running pell-mell behind the kidnappers until his legs give out on him. The writing aspect is simply dropped, replaced utterly by the kidnapped son issue, and it does diminish the overall power of the play. Thankfully, however, the raccoon, wry and sly and quite rude at times, and his interactions with the put-upon office worker, are so entertaining as to make this only a minor problem; notable, but not worth dismissing the production entirely for. The high quality of this production should come as no surprise, either, since it carries the name of the writer of last season's excellently comic dystopia, A Modicum of Freedom, one of the best productions mounted that year.

Industry Minister Tony Clement was on CBC's The House a few days ago, to talk about the Conservative government's plan to do away with the mandatory long-form census. Given how irredeemably stupid this decision is, Clement gave probably the best performance possible, which is to say a terrible one. If he'd been a beauracrat tasked with defending his minister's decision, I'd have felt damned sorry for him. As it is, though, I'm just disgusted by the nakedly ideological move.

The thing is, there is no argument against the mandatory long-form census that isn't either pointlessly inane or that wouldn't work just as well, if not better, in favour of it. Clement had two main points he hammered on, time and again; that it was 'intrusive and coercive', and that 'people had complained'. But the new voluntary census is going from twenty percent of the population to thirty-three percent, with a major advertising blitz to try and convince people to do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Increasing the census's printing costs by an additional sixty-five percent, to say nothing of the advertising budget, is going to require more spending. And where do governments get their money from? That's right, taxes. Taxes that are far more 'intrusive and coercive' than any free, twenty-minute survey could every be. And this government's concern with not being 'intrusive and coercive' certainly didn't stop them from locking up downtown Toronto for three days, or from continuing a mandatory long-form agricultural survey, or for lobbying in favour of criminalising private actions under two different copyright bills and an international agreement. Clearly, neither intrusion nor coercion are considered to be bad things in and of themselves for this government.

The more egregious claim, however, was Minister Clement's repeated invocation of complaints fromr 'Canadians'. Nevermind that there are only three formal complaints about the mandatory long-form census on record over the course of ten years. And nevermind that since the government's announcement, municipalities, universities, business associations and NGO's have all complained, loudly and openly. That the conservatives have refused to produce any kind of quantitative proof of these complaints, preferring instead to talk in generalities about MP's recieving 'plenty of' complaints each time the census rolls around, and according to Minister Clement more each time, underimines to a monstrous degree their claim to be acting on the will of Canadians, given the clear and consistently-expressed will of Canadians not to scrap the mandatory long-form census.

The larger, voluntary census will be more expensive, and at the same time, less reliable. The government will spend more money to address a problem that appears to have been almost completely nonexistant, and will do a worse job along the way. This makes absolutely no sense from a public policy standpoint, or even from a populist standpoint, since it's not like Alberta has been on fire with protests against the mandatory long-form census. The only way it makes sense is in the context of Stephen Harper's belief that 'no taxes are good taxes', and by extension, that nothing the government does is worth doing.

As is almost always the case when right-wing parties are elected, it would appear that the inmates are running the asylum.

I'm not going to lie; this may be the best news I have heard in a long, long time. I have long thought that dental science has lagged far, far behind the other bodily sciences, but this? This is pretty much exactly the breakthrough I have been expecting from the dental researchers of the world for years, now. A gel that stimulates teeth to regenerate, avoiding drill-and-fill? Perfect! Sign me up for the clininal trials and let's get my mouth into the twenty-first century!

This summer has seen no end of remakes and sequels; Iron Man 2, Shrek Forever After, The A-Team, Robin Hood, Sex in the City 2, Toy Story 3, and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum it sometimes seems. But while most of the remakes are wholly uninteresting, and many of the sequels have been disappointing to say the least, there have been some good showings. Iron Man 2 was as solid as the first, and by all accounts Toy Story 3 is the usual high quality Pixar offering.

And then, there was The Karate Kid.

Really, the film shouldn't even be considered a remake. There are at best a small handful of subtle references to the original franchise, but other than those it stands utterly on its own. In fact, everywhere outside of North America it's simply been marketted as 'The Kung-Fu Kid', which is a better title both in terms of setting it up as its own film, which it is, and in being true to the film itself, since nobody uses 'karate'. The only times it's mentioned are by a scared boy trying to talk tough, and his mother, who is quickly corrected by her exasperated son. The Karate Kid is barely even a spiritual successor, nevermind a direct remake. And that's probably why it fares so well.

And make no mistake, The Karate Kid is an excellent movie. Like all sports-themed films, it has a familiar premise; an untutored by spirited underdog, swaggering elite-level bullies, a mentor/father-figure who can harness natural skill, and a tournament-based climax in which victory is achieved by the narrowest, and therefore most dramatic, of margins. Going into a sports-themed film, everyone knows essentially what to expect, whether it's The Karate Kid, The Mighty Ducks, Men With Brooms or A League of Their Own. The only real question is how well the formula is executed, and The Kararte Kid executes it with almost flawless precision. The bullies swagger contemptibly, the hero's early ignorance is matched only by his spirit and tenacity, and the tournament-based climax is a glorious display of martial prowess, not just from the hero and the primary antagonist but from other members of the evil school, and even no-named members of other schools, just to remind viewers that there's more to all this than just the inevitable one-on-one showdown.

Along with the basic framework, The Karate Kid manages to slide in some rather nice little subplots. The chaste, childhood romance between Jaden Smith's Dre, the lead, and Meiying, a young Chinese girl, works both in terms of a personal relationship and as a metaphor for cultural relations. And Jackie Chan's mentor character, Mr. Han the maintenance man, has a backstory that's genuinely affecting when it's revealed, but isn't played for unending pathos. It's a nice piece of emotion that knows not to overstay its welcome, and in that regard is much like Dre's remoance, his butting heads with this mother and his sense of alienation in having left Detroit to come to Beijing. These things are all there, and they add a nice layer of depth to the film, but they're never allowed to overshadow the fact that at the end of the day, this movie is about Dre learning kung-fu so he can have a good, honour-satisfying fight at the end of the film.

Special mention must go to the fight choreographer for this film. Mr. Han has a fight against a half-dozen bullies to protect Dre at one point which is utterly Chan-esque in its energy and complexity, but for the most part the fights are realistically short, decisive and brutal. Every blow that connects in this film looks like it hurts, which is appropriate when you're showing children roundhousing kicking each other in the face. The early, horribly lopsided fights have a visceral quality that really make you immediately loathe the swaggering Cheng, while the tournament bouts showcase both a take-no-prisoners wildness in the young contestants and a hesitancy, appropriate given how easily it is to leave yourself open to a quick reversal. Given its name, The Karate Kid ultimately lives or dies based on its fight scenes, and I'm happy to report that it not only lives, but thrives.

Special notice should be given, however, to the boy with the mohawk in the tournament. Though he has no lines and is knocked out well short of the semi-finals, he has such a hilarious style he can't help but steal every brief scene he appears in. The way he begins each fight, reaching up to run his hands up his mohawk while the other boys bow respectfully, just works on a fundamentally enjoyable level.

If they're looking for someone to pick up the next Karate Kid remake in a decade or so, they could do worse than to track that kid and his awesome hair down.

Windows smashed! Police cars ablaze! Anarchists riottinig in the streets!

The visuals from the first day of the G20 conference were certainly sensational, and far be it from me to condone the acts of vandalism engaged in by the boringly predictable 'black bloc', with their desperate hatred of Starbucks and their clearly-impotent bourgeois rage. What annoys me the most, though, is that such violence is going to be used to excuse the outrageous costs of the summit's security, currently at 1.2 billion dollars and counting. Counter-intuitive thought it may seem, however, the violence in Toronto yesterday just reinforces the idea that the government spent as wastefully as it did lavishly in the run-up to this summit. The real problem with the G20 wasn't the protestors and the vandals, it was far more fundamental than that.

The real problem was holding it in downtown Toronto.

Look, when you gather up the leaders of the G20, obviously security is going to be a major issue. That being said, however, if your concern is safety over all, which appears to be the case given the twenty-thousand police in Toronto this weekend and the secret laws creating a mini-police state around the walled-off Fortress Toronto, then there's no reason whatsoever to hold your meeting in the downtown core of the largest and most densely-populated city in the entire country. If security is the paramount concern, the meeting should have been held in an undisclosed location, at some semi-isolated military base somewhere. With six months' worth of warning the government could easily have constructed enough temporary housing for the summit's visitors. And without the comfortable trappings of a major urban centre, you wouldn't see nearly so many protestors; while as many as forty-thousand protestors may have descended on Toronto yesterday, according to the Globe and Mail there was just a single protestor at the G8 meeting in Huntsville, a young child with a sign demanding more cookies for kids (his demands were quickly met by the police, by the way, before his mom picked him up and took him home again). Toronto offers the worst of all worlds as far as security is concerned, and carries with it the added bonus of inconveniencing thousands of perfectly law-abiding Toronto residents, and gutting the city's core economy for the weekend. The Blue Jays went to Philidelphia for their 'home' games, for crying out loud!

While the vandalism in Toronto yesterday was unacceptable, it doesn't justify the government's absurd spending on security. Instead, it simply reinforces what a stupid idea it was to takeover downtown Toronto for this in the first place.

I don't care what anyone says, root canals are just oodles of fun! I mean, what's not to enjoy about having your jaw levered open for an hour and a half, while having your tooth drilled, prodded and grindered? Unless, of course, it's the way the tooth aches for the next day, and then spends nearly a week being so sensitive to pressure that just closing your mouth sends a little shock of pain through you. That's fun, too.

So much fun, in fact, that boy oh boy, was I happy when it turned out my dentist missed a canal last time. That's right, this ride's not over yet!

Ugh. So, yes. A week and a few days after the first round, I was supposed to get the permanent filling put into place. Unfortunately, there was a fourth canadal that didn't show up on the x-rays, which needed to be taken care of before we could proceed. So rather than being done, I've now actually got even less tooth left than before (I'm now missing two of five points) and, as though that weren't reason enough to celebrate, the next available appointment wasn't until July 17th. Given that my last appointment was June 13th, that's kind of a long wait. But hey, that's okay.

Because it's all just so darn much fun!

Everybody's heard about All-Star Batman and Robin. The blatant fan-service. The insane violence. 'The God-damned Batman'. The comic was originally put forwards as a sort of DC equivalent to Marvel's Ultimates line, a 'back to basics' way to bring new readers into the line without the decades of background the main line carries. But since Frank Miller has apparently lost his godsdamned mind, it quite rapidly descended into absolute farce, now apparently serving as a prequel to Miller's The Dark Knight Returns/Strikes Again, because of course if you're trying to bring in new readers, the best thing to do is write a prequel to, respectfully, a twenty-four and a nine year old comic. Given how utterly abominable Strikes Again was (although Returns was quite good), this hasn't really given rise to a great piece of literature. The only thing that can be said for it, frankly, is that at least Miller's not doing the illustrations anymore.

The trainwreck-style interest ASBaR has attracted has vastly overshadowed All-Star Superman, which is absolutely tragic, because All-Star Superman is one of the best Superman stories I have ever seen. The twelve-volume series follows the Man of Tomorrow in the aftermath of a solar-probe rescue that poisons him, overwhelming him with the sheer power of the yellow sun at such an unbelievably close range. To its credit the series never allows itself to fall into maudlin tear-jerking, instead using Superman's approaching end to highlight the unrelenting nobility of the Last Son of Krypton, showing once more why Superman endures as much as an icon of the human spirit as he does as a character in his own right. And in terms of a Superman story, in its own right, it's excellent there, too. All-Star Superman nicely balances Silver Age madness, like a battle with Solaris, the Tyrant Sun and a visit to Bizarro world, with more meta elements, such as Superman's incredibly difficulty convincing Lois that yes, he is in fact Clark Kent (apparently, that disguise is even better than we thought). And in one of the comic's best moments Superman, faced with his own rapidly approaching demise and working on nothing more than half a phone conversation overheard at a busy train station, manages, well, this...



Seriously, that gets me every time.

All-Star Superman is, quite simply, as near to perfect a book as one could hope to find. Action, comedy, romance, drama, pathos, beautiful artwork, enough self-awareness to be amusing but not so much as to be pretentious, and all wrapped up in a perfectly self-contained story that touches equally on Superman's well-known past and the vast potentials of his future, his decades-old friends and enemies and new associates and antagonists, and all wrapped up in a nice, easy, approachable package, perfect for the casual newcomer or the hard-core Super-fan.

It is everything one could want in a Superman story, and I have only regret.

That it ends.

Why the holy hells did nobody tell me about this? A 40K movie, featuring the Ultramarines? With Jon Pertwee (son of famed Dr Who actor Sean), Terence Stamp (General frickin' Zod) and John godsdamned "I was in I,Claudius, Alien, 1984 and Hellboy" Hurt? Running seventy minutes long, and done with state of the art cg?

I could only be more pleased if it featured the Tau. And even then, it wouldn't be by much.

Apparently, hot on the heels of the excellent season finale 'Swan Song', comes news that Supernatural will be getting a 22-episode anime series. Seriously.

This is pretty amazing news, not just because Supernatural is an excellent show and more of it is no bad thing, but just because of the sheer novelty of this move. Hopefully, Japan will do a better job of adapting American pop culture properties than America has done of adapting Japan's. CoughDragonballEvolutioncough.