Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
This is extremely stylish, like Baby Driver, but emotionally hollow. Fighting with ex boyfriends for the hand of a nominally independent woman doesn’t totally gel with the plot, it’s ludo-narrative dissonance.
What’s the deal with the controlling chip as well, why is the object of desire a literal damsel in distress in the final scene? And the young girl goading him into chasing the age-appropriate woman, yikes. The male fantasy is strong in this one.
This also goes through genres like Ramona goes through hair colours. It starts as a screwball comedy, but verges into pure action film at some point. There’s a Seinfeld scene at some point.
They take the videogame inspirations quite far, into repetitive combat sequences, to grind XP for the big showdown with the love of his life. The self-respect katana is a bit cringe.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.