“Hey, have you guys seen Scott Pilgrim v. The World?” asked Clark Hubbard.
He was kneeled over rummaging through a cardboard box marked “NOT DRUGS” on the floor of our freshman dorm, Dodd 16. The front door was open, as it often was freshman year, and from the living room you could read the cardboard sign on the front side of the door that read “Chateau de Swank.”
“Dude, yes!” answered Joel Holland. “I love Edgar Wright.”
He walked out of his room in the back left corner next to the bathroom, probably eating a corn tube. What is a corn tube, you ask? Great question. It’s an abomination of a snack from China that is simply processed corn wrapped in a tube of what we believe is processed meat and it just so happens to be Joel’s favorite snack.
“Have you guys seen the whole cornetto trilogy?” inquired Clark.
The conversation quickly moved past the point to which my brain had evolved into a discussion about how Edgar Wright used seamless scene transitions and a unique stylized way of directing. The conversation felt a lot like walking into a lecture on theoretical physics halfway through the session, having slept for less than four hours the previous night. It wasn’t until a couple years later that I would learn Edgar Wright is the director of Scott Pilgrim.
“I haven’t seen it,” said Mike Horton.
Quick background on Mike: We know nearly nothing about him despite having lived with him all four years of university. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does, it’s typically hilarious or insightful. He also had a habit of hermiting freshman year. He lived in the room next to mine and I could go nearly a week without seeing him even once, despite being able to hear him sigh every night through the wall that connected our rooms. Also of importance, he had seen somewhere between zero and five movies before coming to Union. In fact, he says that he doesn’t really like watching movies more than twice every few years anyway.
“I wanted to watch it when it came out,” I said. “But I never had the money to actually go see it.”
“Alright boyos, sit down,” commanded Clark. “We’re going to watch this tonight.”
Let me tell you, this movie is wild. Based on a comic book series of the same name, the movie is about Scott Pilgrim, played by Michael Cera. The movie stays pretty faithful to the comics and even uses some eight-bit graphics to give off that retro vibe the comics have going. Scott is just a regular guy in his early twenties. He went through a rough breakup a year before the start of the movie and he’s trying to move on. One thing leads to another, and he finds himself in this sequence of fights with the seven evil exes of a girl he met at a party only a few days ago. All of the fights are way over-the-top, cartoon-y extravaganzas.
“I thought the art style and editing they used were interesting, like the onomatopoeia they used relayed the nerdy/comic book vibe it was trying to put out,” said Mike. “The more you watch it the more quotable it is, and it is full of details that make it not so boring even after watching it a few times.”
So, the first semester of sophomore year rolls around, and a freshman friend of ours, Michael Chapman, told us that he hadn’t seen the movie. Naturally, we forced him to sit down and watch it with us, as good friends should always do.
“I hate it almost as much as I love it,” said Chap.
Since then, we have watched this movie at least once every semester that we’ve been at Union, and Chap has come around and really embraced the movie. We didn’t mean for it to happen that way, but it just kind of did. It became one of our traditions.
Side tangent: It’s such a weird thing to me that our dorm has traditions. Joel and Clark read each other poetry every night, Mike and I watch cartoons together every semester, we collectively have a book of stupid quotes that we’ve been keeping since the first week of freshman year. We essentially have our own subculture on campus, and all of this happened because we just happened to be alphabetically assigned to the same room. What are the odds that we would even stay together, let alone become so close that we would have actual traditions?
Anyway, what started out as just friends showing friends a fun movie became a staple of our time in college. We began analyzing it and finding new jokes that we had missed, or resonating with different characters depending on where we were emotionally or mentally at the time.
“It gets better every time,” said Joel. “Every semester we each go through our own share of crap, whether that’s hurting others on accident, having our heart dropped and stepped on or just whatever it is.”
This movie probably won’t change your life. It hasn’t really changed mine. However, it has forced me to take a look back at my time at Union, to look at my friends that have become like family to me and to look at the decisions I’ve made that I can see play out in the movie. It kind of stings to look at how selfish and self-destructive some of the characters are and then realize that I’ve done exactly the same thing.
On my own personal rating scale, I give this movie a full price. I would give it a higher rating, but my scale isn’t exactly Union approved. It’s a 10 out of 10, would recommend. If you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check it out, but watch it with a group of friends because everything is better when you’re with the people who are most important to you.