Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Question: how hard must a movie rock to escape from the pull of the Earth’s gravity, to jettison itself from our planet and our universe, and then to carve out its own world with the power of an electric bassline and pop-culture references to define a generation?

Answer: about as hard as Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a nonstop whirlwind of energy which delights in cranking the fun up to 12 or 13–all the while winking back at us, because it knows a simple 11 would’ve sufficed.

Edgar Wright doesn’t settle for good enough.  Every inch of Scott Pilgrim is meticulously detailed, every scene packed with sounds and costumes and posters and special effects that, quite frankly, make Scott Pilgrim the film a more unique creation than Scott Pilgrim the comic.  In comics, onomatopoeia are almost necessary to transform the silent print medium into something we can fully relate to, but in film the audio pretty much takes care of that itself.  Yet this alternate reality, this wonderful vision of Toronto brought to life as a 21st century version of magical realism becomes more authentic and individual for all its comical sound effects, CG embellishments and narrative exposition.

Wright is relentlessly inventive, employing a dazzling variety of effects that blend together to create this coherent piece of media that doesn’t quite behave like any other movie out there.  And just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks, an old one will suddenly be used in a different way, as if the blend of sight gags and chiptunes and soundbytes and references could be endlessly combined in innovative ways.  This is just what we get.

A very few fans may gripe that Cera’s Scott isn’t the same as the Scott from O’Malley’s comics, or that the secondary cast are marginalized to make way for the hugely entertaining battle scenes.  Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a movie that never slows down once it gets up to speed, and combat does take center stage.  But it’s only a sign of excellence that we want more time with these characters–they’re far from neglected, all played with style and talent, and besides, this is Scott Pilgrim’s show.  He kicks ass, smiles goofily, rocks his heart out and freaks out about his haircut in perfectly measured proportions.

If this is a genre film, I’ll be damned to tell you which one. No action movie has this kind of music, crafted by Beck and other visionaries into an intrinsic element of the film’s world.  No romantic comedy has this much cultural awareness, this keen a sense of the baggage we all carry with us writ large with glowing katanas and videogame sound effects.  And no comic film ever used the elements of comic books so blatantly or originally, mixing illustrations and wild camera technique and multi-frame action to suit the scene at hand.

I don’t know how it could be possible not to like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World when it enjoys itself so much.  As long as you’re willing to leave our world and travel to one very similar, which delights in the sights and sounds we’ve grown oblivious to and promises to one-up your expectations at every turn, you will find something to love in Scott’s fantastic battle.

At some point amidst the flamboyant violence, amusing dialogue and stereotypical high school trappings of “Kick-Ass,” I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Director Matthew Vaughan’s interpretation of the comic book “Kick-Ass” channels the graphic nature of Quentin Tarantino; gleaming swords dance deadly across the screen, bullets fly, bodies crumple and explode, and all the nihilistic action plays out against a pitch-perfect pop rock soundtrack.

Why, then, does “Kick-Ass” fall short of its lofty potential? When the action is on, it’s a well-greased machine of cinematic violence. But the story seems to slide into place a little too perfectly, a little too conveniently. And what was originally meant to be an homage to superhero comics that revealed their absurdity has, instead, become a flashy film that doesn’t quite ram home the fact that its characters are, in fact, quite deranged.

Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) is a normal teenager who makes a very abnormal decision. After one too many muggings for petty cash, Dave buys a comically ugly scuba suit off the Internet and decides to live out his superhero fantasies in real life. Fueled by adrenaline and stupidity, Dave’s fun pastime quickly leads to him being beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car.

He lives — barely. Undeterred, Dave keeps at it, prowling the streets in search of good deeds to be done. And when he saves a man from a gang beating, he becomes an overnight Youtube sensation.

Dave saunters around New York like he owns the place, and unwittingly becomes embroiled in a dangerous criminal underworld. His masked superhero antics inspire the film’s other principal players, father-daughter team Damon (Nicholas Cage) and Mindy (Chloë Grace Moretz) Macready, to don costumes of their own and assume the identities of Big Daddy and Hit Girl.

And this is where “Kick-Ass” begins to go astray. In Mark Millar’s comic, Big Daddy is nothing but a comic book geek, a maniac self-taught in the arts of murder and decked out with a massive arsenal of weaponry. In the film, Big Daddy is a former police officer, and his systematic destruction of mobster’s Frank D’Amico is driven entirely by revenge.

Big Daddy’s backstory may not seem like a significant change, but it’s only one instance of a tonal disconnection between the two versions of “Kick-Ass.” In the comic, there are no heroes, no supermen; only insane killers and a boy in way too deep. The pen-and-ink version is a more realistic tale, and the gouts of blood that jet from eviscerated bodies become a little sickening. And that’s entirely the point. If superheroes were real, if they were fighting criminals, they’d be insane vigilantes enacting brutal justice, not candy-colored boy scouts a la Superman.

“Kick-Ass” the film tells a different story; violent as it is, it doesn’t evoke the spirit of the comic, and the action scenes are mindless, cartoony eye-candy. Granted, they are tons of fun, and Hit Girl absolutely lights up the screen every second she has a camera pointed her way. She’s at once endearing and foul, charming and savage. If “Kick-Ass” were nothing but Hit Girl bouncing around the screen knifing drug dealers for two hours, I may have left the theater with a grin permanently stuck on my face.

Unfortunately, there’s a little too much downtime with Dave’s teenage life, and it rejects the sharper depiction of high school society Millar wrote into his comic. In Vaughan’s film, Dave gets the girl of his dreams, doesn’t take nearly as much abuse at the hands of criminals, and plays a gung-ho role in the shoot-em-up finale in mobster D’Amico’s penthouse apartment.

Overall, “Kick-Ass” is simply a cheerier, more lighthearted story than its comic counterpart. Sure, it makes for a fun night at the movies. But when the cheeriness goes hand-in-hand with graphic violence the characters shrug off like it ain’t no thang, “Kick-Ass” misses out on a chance to pack some moral depth in with its visceral action scenes.

Every so often, a story manages to brook the transition from written form to television to the silver screen.  Batman and Superman both began life as comic book characters, starred in a number of live-action and animated television shows, and eventually achieved success in Hollywood.  Masters of the Universe is not one of those stories.

In 1987, the popularity of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had reached its fever pitch — the cartoon show and its spin-off She-Ra had just concluded, and the toy line from which the series was first born was still going strong.  It was time to take the muscle-bound, uncomfortably homoerotic hero to the big leagues.  Though this decision undoubtedly thrilled legions of 10 year-olds around the world, the resulting film was, not-so-surprisingly, a mess of bad acting, an utterly asinine script, and a hodgepodge of movie clichés.

The opening titles of Masters of the Universe look and sound as if they were ripped straight from 1978’s Superman, and the legions of ineffectual soldiers are dead-ringers for the black-helmeted crewmembers of the Death Star.  Even borrowing heavily from its betters, Masters of the Universe may have been a salvageable effort if it took place in the creative sci-fi/medieval fantasy world of Eternia.  Instead, everyone involved decided it would be much more fun to throw the heroes through a wormhole, drop them in New Jersey, and pair them up with a couple troubled teenagers (including a pre-Friends Courteney Cox).

If the relocation to Jersey wasn’t a clear indication, practically nothing in Masters of the Universe corresponds to the original He-Man comics.  Most of the major characters are represented, but other heroes like Stratos are nowhere to be seen.  And Orko, He-Man’s floating sidekick whose blunderings once served as comic relief in the animated series, is replaced by the film’s ugly Hobbit/troll mashup Gwildor.

Though Dolph Lundgren would’ve been a far better He-Man without ever opening his mouth, Frank Langella’s Skeletor may be the highlight of the film, simply because his make-up looks a little cool.  Considering how limited his facial expressions are behind Skeletor’s yellow-white skull exterior, Langella’s voicework outpaces the rest of the cringe-inducing cast…until the finale, anyway, when Skeletor transforms himself into some sort of Golden God and utterly ruins everything.

Kids may blissfully overlook the terrible acting and moronic plot, delight in Skeletor’s cliché blundering henchmen and be thrilled by the clumsy choreography of each painful fight scene.  They’ll even get a kick out of the real-world setting and the infusion of distraught teenagers, who rise to the challenge of helping a mostly naked man save his home planet and are rewarded with true love forever. For everyone else, Masters of the Universe is a textbook on how to make a bad children’s movie — take a terrible story, cast bad actors, and try to make it look as cheap as possible.  New Jersey seems to boast a population of about twelve people, but maybe that’s understandable — nobody else wanted anything to do with Masters of the Universe.

“Ordinary people caught up in extraordinary situations” — John Wagner’s foundation for the graphic novel A History of Violence, the story of a normal man caught up in a frighteningly real kill-or-be-killed world.  David Cronenberg’s film adaptation depicts the same extraordinary situation, but alters or cuts most of the extraneous plot points, resulting in a leaner film that is both more believable and intense than the original comic.

A History of Violence begins with a lengthy, continuous tracking shot, seemingly easing into the story with a relaxed nonchalance.  The same casual air continues for the first twenty minutes of the film’s running time, introducing us to Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife (Mario Bello) and children, a seemingly perfect family in an idyllic small town.

That all comes crumbling down when Tom kills two vicious robbers in self-defense, exposing his long-hidden identity to the demons of his past.  When those demons manifest in the form of the menacing Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris), the Stalls are tossed into an incredibly tense battle for survival and sanity.  The slow build-up of the first half of A History of Violence introduces a cast of realistic, human characters, and the slowly-mounting tension continuously heightens the suspense.  The film gives us just enough information to understand each scene as it unfolds, keeping us guessing all the way through—is Tom really an experienced killer with a history of violence, or is he simply an ordinary man caught up in an extraordinary situation?

Cronenberg’s film deftly maintains a level of balanced believability that makes its story so gripping — despite the insanity of the circumstances, each character reacts like a real person, and it’s that subtle storytelling that elevates A History of Violence well past its comic book roots.  Wagner’s story possesses none of the subtlety of the film, immediately beginning with a random murder and delving straight into Tom’s fight in his diner.

From that point forward, it’s obvious that Tom’s hiding dark secrets, and the eventual revelation leads into a long backstory substantially different than the brief glimpse of Tom’s past we get in the film.  We discover Tom committed all his misdeeds as a teenager, alongside his friend Richie; in the movie, Richie (William Hurt) is a mobster, Tom’s brother, and the evil Tom must ultimately confront to end his cycle of violence.

Despite the Tom of Wagner’s graphic novel seeming like a more normal everyman than Mortensen’s character, the comic strings together explosions, shootouts, and insanely evil forces.  Even the film’s fantastic characterization is nowhere to be found — Tom’s son “Buzz” throws out lame catchphrases, and his wife’s quick acceptance of his bloody past is almost laughably simplistic contrasted with the emotionally-wrenching fracture that comes between Mortensen and Maria Bello.

Vince Locke’s rough art continuously felt like the bare minimum of functionality needed to convey Wagner’s story — only a few rare scenes stood out or managed to exaggerate the horror of Tom’s ordeal.  The black-and-white sketchbook ugliness may be in keeping with the story’s tone, but with Cronenberg at the reins, A History of Violence tells a better story and wraps it in a superior package of haunting cinematography and an understated score.   Where Wagner’s comic tells a contained story that leaves little to the imagination, the film’s ending can only leave us yearning for more, as if A History of Violence was a glimpse into the lives of real people that’s over far too soon.

It’s not too hard to picture pop culture as a massive, interwoven tapestry of media — movies and television shows and books and podcasts all borrowing ideas and themes from one another, trying to offer consumers something familiar enough to be appealing but original enough to be captivating.  And one of my absolute favorite things in pop culture is when the creative types unabashedly reference their favorite works, with in-jokes or overt name-drops.

Brian K. Vaughan, author of the incredible comic Y The Last Man, wears his comic book geekery on his sleeve.  Every issue of Y is utterly packed with cheerful jokes that won’t make much sense to readers whose knowledge of the medium doesn’t match Vaughan’s, but it’s cool nonetheless to see such a good writer pay homage to his own influences.

More recently, the seriously bizarre (but hardly serious) action game Bayonetta has fun dropping cheeky references to other video games.  Bayonetta’s wacko plot may be a bit too out there for me, but hearing one of its characters emulate the Resident Evil 4 merchant was amusing, and Bayonetta’s own “Henshin A Go-Go” a delight.

In most cases, that’s as far as pop culture goes to plumb the depths of its own history.  Surface-level window dressings can be a ton of fun, but how often do such references have a genuine impact on the heart of a story?  Pretty rarely — which is one of the reasons Scott Pilgrim is so awesome.

Bryan Lee O’Malley doesn’t just work in commentary on music, video games, anime.  I mean, he does all that, and he does it well.  But that’s barely touching on what makes Scott Pilgrim such an original, interesting work.  Scott Pilgrim is a surreal blend of the real world and a goofy, magic-imbued fantasy reality, where Ramona Flowers can use subspace to travel through people’s dreams, where vegans are imbued with psychic powers, and where Scott isn’t just a twenty-something loser — he’s a twenty-something loser who always wins his fights.

O’Malley’s art trends towards the cartoony end of the comic spectrum, which is perfect for the offbeat, experimental mash-up of styles and genres present in his work.  Every great comic creates a detailed world for its characters to exist in, and the way that world is realized appropriately mirrors the style of the narrative.  Cartoony, oversized expressions would seem just as out of place in a post-apocalyptic thriller as minutely detailed characters would look in a lighthearted comedy.  Which isn’t to say that Scott Pilgrim is never serious — but in the world of comics, cartoony, iconic characters are easier to latch onto, and the more stylized they are, the more likely we are to buy into the world around them.

Which is important, because the world of Scott Pilgrim is unlike any other.  As they become more and more advanced, video games have been gravitating towards emulating Hollywood to the best of their ability.  They’re trying to adopt the language of movies: the way cinematography works, how scenes are composed, how characters interact.  Comics, on the other hand, have a very distinct style of storytelling, a way of handling time that is very much their own.  But Scott Pilgrim doesn’t quite play by those rules; it incorporates the trappings of video games at a conceptual level.  In a comic, there’s a way you expect characters to interact with their world, and in video games, there’s a way you expect the elements in the interactive environment to work.  But by infusing aspects of video games into Scott Pilgrim, O’Malley has birthed a cool mix of mediums, in which the expected logic of comics doesn’t work the way we’re accustomed to.

When characters die, they don’t die like they would in a comic; they die like they would in a video game, leaving behind power-ups or 1-Ups (or bunnies, in one Sonic the Hedgehog inspired incident). Video game iconography often pops up to establish a scene with a minimum of wordy explanation.  Game-esque “stats” are applied to objects and characters, like Ramona’s bat (+1 against blondes!) and Scott’s leveling up.  Anyone who’s familiar with video games will take these things for granted in a game, but O’Malley uses them to tell a story in a way that games never have.  Narrative in video games often disregards the way we interact with them — RPGs will throw tons of stats and levels and weapons at you, but those things almost never have any bearing on how the story plays out.  But Scott Pilgrim tells its story through those tropes.  Pretty cool, huh?

There’s plenty more video game stuff packed into Scott Pilgrim in the form of references like Clash at Demonhead, and some moments that break the Fourth Wall, which seems only natural for such an offbeat comic.  As interesting as the Scott Pilgrim comic is, it’s even more tantalizing to anticipate how Edgar Wright will take the video game elements and incorporates them into the upcoming film adaptation.  Odds are it won’t work in quite the same unique way, but who knows?

Akira.

It’s one of those names that sticks with you.  Strong, mysterious, foreboding.  What does it mean?   Who is Akira?

Perhaps the name’s indelible quality actually results from the film itself, because Akira is one of those films you’ll never forget — even if you’re not entirely sure who or what Akira is by the end of its two hours.

Akira set a high bar in 1988 as an audio-visual powerhouse, propelled by a massive budget topping $10 million.  The meticulously detailed animation has endured for 20 years and can stand to-to-toe with the best produced even today.  Every scene bustles with activity.  Every background captures the grimy, worn-down feel of a post-war cyberpunk Tokyo, a city wallowing in its own filth and corruption.  And the movement, often a sticking point for Japanese animation, attains a Disney-esque level of fluidity.  When huge crowds riot in the streets, entire swaths of the landscape explode into rubble and dust, and biker gangs hurtle through the city, it’s obvious that budget was worth every cent.

Even throwing down a cool $11 million couldn’t truly tap into the full scope of Katsuhiro Otomo’s saga; despite the overuse of the term “epic” in the post-Lord of the Rings era, Akira personifies the term.  Otomo’s original manga, a 2000+ page landmark of graphic fiction, tells a vast, complex tale impossible   to contain on film.  Thankfully, his illustrative prowess makes the transition.  Kaneda’s red biker jacket and sleek motorcycle are transcendent; they will, quite probably, be cool forever.  The bikes and their wicked neon light trails remain one of the film’s most enduring images, despite their relatively small amount of screen time.

And then there’s the antagonist Tetsuo, who begins life as a kid with self-confidence issues and a mean streak and ends things as a maniacal, super powered psychic.  His character makes the jump to celluloid, but his story arc can’t quite do the same.  Akira’s expansive, convoluted narrative simply can’t be accurately stuffed into a two hour film, and the end result is a bit of a mess — major characters are cut completely, disparate pieces of the story are cobbled together, and only a tiny fraction of the entire saga gets its due representation.  Even the film’s namesake, the poster child for creepy Japanese children, hardly gets any screen time!  Akira is the ultimate result of psychic-powered government experimentation; he actually becomes a major part of the graphic novel’s plot, which feels far more appropriate than his brief, phoenix-like resurrection from bottles of preserved organs in the film’s final minutes.

Considering Otomo’s involvement with the animated production — and the fact that his manga didn’t end until two years after the movie’s release — it’s more appropriate to view Akira as an alternate version of the story rather than an attempted translation from one medium to the other.  A far-too-brief, not-so-coherent plot replaces the manga’s endless series of action scenes and long arcs of character development.

Even so, the film is carried on the strength of its superb animation and bizarre, stunning soundtrack.  And it was the animated version of “Akira” that helped ignite an appetite for anime in the United States, which is likely why it’s still recognized in the realm of pop culture to this day.  But maybe it’s not all about the cool motorcycles, wowza explosions and entertaining psychic powers.  When you get down to it, Akira is a pretty dark film — it begins with Armageddon, and it’s hard to say whether the city born from Tokyo’s ashes, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, really deserves to be saved at all.  On the flip side, Kaneda’s youthful determination doggedly propels a strong thematic undertone that the human spirit is worth fighting for — all you have to do is believe in yourself.

With a two-part live-action version of Akira in the works and slated for 2011, we may get to see just what it is that makes the story so captivating.  Maybe those badass bikes really are all you need…or maybe it really was just the name all this time.