Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

The film is based on a series of graphic novels by Brian Lee O’Malley, and stars Michael Cera as 22-year-old Scott Pilgrim, a manqué indie rocker who’s still moping about being dumped a year after the fact by a girl who split him and Toronto to go on and make a name for herself in the music world. Everything changes when Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) rollerblades out of his dreams and into his life. One problem: the girl has seven evil exes whom Pilgrim will be called upon to defeat in order to qualify himself as up to snuff. What follows is typical Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), in this case an exercise in magic realism that approaches each conflict as though Pilgrim is leveling up through a classic fighting video game. It’s a delirious and very, very funny stew of pop-culture spices, a reference-a-second mash-up that hews heavily toward that video-game culture. Tinseltown. Rated PG-13