Never Let Me Go by Mark Romanek

Anyone who knows me will tell you I love science fiction, and I especially love science fiction when it is clever, new, and refreshing. This brings me to Mark Romanek's Never Let Me Go. Now I may have started this wrong by classifying Never Let Me Go as a sci-fi, but to a certain degree I have to admit that part of it makes me love it slightly more than I already did. As this review continues, I am not sure how much will be a spoil and how much won't.

Never Let Me Go is the delicate tale of an alternate history where cloning was discovered early in the 1900s and the clones were used to save the lives of the naturally born. The film follows three of these donors as they go to a school specifically for donors, fall in love, grow up, have hearts broken, and move towards completing their donations. It is a story about characters whom the audience at first feels sorry for, but goes on to realize these characters are living life the same way any other person does. It is a beautiful and tragic and intelligent story.

The film stars Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley as the three leads. Each actor has grown into their own since breaking into cinema, but, as she did in An Education, Carey Mulligan pulls the film along. It is rare to find an actress so in control of her performance, of every inch of her body that she can control every scene with a flick of the eye or tweak of the lips. Her Kathy H is the both full of hurt and beauty and complexity, it is another great performance. Knightley and Garfield are both incredible in their performances and support the head performance of Mulligan perfectly. This is definitely their film and relies so much on their interactions, and they delivery beautifully taking the audience on a personal journey of heartache and discovery rare in any sci-fi these days.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World by Edgar Wright

There is this great misfortune in the world of cinema that the greatest entertainments are often overlooked. People tend to watch relatively tasteless and awful films and a great film like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World suffers at the box office. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is the story of one boys journey through the deadly baggage of his new girlfriend. In this film the baggage happens to be seven evil exes who fight and try to kill Pilgrim in video game styled fight sequences.

It is the great joy of this film that it is so informed by our contemporary culture with references to games like Street Fighter to sitcoms like Seinfeld. The film becomes an inventive exercise in style that maintains its large heart and delightful story. The strength beneath all of this is, of course, the direction. Some movies are writer's movies, some are actor's movies, and some are very much a showcase of directorial style. Scott Pilgrim displays Edgar Wrights typical flair for fast cutting, clever dialogue, and performances that are perfectly skewed to capture character. As mentioned before there is a brilliant reference to Seinfeld in which the entire scene takes place in a kitchen, has the soundtrack of Seinfeld, and even the sitcom laugh track which results in one of the more inspired and hilarious scenes in modern movies.

Something must be said, too, about Michael Cera in this film. Often seen as a one note player, it is refreshing to see someone pulling the right amount of quirk and heart out of Cera in the way Wright does. Michael Cera is perfect in the role of Scott Pilgrim and brings a great center to the character allowing the audience to relate and empathize with him even through all the over-the-top wacky antics that happen in the film that might take away from a weaker film. All in all Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is a great, often perfect, film that represents all the silly fascinations of our generation.