Scott Pilgrim vs. the World | Eat Pray Love | Machete

For most of Scott Pilgrim, the metaphor is literalized as Scott physically battles the exes (Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, Jason Schwartzman and others) in video game action setpieces during which he transforms into an action hero and anything can happen. This is my one real qualm with the film, and the problem with literalizing a metaphor. Why does he have to fight them? Most of them no longer care about Ramona, and we´re never given a satisfactory explanation. What are the rules of the fights? None – Scott can get thrown fifty meters into a building, then get up and deliver a single punch that shatters his enemy into an explosion of coins and bonus points.

And thus, the bulk of Scott Pilgrim becomes watching these metaphorical battle scenes that are well-choreographed and visually exciting but completely devoid of not only suspense or tension, but anything that would allow us to understand what is going on, or who is winning. It´s all wham-pow-crunch with an arbitrary and predetermined outcome, and the audience is simply unable to fundamentally interact with these scenes. A life meter, that old video game standby, would have helped immensely here; the final fight features characters that begin to flash when they get low on health, but until then? Nada.

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Elizabeth Gilbert´s novel Eat Pray Love, going by the user reviews on Amazon.com, is a book that has polarized readers: many find it inspirational, thoughtful, even life-changing, others find it boring and self-absorbed. Unread by me (and unlikely to be read in the future), I´m guessing I´d fall in with the boring and self-absorbed crowd, because Eat Pray Love is also the most excruciatingly torturous cinematic experience in recent memory. Yes, it´s more painful to sit through than Sex and the City 2.

Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) is depressed, lost in life, searching for answers. I think most will reach this crisis at some point in their lives. The majority will have to deal with it during the course of their everyday lives, and probably have bigger problems to deal with than finding inner peace. The rich will see a psychiatrist. The über-elite will take a year out of their lives, travel to Italy to eat, India to pray (or meditate, rather) and Bali to fall in love, claim to have solved all their problems, and then write a bestselling book about it.

Most movies go from A to B. Eat Pray Love goes from ? to ?. It´s basically a travelogue: Liz goes here, does this, sees that. But everything is arbitrary, nothing is explained. The goal, I presume, the point of the movie, is to find inner peace. But what she lacks in the beginning is unclear, and what she has gained by the end is even more unclear. She seems exactly the same. Equally vague is every single step of her journey: why does she go here, specifically? How is this supposed to help? Does it help? All questions I cannot answer from the movie alone.