i can’t believe it!

About time! It looks like they’re making a Scott Pilgrim movie (for reals!) after all. Apparently, they even have Michael Cera from Superbad lined up to play the title character and Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead fame) as director. Truly a shiny golden thread of hope for aspiring Canadian graphic novelists such as myself, as we might one day be lucky enough to have our works adapted into full-length movies! A bit of a damper, though–apparently the author, Bryan Lee O’ Malley, is planning to defect to the United States, so he’s technically not going to be Canadian anymore by the time he’s raking in the dough. Also, I didn’t really dig Superbad. It seems as if throwing around copious amounts of completely pointless vulgarity every five seconds counts as “comedy” nowadays (kind of like what they did to shark-jump some of the later episodes of Family Guy. Damn you, Seth MacFarlane!). But I digress.

Scott Pilgrim is quite frankly, for those not in the know, the coolest thing ever since Nerf balls. It’s chock-full of clever pop culture references, fourth-wall breaking dialogue and sass that would put even Kim Possible to shame. (You can’t go wrong with quotable lines like “Scott, if your life had a face, I would punch it. I would punch your life in the face.”) The other thing to know about Scott Pilgrim is that it’s a fairly surreal story that shifts from mundane to outrageous and back without batting an eyelash. The characters react to outlandish situations in such a hilariously deadpan manner that no one would even dwell on the absurdity of gaining superpowers with a vegan diet, or how Amazon employees use subspace for making deliveries in Canada. The characters just shrug them off as if they were everyday occurrences–in other words, they have a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief, which you’re going to need plenty of once you start reading the book!

That said, I’m seeing a terribly disturbing trend nowadays. I don’t know if it’s just an increasing preference for reality-based entertainment over fiction at the moment, but people seem to be losing their ability to suspend disbelief. On the plus side, people are more skeptical and perceptive of the information they receive from the media. On the other hand, however, it’s as if people lost the ability to just turn off their brains and enjoy works of fiction without mulling too much on details like historical accuracy. This article I found demonstrates this newfound need of people to be historical nitpickers. (It’s obviously written for laughs, but it does capture the sentiment perfectly.) Why do people feel the need to criticize the historical inaccuracies in movies like 300 and 10,000 BC (which are clearly works of fiction and shouldn’t be taken too seriously fact-wise)? Seriously, you folks need to lighten up.

 

It gets exponentially stupid from here.  Here’s another article about how the writer of a children’s book was forced to edit out scenes of a dragon breathing fire because the publisher figured that kids would imitate the dragon and injure themselves. And I thought the story about kids “in danger” of imitating Cookie Monster eating a lit pipe was moronic!

Then again, more and more people (children and adults alike) seem to be compensating for their inability to suspend disbelief by confusing reality with fiction–with predictably disastrous results. An extreme example would be this tragic story about a boy who died recently after burying his head in a sandbox while trying to imitate Gaara from Naruto. I don’t know about the details–it’s possible that the kid had some sort of mental problem–but there is no justifiable way for the media to rightfully blame the show for causing this behavior in children (but knowing the media, they’d probably sensationalize this story anyway if there were a big enough audience). I used to think the disclaimers they showed on TV ads that show obviously impossible situations was excessive, but now… I dunno.

The inability to suspend disbelief is the death of imagination. So what’s to blame for this? The increase of reality shows due to the Writers’ Guild Strike? Poor nutrition that causes mental deficiencies in kids, perhaps? I say blame it on the rain and imagine for a minute that Milli Vanilli was in fact two black guys wearing bad ’80s fashion.