So tonight I Red Box'd it, because I really, really wanted to like it. Figured I'd missed something the first time around due to tiredness or the ubiquitousness of Michael Cera or something.
It turns out I missed the point altogether - maybe. After watching it the first time, and listening to the critical podcasts, I'd surmised that the landscape of the film was a kind of alternate universe in which video game battles are real. The second time around, it became possible to see the "battles" as the protagonist's projections: He's full of baggage (probably orphaned, unpopular, without real emotional ties to anyone excepting maybe his associations with his bandmates, recently cuckolded and broken-hearted), and feels an adolescent's need to think about his social tensions as physical fights. When he finds his new paramour also has baggage, instead of dealing with his insecurities and living in the moment, he feels a need to "fight" her exes in order to feel cool.
This reading makes me like the film - instead of a story about a boy who fights a bunch of people in order to be with a girl who has no reason to like him (nor he to like her), it finds a kid who's struggling to overcome his emotional handicaps and grow the fuck up. Rather than focusing on some guy in Billy Corgan's famous "Zero" t-shirt, it's about a nonchalant hipster who realizes he needs to gain some measure of self-respect in order to find the ability to feel anything real about another human being.
But then... Why does he gain self-respect by fighting his ex's baggage? Shouldn't he be fighting his own? And so... why are his ex and current GF fighting? Because they also feel the need to conceive of baggage as things to viscerally destroy, or because from Scott's vantage everyone feels this way, or is it because he just thinks it's cool to have girls fighting over him? And then... why do both girls team up to help fight the current girlfriend's baggage? And so... why does he have to fight himself after gaining self-respect?
Never mind. Either this movie's fucked, or I'm dumb. Either way, insert fart noise.
