Scott Pilgrim

Richard Brody being convincing about the youth of today:

My teen-aged daughters and their friends have a much more competitive sense of life than we (late boomers) ever did; they and their friends are tested, literally and figuratively, more intensively and more constantly than we were, in school, at home, and among friends. The ubiquity of social media gives them no place to hide and submits the least of their idiosyncrasies to snap judgment, while an increasingly therapeutic and supervised environment gets them in the habit of understanding their personal issues and crises in more general, even abstract terms. At the same time, the virtually constant contact that their electronics keep them in teaches them, quickly, that the net of social relations is wide and strong and that they’re inescapably connected to the big world, which comes with a sense of responsibility, adventure, and danger. They learn early that the expressive power of a semi-public persona goes together with the constant maintenance of a self-aware guardedness. Scott Pilgrim doesn’t take up arms or raise his fists against exes, evil or otherwise; he battles his own emotions and struggles to get them under control. With the willed goofiness of its media-centrism—which both diverts and distills the constant pressure its characters endure—“Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” presents a richer blend of the contemporary adolescent experience than any teen comedy I’ve seen.

UPDATE: I hasten to add that these sentiments echo things said for years by friends (including the proprietor) who are parents of teen-aged girls -- What oft was thought, etc. I like finding things in the broader media that indicate the movement of ideas, books, images, music, or characters into the mainstream conversation -- even if they have been part of our private conversations for years.

It's exciting that a group of people who make movies have stumbled upon and (apparently) done well with a set of observations as yet unrecorded there.... One fewer on the list of things to be irritated about.