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6 Great Movies That Will Overwhelm Your Senses

Movies are more than simply storytelling. It’s often tempting to focus exclusively on the story aspect of cinematic storytelling at the expense of the telling. It’s true that popular feature length movies are almost uniformly concerned with the unfolding of a narrative, but part of the pleasure of watching often comes from the familiarity or strangeness of a world we’re being immersed in. Sometimes this is done in beautiful, artful, and understated ways, and that’s great. What’s unfortunate is when equally beautiful and artful work is dismissed as spectacle or shallow entertainment, because the best of this kind of filmmaking exposes us to a way of seeing and experiencing cinema that’s different and interesting.

Darren Ruecker Mar 3, 2014 3:44 pm2017-08-26T18:56:49-05:00

1) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

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Edgar Wright established himself as a director of wonderfully manic style in his early collaborations with Simon Pegg, such as Spaced and Shaun of the Dead. In 2010, with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, he showed that if he was holding anything back previously, he wasn’t anymore, making a movie with some of the craziest energy and visual expression that audiences had ever seen.

Movies based on graphic novels are still a relatively recent chapter in film history, and the range of expression in the many adaptations is wide. There’s something like Sin City that looks almost entirely animated, or Watchmen which captures the punchiness and deliberation over specific images that you can only get with a comic book. Scott Pilgrim goes even further, capturing the frantic page-turning feeling combined with just a wild frenzy of thought and side notes.

It may take more than one viewing to make aesthetic sense out of, but its retro video game sensibility and employment of bizarre yet charming humor make it an immensely fun movie that doesn’t allow you a moment to be bored.

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