Michael Cera is just ADORABLE.* And he doesn’t CARE who knows.

Universal Studios however, do care, and as such they have put him in a sequence of films of varying genres that go something along these lines.

Michael Cera is a geeky, skinny, painfully-semen-filled early twentysomething/teenager that really should have had sex with a real live girl by now, but he blames his lack of success on his need to find the exact right one, rather than the fact that he looks like someone shaved a lemur and taught it to stare with huge eyes at some other female lemur with cool taste in music and an ironic liptwitch. He’s not into confrontation, he likes things to be clean and in order, he’s finicky and into “being a gentleman”. He’s a weak, musically knowlegeable mushroom of a boyman. He’s basically like a super-horny innocently-straight non-robot C-3P0, trying his best to find a female R2D2 that he can fall in love with and be with in a galaxy near near to his apartment.

So. All of the movies start off with him being crushed cruelly by some heartless bitch of a girl, or with him totally in love with a girl he can’t have, or some flavour or variety of similarly predictably bland happenstance. Then the movie proceeds as we’re introduced to the wacky cast of characters that flesh out his weakness, at least one of which always shouts a lot about fucking or how he should stop being a little bitch and fuck the fuck out of a real bitch. Then he either finally sees the girl of his dreams, so evidenced by a slow tracking shot of his little boy wide eyed beauty appreciation and her standing or talking or reading in slow motion and it’s done. Then he tries through increasingly weedy ways to convince a girl who doesn’t really even like him to love him. Eventually, because of the innocent purity of his need to love he either gets the girl he wants or realises that he should be in love with another, more deserving girl, and the movie ends, presumably with the long awaited slight reduction in the ambient pressure of his semen flow.

Now. Why is this so successful? Why is it that he’s been able to make what is basically the exact same film and people like me will stil take time out of their busy schedules of being narky sarky dissattisfied assholes to fade back into a time where love was an option rather than a punchline?

Because Micheal Cera is ADORABLE.

Seriously. I don’t know what it is. He is probably the whitest manboy alive. You just want to skin him and wear him as an innocent suit. You want to dress him like a kitten and get him to bat at a piece of wool. He has the kind of skintone that I would hope to find on a hipster unicorn. It may be a glut of manboyjuice that makes his pearly sheen look translucent or maybe he has some kind of undaignosed vitamin-D deficiency, but either way, just looking at him and listening to his ridiculously tremulous voice and you’re immediately thrown back into a period of near permanent adolescent embarassment and empathy.

In my mind, if you want to conceive of the two images of Michael Cera that are probably the most definitive of his particular mental real estate, I would say the first would be a close up of the look of terror in his eyes as he stands cowering, locked outside a gym locker room door dressed only in his sadly sagging white Y-Fronts while he watches the girl of his dreams walk in slow motion towards him, all the while listening to the laughter of guys with more successfully manly voices in the background, the second would be of him waxing lyrical about the singular, unique beauty of a girl lost in a sea of unappreciative philistines while his conversational partner scratches his balls and thinks about midget porn. As such,he’s kind of cornered the market on “That dude who will be cool when he grows up but has to put up with childish bullshit now”. Unlike me who cornered the market on “That dude is a dude and always will be”.

And like, it works and will continue to do so, if only until he gets too old. Which will probably be in about twenty minutes. So it worked in this film. Scott Pilgrim is of course the radically successful graphic novel series written by some dude in Canada about a slacker type band dude who falls in love with a alt-cool girl, and in order to get with her he has to battle her 7 evil exes in a manga-esque nemesis glut of nerdy awesome geekery. It stormed the indy comic scene and set the brains of a million mid-level studio execs on fire, all of whom were looking for the next awesome no-brainer comic hit. So, they hired the awesome Edgar Wright to bring it to the screen, and I have to say he did a great job. The whole thing looks polished and awesome, and although it does get a bit boring watching Michael Cera fight, because let’s face it, his entire personality says “lover not a fighter”, the film is fun. This may in fact be the major point of this film, maybe Cera is using this to put his hat in the “I’m a bit older, give me some roles where I don’t have to play the same socially awkward chronic masturbator”, and in that, I don’t know if it really worked as he wasn’t like, totally convincing. All of the cool swords and fighting and stuff kind of seemed a little tacked on, I kind of think he should maybe stick to what’s he’s good at. Chronic masturbation jokes.

Now I realised that I’ve actually spent the whole of this review talking about Michael Cera, and have said basically nothing about the film, but what can I say? The film was good, go fucking watch it for yourself and decide.

Jesus.

*I could literally end this review right now as this is the entire basis of this film and nothing else really matters.