While we still aren’t quite convinced that Michael Cera and his fishbowl bouffant are fully dickish enough to play young Scott in Edgar’s upcoming super geekout, we’re still kinda excited about what exactly it will look like, and judging from this new UK one-sheet, it should at least have some amazing haircuts – and hey, that’s all we go to the movies for anyway isn’t it?

The Freezepop T-Shirt in the back of my wardrobe is proof that we’ve all done stupid things to impress girls, but Nick Twisp takes it a bit further than most in Dimension Film’s new adap of C.D.Payne’s enormous teen saga, and just about gets away with it too.

Living in a trailer with Zakk Galifianakis isn’t my idea of fun either, so when Michael Cera’s secretly-cool dorky Twisp bumps into Sheeni Saunders, he seizes on her Francophilia with a vengeance, creating an entirely new hipster persona – the preposterously monikered Francois Dillinger – and sets about an escalating campaign of crime –all in the name of love naturally.

Payne’s original book is absurdist in the extreme, but transfers well to the screen thanks to it’s penchant for blackly-humorous, if ridiculous, skits that nailed their colours to that staple of teen drama: Girls love a bad boy.

Cera himself is a great piece of casting. Over the past year his career went into mini-freefall with the likes of Year One blotting his otherwise impeccable CV, but it helped foster a nice guy loser persona that he delights in ripping to shreds here, his performance subtle and tinged with spite. He excels in scenes where his two personalities play off against each other, Francois pencil-tache lips sneering with just the right amount of Gallic stereotype, while the surrealist touches that director Arteta excels at make it impossible not to laugh, even when watching the ravings of a split-personality nutjob. You’ll find yourself drawn to Dillinger, his Tyler Durden-lite blackmail and arson curiously loveable and compelling as he fights his very odd fight to get the girl.

Overall the movie relies a little too heavily on set-pieces, coming off as a surrealist sketch show at times, but with able performances from the leads and strong support from the likes of Steve Buscemi (as Cera’s teen-chasing dad) it ends up being a comic teen Fight Club that hopefully marks an end to Cera’s downward slump.

Here at STS we spend way too much time reading comic books, so when a creator-owned property like Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World makes it’s way through the Holly-mangler we’re always concerned.

Luckily if this fantastic first look (courtesy of our friends over at the ever-lovin’ UltraCulture) is anything to go by, we needn’t have worried – This looks incredible!

SPVTW _ as it shall henceforth be known – details Michael Cera’s attempts to defeat his true love’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. With a flaming sword naturally.

If this is anything to go by then Edgar Wright is making a great job of some truly bizarre casting as Cera doles out some truly hardcore ass-kickery – expect a release date to be anounced soon.

Take a large group of proven comedic talent, and give them a script where characters with modern sensibilities live in an ancient or mythical world. If you do it right, you get The Life Of Brian. Do it wrong, and you get this steaming pile. Proof, if it were needed, of the lack of intelligent design in the universe.

Hunter-Gatherers ‘Oh’ (Michael Cera) and Zed (Jack Black) eat of the tree of knowledge (“hmmm…Kind of ‘knowledgey’ tasting…”) and set out through an old testament landscape in what should be a very funny buddy movie, but ends up being ‘Abbott and Costello meet their maker’.

As they travel from one unamusing scenario to the next, Cera plays straight man to Black, but unfortunately Black has long abandoned actual jokes in favour of shouting his lines in a cod Shakespearian style while rolling his eyes. As if they know it’s a dud, the edit team cuts scenes before the punchline, creating a stop-start film that has gaps filled with knob gags. Now, I’m not against knob gags – they worked perfectly well in Blackadder – but here they’re as ancient as the setting, with any wit or spontaneity seemingly removed in favour of more screeching and a curious and very Middle-American desire to avoid offending anyone.

Bumping into Cain and Abel, Abraham, Isaac and various other Biblical types on the way, Zed becomes convinced he’s on a mission from God, one that involves saving some attractive girls from the king of Sodom. Throughout it seems like there are two scripts at work here, one wanting to take on the Christian right and give Judao-Christian myths a good kicking, the other written by a horny thirteen year old with a short attention span. The whole thing is offensive, but not in a good way. Homophobic and misogynistic jokes are phoned in by an array of talent, all of whom should know better – while the production design looks like it’s been assembled for a high school review.

Another example of Harold Ramis’ spiral into awfulness – this should be avoided like a biblical plague.