Roadrunner Twice

No questions! I take it literally enough: I like to think it's the far-flung future of 1965! (Or, Zot's world.) —My point is more that it's the first gesamtkuntswerk of the 21st century. (—Scott Pilgrim is also, but I'm only vaguely going to respond to the videogame grammar either here or there.)

The conditional-tense scene is technically a flash-forward; what makes it conditional is that the flash-forward is never explicitly sited in the film's timeline; we never see a scene or a hint of a scene from it when it's "actually" happening. We see in the confrontation that he's gonna lose, and then we cut to him dejected in the lockerroom. Brill.

The thing about it that never stops blowing me away is the first 20 minutes, where in the course of a race we're shown how the races work, how physics works (here), backstory highlights for all our main characters and the plot, and all told through the bewildering variety of wipes and overlaps and timeshifts that make up the grammar of the film: in short, we're explicitly taught how to watch this film and they make it all look so effortless.