The World's End (5/5 Stars)

If Seth Rogen’s ‘This Is The End’ seemed like the last dying gasp of a creative mind, “The World’s End,” which sees the reunion of director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost has to be the antidote for that same creative exhaustion. As far as end of the world comedies go they could not be more different. They both have plenty of laughs but where one comedy took the Apocalypse as an excuse for boyish men to become even more juvenile (ending in of all things a boy band concert from the late 1990s) the other uses it as an opportunity to finally grow up.

“The World’s End” is the third movie by Team Wright, Pegg, and Frost and as such is being the completion of the Cornetto trilogy. The term Cornetto refers to a brand of Ice Cream known (via Team Wright, Pegg, and Forst) as a decent hangover cure. The first two movies in the trilogy “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz” apparently had a Cornetto joke in them, so the makers of “The World’s End” throw in one here and thus a trilogy is born with the ice cream linking all the movies together. This ignores the fact (or does it?) that what could be a far more obvious link between the movies is the setting of each movie: a seemingly innocent British town that harbors a massive conspiracy that each and every resident is in on. In ‘Shaun of the Dead’ the town was taken over by zombies. In ‘Hot Fuzz’ the entire town was a part of a religious cult dedicated to keeping the town picturesque via murder of its undesirable citizens. Murder I say! ‘The World’s End’ features an alien invasion, which turns the residents into things that are not exactly robots. Not-a-Robot Pierce Brosnan drops by as the chap’s old tweedy literature professor to explain exactly why they are not to be called robots per se. It is an enlightening discussion before he tries to eat them.

Another intertwining theme from the first two movies is the many scenes that take place in a pub. In fact, the reason why the chaps are in town for the first time in two decades is to placate the desire of their former ringleader, Simon Pegg, to finish the Golden Mile, a glorious Pub Crawl they started but did not finish twenty years ago on the last day of high school. Simon tells the story of this pub-crawl in rapturous detail to his Alcoholics Anonymous support group and inspires himself to get the gang back together to finally do it. (“It was the best night of my life. And still is.”) Simon is very much still stuck in the past so much that even wears the same type of clothes that he did in high school. Meanwhile all the other chaps have grown up and got real lives and jobs. They include Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan, and Paddy Considine. All of them are welcome faces from the first two movies. Martin Freeman has probably become the most famous of them all what with his uncanny ability to land almost all of the iconic roles in British culture (Bilbo Baggins, Dr. Watson, Arthur Dent, Tim Canterbury). After much cajoling and a bit of deception they embark on their journey. The wit flows and hilarity ensues in a way that generally happens when a bunch of funny people who know each other well get together in the same room. Little by little they notice that the bars they go to all strangely seem like the same bar, with the same handwriting, and the same beer. Everything is homogenized, sterile, and suburban. Nobody recognizes them either, that is until the meet the town crazy man played by David Bradley. Fans of “Hot Fuzz” will remember he had the best line in that movie, “A Big Bushy Beard!” Well, he has the best line in “The World’s End.” After revealing the town’s secret he exclaims, “Why do you think I drink from this crazy straw! Not so crazy now, is it!!!” I guess you just sort of had to be there.

But what sets “The World’s End” apart from your typical end of the world comedy and especially the slapdash “This is the End” is just how incredibly well done it is in a technical sense. This is where the filmmakers, especially Edgar Wright, have matured in leaps and bounds from the first movie. “Shaun of the Dead” is a typical low budget independent movie. “Hot Fuzz” although obviously low budget stuns the viewer with its hyper style of editing. Edgar Wright’s next movie, “Scott Pilgrim v. the World,” was also a low budget movie but had so many brilliant visual and audio effects that it could have easily been passed off as a movie with a budget over 100 million dollars. “The World’s End” has the same proficient editing and brilliant effects, but here Wright also adds extremely competent fight scenes. I mean the Not-a-Robot bashing going on here is some of the best hand-to-hand combat in a movie I have seen outside of Asia. Nick Frost in particular is a badass in this movie. It find it somewhat ridiculous that a movie like this can barely gross 10 million at the box office when it seemingly has everything modern blockbuster audiences say they want: Lights, fights, laughter, a little sex, and plenty of alcohol. Edgar Wright has got to be one of the most underrated directors in cinema today. To have already made so many great movies in the populist milieu he works in and to have so little people seeing them is disconcerting. I would think the American equivalent has to be someone like Robert Rodriguez. Theses people are fun talented people. Go see their movies.

The last five to ten minutes kind of get a bit preachy but since the first two hours were so good it is totally forgivable. I don’t want to spoil anything but the world kind of does end, but it is a bit of an afterthought. The main thing is that after much violent soul searching and funny enlightenment, the Simon Pegg character learns something about himself and people. So even if the aliens respond by giving up on the human race it not totally a downer of an ending.

I would be very interested in seeing what the Team of Wright, Pegg, and Frost do next. I figure they could do anything and in style. 

Prince Avalanche (4/5 Stars)

Enjoying the Silence

This is the kind of movie that renders a star rating system kind of silly. It is a perfect movie in its own right, which should mean it would get 5 stars, but the movie and its ambitions are so small it should seem like it would get 3 stars at the most. So in essence, it is one of those 5 star 3 star movies. I gave it 4/5 stars, which in no situation would make sense but hey as Roger Ebert would say, forget the stars and read the review (or watch the movie). That’s the only real way to get a sense of how good it is.

The movie concerns two weeks in the lives of two men Alvin (Paul Rudd) and his brother-in-law Lance (Emile Hirsch). They are painting new road lines on a desolate Texan highway ravaged by wildfire. It is the late 1980s, although there is no reason for this movie to be set at any time in particular. The wildfires are not based on any specific wildfires. Actually I think the movie may be set in the 1980s just as an excuse to deprive the characters of their smart phones. After most of the conflict deals with how the two men deal with isolation from the rest of the world. Alvin, the older and seemingly more mature man is more comfortable with the silence. He knows how to gut a fish, tie a knot, and make a campsite. Lance on the other hand knows nothing about camping and really really does not care to learn. What he is going through is a special type of hell. His current life goal is to get laid as much as possible. Being in nature around nothing, he explains, just makes him hornier. Lance does not understand why Alvin won’t take the chance to go home for the weekend to visit his long-time girlfriend. He jumps at the chance to leave while Alvin is happy with having some real alone time. There is a particularly good scene in which Alvin in an attempt to bridge the gap between the two takes an interest in listening to the story of Lance’s weird weekend, a monologue delivered splendidly by Emile Hirsch. Imagine having a bonding heart to heart conversation with someone and walking away from it firmly convinced that you have absolutely nothing in common. “Somehow in your head,” muses Alvin, “you really believe you are a gentleman.” “Huh?” asks the still hung over Lance. A pause. “(Nevermind in German)” says Alvin.

This movie was directed by David Gordon Green, an accomplished director of stoner comedies like Pineapple Express and some movies he made before that I have not seen, but had some critics saying he was very much like Terrance Malick. (I read that in a review about this movie). I can sort of see that, in that way he is quite content to slow the movie down and pay attention to puddles and rain and yellow paint in a pretty way. There are also a couple of scenes in which Alvin and Lance are separately visited by what might be the ghost of an old woman who may have died in the wildfire. The use of voiceover in lieu of dialogue makes them strangely effective scenes.

I can’t talk too much about the plot because if I start explaining it in detail, then I am giving away too much of what happens in the movie because you know very little happens in the movie. It is of course done well in a way that perhaps you have not seen before and will not see in a mainstream movie. The movie is also funny in that way in which humorous things happen but not enough of them for the movie to actually be considered a comedy. Then again it is never a bad thing to just hang out with Paul Rudd for 90 minutes and for those of you who have liked “Into the Wild,” here is Emile Hirsch out in nature once more. It is a relaxing movie. I liked it.