The World's End -- Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, etc.

i watched it with Joel last week and said more or less the same thing "the SF gubbins doesn't really add anything"

sort of disappointed that the douchebag Pegg character still ends up kind of vindicated, too

I agree. he's so good at the comedy...and i think he's great at creating really good, shaded characters which adds to the comedy, all that light and shade is great. the scifi plot was good for a laugh but it was nowhere near as strong as the main story and fell into hurried handwaving at the end. not to sound snotty, but I think he undercuts his own talents a bit by trying to drape all the extra stuff over top, maybe over time that tendency will start to fall to the wayside. or he'll get better at um, draping, idk.

but he's definitely a dude where i'm always excited to see what he'll do next.

ie, Ant-Man

yep!

my main problem with Wright/Pegg's parodies is I hate a lot of the movies they love

Conversely, my love for the movies they're parodying only got in the way for me with SotD.

I think the sci-fi stuff jibes really well, I just think the difference between SotD and HF is that Gary doesn't care about it beyond giving him an excuse to continue the pub crawl, which is why the climax is really his desperate run to the final pubs and not the big talk-out with Nighy, though I thought that worked a lot better the second time around. I also wouldn't say it's as much about "vindicating" Gary then a cheerily bleak viewpoint of restructuring the world to fit him rather than the other way around, though the film is fairly ambivalent about a lot of the "progress" that the more "adult" friends have made.

(again, Peter Labuza just nails this movie on Letterboxd)

His conversation with Uhlich on the Cinephiliacs Top 10 podcast was really good, but Uhlich also saw the movie pretty close to how I did.

I related to the Gary King character in an uncomfortable way :(

(again, Peter Labuza just nails this movie on Letterboxd)

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Saturday, January 18, 2014 4:00 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Mainly, I’m feeling a bit tired from the genre-movie-as-metaphor, especially because the strain between the two in World's End is harder to piece together.

thought FCH had a good take on this (hold the Page Down button for about 20 minutes until you get to Part 8)

http://badassdigest.com/2013/10/03/film-crit-hulk-smash-alcohol-withnail-and-gary-king/

having trouble with exegesis in ALL CAPS!

I wonder if anyone wil lwrite a thesis on this as an anti-getting-sober film... Gary does it whatever the cost.

...but he doesn't "end the world," he ends the MODERN world, which is looking like a consummation devoutly to be wished.

You people who consider the new romantic masterpiece Her to be "pro-technology," can't really get by on that here, huh? Zombie electronics are entirely the work of intergalactic overlords, the better to turn us into troglodytes.

I'm so glad I haven't wandered into the Her thread by the looks of that.

xp I don't really see that this movie is pro-ending the world; if anything the movie's ending was incredibly dark to me, that he ultimately destroyed the world for his own selfish impulses. There's some levity in that some of the clones' lives are basically exactly the same as they were, but everyone else gets screwed so one guy can have a crazy night of binge drinking. "Returning to the past" is kind of underlined as sad and desperate here, isn't it? Even with an ambivalent look at the modern world

really i think i'd have preferred this movie if it had just been a coming-of-middle-age pub crawl. the zombie robot shit was almost completely unnecessary but I guess Wrights will be Wrights. The Gary character is a lot like people I know (incl. me in some ways) very relatable.

Saw this last night, and loved it, way more than the other movie. It's funny both movies are more or less 80's kids who grew up playing Ghostbusters and now have millions of dollars and film crews to shoot them pretty much playing Ghostbusters. This movie was almost like a giant game of freeze tag or something. The enemies and story and writing and special effects and just about everything in this movie was heads above the other one. I liked it much more than Hot Fuzz, and for me it's up there w Shaun of the Dead.

The giant angular robots were my favorite part. They look so awesome!

this was p garbage, and if id seen it in a theater id of prob walked out

I was rewatching this last night too, and aside from a couple of really funny moments it barely rises above amusing. I'm not really sure I need to see Pegg as the wayward man-boy again, in fact you could interpret SotD and this (I'll pass on Hot Fuzz, haven't seen it recently enough to remember) as the mature Edgar Wright looking back on Tim from Spaced and casting him in a judgemental light rather than a sympathetic or empathic one. They're not the people they were at that age and neither are we, so maybe we shouldn't pretend we are.

Whoever said Gary = Partridge ^^^ is sort of OTM but there's someone he reminds me of even more. It's not Brent, is it? The inability to take things seriously, the giggling, the in-jokes, the lack of self-consciousness, not being able to see everyone laughing at him?

I could have taken this as a drama without the invasion plot, that the other four are just playing along with Gary (maybe out of loyalty, his mum really is dead perhaps?) who has fried himself on druqs up until the point where he kills a boy in the pub toilet because he thinks he's an alien/robot. Then it becomes about extracting themselves from the situation.

He's sort of the post-snapping point of a lot of traditional British sitcom arcs - Ronnie Corbett or Richard Briers has Gone Too Far and is a piss-weak version of pure Id, oh how embarrassed they'll be when the fog clears - except that he starts from there.

I could have taken this as a drama without the invasion plot, that the other four are just playing along with Gary (maybe out of loyalty, his mum really is dead perhaps?) who has fried himself on druqs up until the point where he kills a boy in the pub toilet because he thinks he's an alien/robot. Then it becomes about extracting themselves from the situation.

― the bowels are not what they seem (aldo), Friday, January 9, 2015 6:11 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea this would've been infinitely better, and could've prob been a really good movie

Pretty good list

https://mubi.com/lists/edgar-wrights-favorite-movies

who has 1000 favorite movies? kinda makes "favorite" meaningless.

i don't, but i could easily compile a list of 1000 movies I like, which is what he did

he has good taste

I think Hot Fuzz and Shaun Of The Dead are better overall but the depressing parts of The World's End have left the strongest impression of any of the films. Maybe the sci-fi action direction wasn't the best way for it to go but I can't think of better alternatives.

I'm not a big South Park fan anymore but it reminds me of one of the best episodes with Stan getting jaded and its genuinely quite sad but it doesn't really go anywhere interesting in the second part.

just like that South Park two-parter than ends with Stan as an alcoholic and is never referenced again!

The word "Brexit" hasn't been mentioned once itt!

instagram just recommended that I look at this photo of a young Nick Frost that Simon Pegg posted last week, I'm not sure why because I don't follow Simon Pegg or Nick Frost, but it did make me realise something that had never occurred to me before in the near quarter-century since I first saw Nick Frost's face - Nick Frost looks like a bit like Howard Lew Lewis

https://i.imgur.com/KjfJu9e.png