The World's End (and Movie Musings: Three Flavours Cornetto)

And so it comes to this, the final installment in Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. This being so, and having seen the film tonight, I am in a mood to muse on the trilogy before I go to bed.

As an aside, the cinema was struck by lightning halfway through the film and had to reboot which, in the end, turned out to be kind of apt.

The trilogy began almost a decade ago, with 2004's Shaun of the Dead. Self-described as 'a romantic comedy with zombies', it was on one level a fairly crude slacker comedy, but also contained elements of broad social satire, comparing the soporific and repetitive nature of modern society with the Hollywood Zombie movie. It was also - in common with all of the trilogy - about the need to grow up, without losing touch with your past and your sense of fun. Pegg's Shaun is the middle ground between absolute slacker Ed (Frost) and uptight ex-bro Pete (Peter Serafinowicz); young enough to still be alive and motivated enough (just) to move on when necessary.

The second film was Hot Fuzz, in 2007, a buddy cop movie set in a small English village, which transforms half way through into a madcap Hollywood action flick. Like Shaun, it combined a mundane setting with its more fantastical elements. It equated normalcy and conformity with a more sinister kind of control, this time in the form of the village-wide murderous conspiracy, rather than the more impersonal zombie plague.

Hot Fuzz also celebrated friendship and a kind of overgrown boyishness, although this time Pegg's character was the straight-laced Nick Angel, a tightly controlled police sergeant who needs to loosen up, while Frost plays the childlike, innocent Danny, who needs to grow up. The themes are similar, but the balance and execution are very different. As an aside it was also the only one of the three films that had no love interest in (although it did toy with some macho homoeroticism, it really only toyed).

And that brings us to the darkest installment of the trilogy - the mint choc-chip - 2013's The World's End, and the part of this review which has a few spoilers in it.

Pegg plays Gary King, an unreconstructed man-child whose life never lived up to the promise of his youth, and who is determined to recapture his glory by reuniting his childhood friends in an attempt to finally complete the Golden Mile, a twelve-stop pub crawl around their home village, the first attempt at which (ending on nine) was the high point of his life. Once more, Frost's Andy is the sidekick, but this time he gets to play the straight man; Andy is the one sobered by age and regrets, married with two children and impatient of Gary's excesses and refusal to face his shortcomings.

This time also they are joined by others who have a more even share of the limelight than has previously been the case: Ollie (Martin Freeman), Pete (Eddie Marsan) and especially Steven (Paddy Considine) round out the Five Musketeers (better than three, because you can lose two and still have three), while Sam (Rosamund Pike) is Ollie's sister and the great regret of at least one of the others.

And you know what? That would have been a great film.

Pegg, traditionally playing the sympathetic character, is a revelation as Gary, a narcissistic jerk (and yet still manages to pull it back at the end), and the balance of the other characters is just right to have been a superior finally-coming-of-age rom com. But then it goes all Hollywood again, as the six friends accidentally uncover an alien invasion of an unusually benign character; in fact, an invasion right in line with the intentions of the Neighbourhood Watch in Hot Fuzz, who have made use of technology to affect a similar soporific effect as seen in Shaun of the Dead.

In fact, given that it shares no characters or settings with the other films, it wraps up the trilogy to impressive effect, with a fair few callbacks and the usual array of quirky little echoes throughout. Pike's Sam is also perhaps the trilogy's strongest female character, although admittedly that's not saying a great deal. It is a fair criticism to say that all three films are pretty laddish, and although somewhat self-consciously so, it is pervasive enough to be a barrier to enjoyment for some (although not enough to be so for me).

I enjoyed the film a great deal; although I am clearly in the target audience (nerds of a certain age). It's a likeable film, if a little rough around the edges (and not one for anyone who doesn't like the swears).

Monsters University and Macbeth

Today was a movie double bill - or in Mummy's case, triple bill, adding Pacific Rim onto the front - for the whole family.

First up was Monsters University, the prequel to Pixar's hugely successful buddy comedy about monsters. The beats of the college buddy movie are pretty well established - the odd couple, the big competition, the rivals, the lessons learned - so the film has to work for some freshness, a lot of which comes from the casting of monstrous protagonists in essentially mundane roles.

We get a twist in our story early on, as we first meet Mike, a small monster whose dream is to be a great scarer, and are then introduced to Sullivan through his eyes. From the original movie, we know Sully as a big, sweet guy with a heart as big as outdoors, but we meet him here as a lazy jock, coasting on natural ability and a family name. In addition, Randy - the dragon of the first film - comes in as a nervous geek and initial friend of Mike, setting up immediate tensions.

What follows is a struggle for our protagonists not only to establish themselves as scarers through the legendary 'Scare Games' and therefore prove themselves to the fierce Dean Hardscrabble (Helen Mirren bringing the awesome), but to forge the enduring friendship that will form the foundation of Monsters Inc. The beats are, as noted, pretty well tried and true, but as with Pacific Rim they feel fresh. In particular, the end of the film holds some actual surprise, and reflects a whole new light back on the action that goes before it.

After dinner, we went on to see Macbeth, a National Theatre Live performance starring and co-directed by Kenneth Branagh. Other notables in the cast included Alex Kingston (and despite playing the protagonist's dangerous, slinky missus, there was not a trace of River Song in the performance), stalwarts John Shrapnel and Jimmy Yuill, and the up-and-coming Alexander Vlahos. Ray Fearon was a new name to me as Macduff, but was one of the standouts in an excellent cast. The performance was in a deconsecrated church and the space was amazing, with the bulk of the performance taking place in an aisle between two sets of stalls, with a more open space at the altar end and a raised platform and three hatches below it in the wall at the door end.

It was not a perfect performance, but it was certainly very good. Notable problems, for me at least:

• The witches were overdone. The basic Wyrd Sisters models are the classic crones and the more modernist muddy hot chicks, and this went with muddy hot chicks with the attendant running around and acrobatics, but delivering their lines in full-on, batshit crazy crone cackles. For my money, they would have been better with the dialogue dialed back a bit. As Hannah noted, it would have made for a more credible source, rather than a trio who, if you met them on a blasted heath, your first instinct would be to avoid eye contact with them.
• Both Kingston and Branagh hammed it up something raucous for their final descents into madness, and again I think this would have been better played down.
• Camera angles and close-ups are not the friend of stage fight choreography. I suspect being in the front row would have been terrifying.

But that being said, the things I liked:

• The witches appeared throughout the play as spectres of doom and their own prophecy, which was done very well.
• In the earlier part of the play, Kingston and Branagh played the Macbeths as a couple very well, with a lot of affection on top of the obvious scheming, and overall their performances were both top-notch. If anything, they seemed weaker on their own than when able to bounce their performances off each other or the other actors, with both showing the most significant weaknesses in their soliloquies.
• Macduff's meltdown on hearing of his family's demise was fantastic, and the leads could have taken a note or two from Ray Fearon.
• The design was amazing.
• In general the production was done with great skill and acted brilliantly.

Pacific Rim

On the one hand, Pacfic Rim is a film in which giant mechs battle equally massive kaiju emerging from a rift under the ocean, and it would take a lot of hard work for anyone to screw up a mech vs kaiju film so badly that I couldn't find anything to like in it. On the other hand, I saw Transformers II, so I know that some directors can beat those sorts of odds. On the gripping hand, Guillermo Del Toro is a much better filmmaker than Michael Bay.

As always, the spoiler free review first:

Pacific Rim is an against-all-odds, last stand battle kind of movie, in which a scarred veteran and his gifted rookie partner join the thin red line, led by a commander who has forgotten everything but the war and needs to remember to be human and an arrogant ace whose skill almost makes up for his lack of humility. In giant robots. The story and the characters are nothing especially new, which means that the movie sinks or swims on the execution of those ideas.

And the giant robots.

The good news is that in the hands of Del Toro, these old ideas are played fresh and a solid cast manage to make you believe the screamingly unfeasible bullshit by never letting you think that they don't believe it 100%. The beats are obvious, but because each one is a classic, and the band of misfits are genuinely loveable misfits, so it's easy to forgive them for being a little familiar. And the monsters and the giant robots are freaking awesome.

With spoilers:
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The film's weakest point by a long way is the opening info-dump, which is an awful lot like the trailer voice over. I felt that much of it could have been conveyed through dialogue and, in particular, through the drift, an in-universe means of exploring the memories of the characters. With that out of the way, however, the film slams into high gear and barely lets up the pace for the next two hours.

Our opening action scene introduces brothers Raleigh and Yancy Beckett, and our real star, the MkIII Jaeger Gypsy Danger. The jaegers have a real scale and weight on the screen; they look and feel massive and powerful, matching the voice over's claim that in a jaeger 'you can fight a hurricane'. When they hit, or get hit, the impact is palpable, although by recent standards the volume is not overwhelming.

The female lead is always a rocky point in action movies, but Mako Mori manages to combine an affecting humility and vulnerability with force and determination, and without needing a rescue at the end of the film. Yes, Raleigh gives her his oxygen and ejects her from the jaeger, but the damage is done to both of them and she later rescues him from his pod. I also like the fact that, despite some tension throughout the film, we close on a headbutt of love instead of a kiss.

So, yeah, I liked it.