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.

Despicable Me 2

Despicable Me was a bit of a sleeper hit, and while there was a lot to like about the film, in particular it was the minions took off like nobody's business (just look at the publicity campaign for the sequel, which featured only the minions in all but a single full length trailer, including a series of viral videos and a cinema spot borrowing the music from Friday the 13th.

So, anyway; Despicable Me 2. Technically it's out on Thursday, but there was a massive pre-release this weekend - far too widespread to count as 'previews' - and Hannah and I took the Biscuit to see it this afternoon.

Starting with the spoiler-free version: I liked it. I'm a bit of a Johnny come lately to the franchise, having caught the original on Lovefilm a few months back, so I hit this with that rather fresh in my mind, and it worked both as a film and as a sequel. It runs on slapstick a lot, and some of it is hit and miss, but at this rate of fire you can get away with a fairly low percentage.

The performances are spot on. Gru remains a charming curmudgeon, and the three girls are both adorable and somewhat convincing, albeit in the same slightly OTT fashion as the grown ups. New characters have the same quirky appeal, especially Lucy Wilde, a rookie agent paired up with Gru.

And now the more spoilery version. If you're playing along at home, look away now.

Seriously, stop reading.

You have been warned.

Okay; all gone?

Just the ones who've seen it?

Okay: So, the film follows on very nicely from the first, with Gru still a doting dad, aiming to make a living by selling jellies and jams produced by mad science. Instead of doing the reset (take the girls away, force him to be a villain again through blackmail, yadda yadda) he is instead offered a chance to be a hero - or at least and anti-villain - and, incidentally, a shot at love after a life fearing romance. This could be terrible, but it isn't. There's a real spark between Gru and Lucy, with the characters sharing a mix of serious competence and childlike glee in their work.

Similarly, the plot and the villain gadgets manage to be both nefarious and at the same time slightly whimsical, without sacrificing punch in either department.

All in all, a big success, and the minions are as awesome as ever.

Pete's Dragon

So, I suspect that I'll be watching a lot of old Disney films with Arya-Rose over the years. Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, The Three Lives of Thomasina, Darby O'Gill and the Little People; you know, the terrifying ones.

Pete's Dragon is the tale of a yougn boy and his friendship with a magical dragon named Elliot, whose ability to become invisible makes most people assume he's imaginary. Pete and Elliot stumble into a quaint little town, where Pete is taken in by the lighthouse keeper and his daughter, while being pursued by the violent redneck family who in some means purchased him and wish to assert their ownership. Meanwhile, Dr Terminus is in town, a quack doctor looking to go 'legit' by selling remedies made from slicing up Elliot.

Both the child slavery angle and the violent dismemberment of a sentient being are, of course, discussed through the medium of jaunty, upbeat singing.

At the end, Pete has a family, and so Elliot goes off to help the next child in need, as magical friends in disney movies of the era were wont to do.

It's not terrifying like any of those others I mentioned, but it is weirdly dark given the tone of the songs, or possibly vice versa. In particular, We Got a Bill of Sale right here - and the fact that no one seems to question this on legal grounds, worries me. Hannah suggested that the bill was in fact adoption papers, but they certainly never refer to them as such.

70s Disney; it's its own brand of messed up.

Man of Steel

From the minimalist to the maximalist; the second cinema trip of the weekend was to see the Zack Snyder-helmed, Christopher Nolan-penned Superman reboot, Man of Steel.

Harking back to the Christopher Reeve days, we open with Superman's origins on the advanced, but nonetheless doomed planet Krypton, where scientific genius and all-around badass Jor-el struggles to save something of his planet in spite of the more violent and eugenic efforts of military commander General Zod.

We flash forward thirty years and more, then flash back through the interim to see how Kal-el, raised as Clark Kent, was taught to control and conceal his abilities, due to his Earth-father's fears that he would be rejected. Then, in short order, he finds a piece of his Kryptonian heritage, Lois Lane of the Daily Planet finds him and General Zod finds Earth.

And yes, that is the right order. In fact, in this film, Lois Lane identifies Kent as a mysterious hero who has cropped up around the world before he really dons the cape and becomes Superman (a name not used until the final third).

In many ways, it's a shame it's wrapped up so quickly, as this is in many ways the most interesting part of the film, with the final act being mostly a series of superpowered slugfests between our embryo Superman and Zod and his goon squads; impressive, but not as interesting. The scenes of Clark wandering the world, not yet aware of his true heritage, and struggling to reconcile the need to help others with the need to hide his powers.

Overall, however, it was a film that I enjoyed, albeit that some of the action scenes were a little hard to follow - Supes' new look is dark enough to sometimes be hard to pick out from the villains if you're a bit colourblind - and very, very loud. I also appreciated seeing the occasional 'Lexcorp' logo crop up.

Much Ado About Nothing (Joss Whedon)

Sometimes, I really hate Joss Whedon. Given a tidy sum to direct the Avengers and a contractual week off between shooting and editing, what does he do with his life? He retreats to his utterly gorgeous house with his 'rep company' of actors and makes a low-budget version of Much Ado About Nothing. You know; for funsies.

This being the case, you could almost want him to fail, but you know what? He doesn't. Instead he produces an interesting take on one of the world's favourite Shakespeare plays, albeit one that is not without its problems. It's basically a light rom-com that goes pitch black in the middle and then at the end everyone acts as if it didn't. It also has a strangely undefined villain, whose self-professed motivation is basically that no-one likes him so he doesn't like them and he's going to fuck with them.

In general the playing was good, and if not every note was perfect, it's doing pretty well for a week's work. It's nice to see Clark Gregg working his range a little - especially when Leonato wishes Hero dead, which is a tough act to play and a harder one to come back from - and no-one felt overly stagey. Alexis Denisof was never quite light enough as Bendick, but I'm comparing him to the Branagh film version and David Tennant on stage, so I am holding to a high standard. Nathan Fillion could easily have overcooked Dogberry, but played it nicely close.

Did I mention I got to see Tennant play this on stage? I did. I still want Whedon's house.

As with any even vaguely successful Shakespeare adaptation, there are a lot of interesting choices. To pick up on a few that I noticed: Wordless flashbacks to cement the nature of Beatrice and Benedick's past, somewhat reminiscent of Branagh's similar device with Hamlet and Ophelia; Beatrice and Benedick's opening volleys, taking a cue from Beatrice's line 'I wonder that you be still talking, Signor, nobody marks you' is actually offset from the action, rather than being watched by the other characters as if it were a spectator event; Claudio's 'I'll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope' being maintained as an 'in universe' faux pas.

In terms of adaptation, the use of a modern setting with political motivations and an ever-present photographer capturing every public moment allows the story to maintain the importance of public honour and in particular public shame, although the middle eight, as it were, is still kind of jarring. Dogberry and the watch worked well as cops, and the replacement of a sword with a pistol when Benedick calls Claudio out adds a chilling fatality to the challenge. It is much harder to doubt that he means business when he's strapping on a gat for the purpose, rather than just carrying a sword as a matter of dress.