|
 As
the late, great director, John Hughes proved, the combination of a
coming-of-age movie with an incredible soundtrack is a powerful thing.
Marvellous filmmaker though he was, I wonder if even his brilliant
imagination could have fathomed mixing those potent ingredients with
aliens, kung fu and his protagonists maturing from the wrong side of
forty. I also reckon he might not have considered substituting a
liver-endangering English pub crawl for the big prom. It is the quirky
fusion of all these offbeat elements with a genuine freshness and
likeability that is oddly reminiscent of a Hughes movie that makes The
World’s End such a victory.
Nobody
gives you a chance or a dollar in this old town… In a small, sleepy
English burg, a group of restless youths yearns to test the boundaries
of their ensuing manhood before larger forces sweep them from this
bucolic life. The close-knit collection of oddballs, nerds and basic
misfits opt to go on a legendary quest to conquer the twelve pubs that
serve as the area’s only source of entertainment (- In a town so
small, there’s nothing left to do). Quaffing down a pint at each of
the dozen stops, the team loses members along the way, but shepherds
ever onwards before falling just short of their goal. The failure will
haunt the group’s leader well into adulthood, where we find him decades
later with the same adolescent mindset and attention span and the same
determination to finish that mythical pub crawl. Indeed, life seems to
have stopped in 1990 for Gary King, so it’s with momentary consternation
that he discovers his former running buddies aren’t quite as welcoming
of their hellraising old pal as he assumed, nor as enthusiastic about
the thought of returning to their hometown on a teenager’s errand.
Obfuscation, exaggeration, prevarication; none of these are excluded
from Gary’s retinue as he blatantly lies to meets his ends and soon
enough even the most hostile and resistant former mate is putty in his
hands. Off the pals go, packed into their old bucket of bolts,
listening to the same mixtape cassette playing Britpop’s finest tunes,
lulled into believing that this could be a pleasurable outing. Soon
enough Gary’s erratic behaviour and outright untruths come to light and
threaten to end the reunion, but not before they notice some new things
about their old town. Why do all the pubs now look alike (“Starbucking,
man, it’s happening everywhere.”)? How come people they’ve
grown up with, and in some cases been attacked by, seem neither to have
aged nor remember them? Why is everyone so relentlessly pleasant? The
answer naturally comes to them in the men’s room of pub number four.
While no one was looking or bothered noticing, the entire town and all
its citizens were replaced by aliens from outer space. The ETs seem
only to want to promulgate their ethos of niceness, adding to their
numbers via body snatching. They are a collective of one mind and one
strong hand against anyone disturbing the peace or threatening exposure.
The conflict for the guys is how to get out of town without giving away
their awareness of the galactic visitors, or in Gary‘s case, whether
they even want to leave. As part of their lure to the dark side, the
aliens make it possible for the friends to live out some of their
pubescent fantasies thanks to their duplication of the sexiest girls in
school who conveniently now have a thing for middle aged men. All the
drama of interstellar domination means naught to Gary, who is
determined to finish the crawl come hell or high water, alien invasion,
laser-beam eyes, Xeroxing of his friends, or not. It’s Gary’s
single-minded determination to have one last lager at the mythical
World’s End pub which may decide the fate of the planet.
Edgar
Wright understood a long time ago that the key to a good review from Miz
Diva was plying her with an audacious concept, rollicking action
sequences, comedy that makes the viewer one with the floor and a bitchin’
soundtrack. My introduction to the Crazy World of Edgar Wright began as
many others did with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, a novel, engaging spin on
the zombie flick, wherein a commitment-shy electronics salesman finds
himself suddenly a hero, fighting for the lives of his loved ones
against a growing army of undead. The chemical combination of Wright
and his two stars, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, abetted by some of the
UK’s funniest TV folk was unforgettable, and yes, the music was as
significant a part of the film as any of the players. Witness his
application of Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” during the big zombie fight -
in a pub, mind - and the guys’ first unwitting walking dead exposure to
the tune of Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines.” The World’s End has many
of those same components (Which also appear in 2007’s
cop-action-buddy movie,
Hot Fuzz); the ordinary man’s
struggle in a small town against a much bigger, unseen evil, which
brings about scenes of clever violence (In Shaun, items found around
a pub, like a cricket bat deterred the bad guys. In
Hot Fuzz,
it was Bruckheimer-level firepower, and in The World’s End, it is
time-tested, hand-to-hand barroom brawling against alien MMA.).
There is once more a fabulous soundtrack: Here it is based around the
friends’ favourite era of music; late 80s-early 90s Britpop, featuring
Pulp, The Stone Roses, Blur, Primal Scream, and, of course, The
Housemartins’ “Happy Hour.” Wright’s perfect placement of Suede's
glistening, haunting “So Young,” elevates the guys’ simple stroll across
the village green to Armageddon-like epicness. It is hard to wait until
the end before hearing “This Corrosion” by Sisters of Mercy, and you
know it’s coming because of the threadbare SoM t-shirt that is seen on
both younger and older Gary. Reigniting their previous chemistry are
Pegg and Frost, reunited with Martin Freeman (Shaun of the Dead,
Hot Fuzz)
and Paddy Considine (Hot
Fuzz), while Wright ensemble newcomer Eddie Marsan as the
meekest member of the group fits in as if he’d been there all along.
Through the epic pub crawl, unresolved issues will come to light,
resentments will be aired and battled over, long-buried crushes
unearthed and possibly some growing up might be done, though purely
coincidentally. The film veers a bit into the awkward when trying to
broach the (unspecified) accident that Frost’s Andy still suffers
from, the cause of which falls squarely into Gary’s wobbly lap. Gary’s
drug addiction and bipolarism almost makes one feel uncomfortable and
guilty for laughing at his antics, but I suppose that’s where the
character development was meant to go. Whatever. All else is handled
so breezily and once the race to The World’s End picks up speed, you’ve
already identified with and liked the guys, even the obnoxious,
nihilistic Gary King so much that structure issues stay small.
During
my conversation with Director Wright, he told me clearly that although
we’ve reached the end of what he calls “The Cornetto Trilogy” (Diva:
“We don’t have those, you know, Cornettos.” Edgar Wright: It’s
basically like a King Cone”), it in no way meant that he
through working with his muses Pegg and Frost. While The World’s End
doesn’t quite spark with the same audacious freshness as Shaun of the
Dead, it is a definite improvement over the fizz-free
Hot Fuzz
and certainly more than enough to keep viewers impatient for the next
Wright-Pegg-Frost collaboration.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
August
23rd, 2013
Easter Egg:
Small chat with Edgar Wright.
 The
Lady Miz Diva: The World’s End was filmed after you’ve gone off and
done your own film (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) without Simon
Pegg and Nick Frost, and they’d made a film (Paul) without you.
What was it like to have spent that creative time apart and come back
together for this film?
Edgar Wright: Oh, it was great. Me and Simon actually had the idea
for this movie when we were promoting Hot Fuzz and we had the story and
pretty much everything, including the end scene and the title and the
idea and sort of based it on a number of things. One of them was the
fact that Hot Fuzz was shot in my hometown, so I had the experience of
being back in my hometown very vividly and so it was very much sort of
preying on my mind and that’s where it starts to factor into this; the
idea of the homecoming. Then we decided that we would go our separate
ways and do separate projects. And in a way, I think we wouldn’t have
written the same script six years ago, cos almost like the nice thing
is, not to get older, but to actually deal with that in the movie.
Shaun of the Dead, which we shot ten years ago, is a film about a
twenty-nine-year-old about to turn thirty, and now in this film, they’re
forty. When I watch the American manchild comedies, sometimes I think
it’s kind of forced because there’s that thing of being a big kid
forever, which I think is glorified, but never really scratches below
the surface, but in reality a lot of those actors are married and have
kids. So I think it’s a good thing to do these movies and actually
acknowledge that the characters are older. I think in that way, it was
great me and Simon going away. It’s not like we didn’t see each other
for six years, cos we’re best friends, but it was the first time we’d
written together in five years. It was great.
LMD:
Was it different?
EW:
No, if anything, I think it was easier in a way. I think out of the
three, Hot Fuzz was the most difficult one to write because I think we
realised that Agatha Christie is a genius. {Laughs} We would
have constant headaches about trying to figure out the murder-mystery
plot. With this, the nice thing about it was that we had the story and
we had the plot and then there was just a huge outpouring of personal
experience; everything from our upbringing. I think the first thing
that we did when we started talking about it was just start talking
about personal experience and all of that stuff giving strength to the
movie. Shaun of the Dead, too, but this one is definitely the most
personal of them because so many scenes in it are just straight from our
experience. Everything from the sister is based on a real person, the
teacher is based on a real person, the bully is based on a real person.
The bully is the experience of my going back to my hometown a number of
times after I’d left to live in London and then vividly one of the
things that sparked the whole thing was going back to my hometown, going
to a pub and seeing a school bully who didn’t recognise me, and I wasn’t
sure if he didn’t know who I was anymore, or didn’t care. But the fact
that he didn’t like acknowledge me at all made me so mad. I didn’t want
him to acknowledge me, and I certainly didn’t want to get into anything,
but I was so mad, thinking, ‘Does he not recognise me? This guy….’ So
things like that just stuck. That’s something that happened fifteen
years ago that sort of stuck with me. So that’s what’s great about
doing these films is that things you didn’t think about for a long time
then just come flooding in and it becomes a whole part of the movie.
LMD:
I must congratulate you on your excellent use of Suede’s “So Young.”
EW:
Yaaaah! It’s one of my favourites. That’s my favourite Suede song.
And I think the thing is that this film is like about nostalgia
sometimes being a bad thing, and a positive form of nostalgia is music,
in terms of, like, I can listen to “So Young” by Suede and be
transported straight back to 1993, and be in a car with my friend,
listening to an audio cassette and the two of us singing along and
belting it out, and it immediately makes me kind of misty-eyed, that
song. All of the songs on the soundtrack are all from a certain period,
late eighties, early nineties, when I was at school and Simon was at
college and it’s sort of all of those gateway songs into more
alternative music.
LMD:
When you’re on set or going over the editing, do you have that music
playing?
EW:
In that particular - funny you should mention particularly that song –
in a couple of scenes in the movie, the actors are listening to the
song, and with the Suede song, they had it in their ears. So when
they’re swaggering along, it’s kind of why I think the slow motion looks
really cool is cos they’re listening to Suede. They all had these
things called earwigs in and even though it’s in slow motion, it’s not
in time with the music, and I said, “I think the scene would be better
if you just listen to Suede.” so they all are listening to it. So it
was great, every single take of that scene, just before we would
actually run, Paddy Considine would be singing along. If you see the
scenes, he’s always sort of singing that bit just before he goes into
it.
But
there’s a couple of scenes like that; like The Doors sequence, we had
that playing. I mean, it’s all choreographed to that song {“Alabama
Song”}. That was before we absolutely knew that we could afford it.
“We better get The Doors. Otherwise, we’re completely fucked.” {Laughs}
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
August
16th, 2013
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