Worlds End

[Jo]

but then they were braying at every use of the word cunt

There was a woman sat near us who gave a running commentary on the trailers, and then once the film started she repeated the last word of every punchline to her boyfriend before laughing. There was a scene when Simon Pegg’s character blew a raspberry, she blew a raspberry and then laughed. I wanted to punch her in the face.

[Phil]

I think you were wrong not to.

[takerdemon]

I saw it last week and it’s odd for me to weigh up. When I first saw SotD, I didn’t love it upon my first viewing. I got it on DVD for cheap one Christmas, decided to give it another go and astonishingly, it dawned on me that it was one of the strongest comedy movies of the 21st century.

Hot Fuzz and The World’s End both had more immediate laughs for me than SotD, although I suspect it’s largely because I “got” the humour by this point. Although, whilst those films both seemed more immediate to me, Fuzz at least feels a lot more hollow than SotD upon repeat viewings. I suspect World will end up being more in the Fuzz camp than SotD.

That being said though, I laughed a fair old bit so I can’t be too down on it. It’s certainly better than 99% of the supposed comedy that infects our cineplexs each year.

…and yes Jo, you should have punched her in the face or at least given her a flying dropkick to the neck.

[Jo]

>I think you were wrong not to.

>…and yes Jo, you should have punched her in the face or at least given her a flying dropkick to the neck.

I know. I am full of regret. :-(

[pfm]

I think the biggest mistake they made was to hype this up years before it was even written and shot. It could never live up to those kinds of expectations. Everyone’s always going to hold this up against Shaun. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen Shaun at least 4 times, probably thanks to the number of times it’s been on ITV2…

I wish it wasn’t connected to Shaun and Fuzz, though it might not have even been greenlit if that was the case. It doesn’t help that I just wanted to slap Pegg’s character through the whole thing (funnily enough that’s how I’ve felt about everything he’s done since Run Fatboy Run…). At least Nick Frost hasn’t gone up his own arse in that way, and he did a good job in World’s End. Maybe it’s midlife crisis time for Pegg??

[Ben Paddon]

> I don’t know anyone who hasn’t seen Shaun at least 4 times, probably thanks to the number of times it’s been on ITV2…

“Can I get… any of you COCKS!… a drink?”

[Seb Patrick]

I might be alone in this but I slightly preferred TWE to Shaun.

But I also think Hot Fuzz is ahead of both of them by a huge margin.

[genericnerdyusername]

I completely agree with Seb on this matter, which makes him right.

[si]

I also (kind of) agree.
I definitely think Fuzz is my favourite, but really can’t choose between World’s End and Shaun. I slightly favour Shaun, but think that’s down to familiarity.

[takerdemon]

Performingmonkey – what did you think of Run Fatboy Run? I remember thinking it was underappreciated at the time; at least a few of the gags were but I’m interested in your take on it. I remember admiring A Fantastic Fear of Everything’ for being different and mildly amusing but I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying I liked it.

I really need to see Hot Fuzz again, it deserves another appraisal.

[Phil]

Looks like I have to wait until late August to see it here. :(

[Pete Part Three]

Saw it earlier and found it to be the definition of an OK movie which, considering its pedigree, is a bit of a downer. I had no problems with Pegg’s character in the early parts of the film as I assumed he’d actually grow into someone we could root for…but no, he was still selfishly dragging people into mortal danger by the finale. SOTD had a lot of humanity in it and when people died, it hurt. But the thinly drawn characters in this just felt a bit…I dunno…”blank”?

I agree with Alex that it takes far too long to get going. I enjoyed the early stuff (*much* more than the later stuff) but there’s only the subtlest of hints that there’s something weird going on in this town (compared to SotD where there’s a fantastically judged level of menace early on). If I didn’t know what I’d gone to see, I’d have been perplexed by a fairly radical genre shift so late in the first half.

The final third is when it really lost me though. The laughs had truly dried up by that point and, the fact that the characters were so pissed (and, as a consequence, rather blasé to the whole thing) meant it was hard to feel any attachment to it.

Shaun>>>Hot Fuzz>>TWE

Oh, and I actually quite like Run Fatboy Run. It does what it needs to do rather well. And India de Beaufort is in it. So.

[Phil]

Saw it today.

I thought the first third of the film or so was legitimately great…but once it got all action-y it also seemed to get a bit mindless. Unlike Shaun and Hot Fuzz I didn’t think the physical chaos blended well with the character work and insight…it was one or the other.

It was also really bizarre to me that the characters in the previous films are in these awful situations because…well, they are. They’re stuck, and they’re going to get through it or die trying. In this case though they had every opportunity to walk away, and it’s odd that as a group they didn’t. I buy it for Pegg’s character. I don’t buy it for the others.

I don’t know. It wasn’t bad, but at some point late in the film I started thinking, man, I really wish there wasn’t a genre shift in this one, because I’d really enjoy this if it actually WERE about a group of friends rediscovering and divorcing their pasts. The bodysnatcher stuff just wasn’t as interesting to me, and as I mentioned — and as is clearly just my opinion — it didn’t complement the more human stuff. It was just some of one thing, then we’ll put that aside so we can do some of something else, and then we’ll put that aside to get back to the first.

I’d absolutely rank Shaun the highest, with Hot Fuzz giving it a pretty fair run for its money. I’ll see The World’s End a bunch more times, I’m positive, and it’ll grow on me. But I’d be shocked if it came very close to the other two.

The ending was also pretty lousy, but by that point I wasn’t expecting much else.

[Stephen R. Fletcher]

So, after getting the DVD for Christmas (then later treating myself to “The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy” Blu-ray box set) and watching it another 5 or 6 times over the Christmas holiday, I have to say my view on the film has completely changed. Not only do I love it now but I love it just as much as the other two films and would even call it one of my favourite films of the year.

Maybe it was catching some of the foreshadowing and other things I missed initially in re-watches (then finding even more with the Trivia Track) and it dawning on me just what a bloody tight script this is – which is odd for me to sort of rediscover with a Pegg & Wright script, since the scripts for ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’ are really no different.

I think it was also the excitement of going through the extras. They usually do great DVD extras for their films and this one is no different, like the brilliant flip chart and the documentaries. I was also looking forward to listening to a new commentary track by Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright, and another one by Edgar. Any interview or commentaries these guys do for their work (or even just Edgar on his own) make it an even more enjoyable experience and I could listen to them over and over again.

I’m guess maybe it was a case of the film growing on me and another watch for it to click. I sort of feel embarrassed to admit this now but I didn’t take well to ‘Spaced’ on first watch. I think it took me a while just to get through the first 3 episodes. Then, a few months later when I got to episode 4, I fell in love and “got it”. Now, those episodes I didn’t like on first watch, I love just as much as I love every other episode of the show.

[Phil]

Glad to hear that. I’ll definitely be picking it up on DVD…I’m just not in a rush to do so. (Though I did see a vanilla box with all three films for $20 or so, and I thought that would have been an excellent buy for people not as features-mad as some of us.)

[si]

My brother received the Trilogy as a christmas present, so I’m going to have to borrow that, as, over time, I’ve managed to convince myself that I didn’t like it, and I know I did. I just found it disappointing. Hopefully I’ll love it, too, when I see it again.

[Phil]

http://www.avclub.com/article/editing-is-key-to-the-drama-and-comedy-of-the-worl-200786

Short but good read.

[si]

I know you’ll be thrilled to know that I’ve got the Trilogy for my birthday, so I may actually get round to rewatching the movie sometime this week. Maybe I’ll report back when I do.

[Pete Part Three]

Watched it again the other week. The beginning is still great, the ending is still shite, the middle is still middling.

[Phil]

http://www.avclub.com/article/denver-come-drink-and-watch-simon-peggs-new-movie-107113

Well this sure booked up in about sixty seconds. Shame, it would have been fun to go.

[peepingsignal]

I only just got around to watching this tonight. I was going to watch it in the cinema last year, but I never got around to it. (I didn’t get around to watching a lot of things in the cinema last year, the only thing I watched in it was the Doctor Who Anniversary, and I’d already seen that on TV earlier in the day.)

I liked it, I laughed, I appreciated the background music. (There really isn’t enough James and Pulp in Movies and TV.) I was enjoying it up until the massive curveball of an epilogue. That grim post-apocalyptic ending really feels like a hit to the senses and it comes out of nowhere. Despite the name of the film being “The World’s End”, I wasn’t actually expecting an apocalypse.

I know that all the main characters appear to be happy in the end, but how happy can you be in a world where the sky is literally blanketed with smoke and toxins and there is debris everywhere. The world had become a like something out of a cross between Mad Max and any disaster movie from the last 20 years. I know that people have other people to spend their non-societal lives with, but a life locked inside an abandoned dirty building is still a life locked inside an abandoned dirty building, even if you have your mates with you. (Hell is being locked in a room with your friends. Shame about the lack of a penguin puppet though…) Believe it or not, I wouldn’t mind the apocalypse part if only they had retained some of the lovely landscape. It would help in an apocalypse if you were able to look to the sky occasionally and feel for that one moment that the world hadn’t ended and that life was still the way it was. But you can’t do that if the atmosphere is filled with fucking smog. Okay I need to calm down about the smoke, I’m reading too much into that bit.

It’s not just the look though, most of humanity seem to have turned into angry bikers (without bikes, though I’m sure bicycles still exist. Angry Bicyclists). Even if some of the characters are running farms in piece or living in a nice shack, most of humanity appear to have turned into a bunch of rabid angered skinheads. I know the film highlights the point that humans are uncultured, but at this point I’m wondering if falling in line with the rest of the galaxy should have been the way to go. But that’s obviously not the right answer, because then we lose the freedom of choice and elements of free will. But then again Earth is fucked at the end and society is dead in the water. But then again…

Shit, I don’t think any of what I’ve said has made sense. This moral dilemma is doing my head in. Besides the last 10 minutes of the film it really is a good film. Without that part it would have sat alongside the other two in the Cornetrillogy. (You can keep that.) Maybe it still does. It’s just that ending is a curveball and has possibly ruined it for me. I really hope not. Like the rest of you, I’ll give it a rewatch at some point and I hope my opinion will have changed.

Funny film though. 9/10, would recommend.

[si]

I think the post apocalyptic ending is what spoilt it for me. That and the fact that I prefer Gary as the twat he is through the film rather than that epilogue.

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