Crammed With Killer Comedy, THE WORLD'S END Is A Funny As Hell Finale To The Cornetto Trilogy

Now playing at a theater near you:

THE WORLD'S END (Dir. Edgar Wright, 2013)

The
third installment in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy is
finally here and it's fuckin' fantastic!



For those who don't know, the
series, which includes the 2004 zombie rom com SHAWN OF THE DEAD, and
the 2007 action movie satire HOT FUZZ is called such because of a
connection to the Cornetto ice cream brand that appears in each film.



At
first glance, this new entry may look a lot like a British version of
this summer's THIS IS THE END, the raunchy apocalyptic Seth Rogen and
Evan Goldberg comedy.



But here, the cast, made
up of Pegg, Nick Frost, Paddy Constadine, Martin Freeman, and Eddie
Marsan, aren't playing themselves (that is, exaggerated caricatures of
their personas), and the backdrop isn't that of Biblical rapture; it's
an alien invasion that the blokes uncover while on a pub crawl in their
home town of Newton Haven, England.



Pegg,
as a 40something n'er-do-well alcoholic who never grew up (he still
wears the same Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and black trenchcoat he wore as a
teenager), rounds up his old gang to again attempt the “Gold Mile” crawl
of 12 pubs that they never completed two decades ago.



Pegg's former
pals have all moved on into responsible adulthood and roll their eyes at
the idea, yet they still join in, mainly because Pegg plays the
sympathy card of his mother's recent passing.



Many
pints are consumed by the group, except by the teetotaling Frost who
orders water to Pegg's chagrin (“A man of your legendary prowess
drinking fucking rain! It's like a lion eating Hummus.”), as they make
their way from pub to pub, but they find that Thomas Wolfe was right
about not being able to go home again.



Pub culture has been devoured by
chains making the establishments all look alike, the aging bartenders don't
recognize “the return of the prodigal sons” (as Pegg puts it), and, oh
yeah, it appears that many of the townfolk have been replaced with
robots.



Another
similarity to THIS IS THE END is that THE WORLD'S END (the title comes
from the name of the last pub on the crawl) is crammed with killer
comedy.



Ultra comical fight scenes, rapid fire one-liners, and sight
gags all hit their marks, while the characters' individual dilemmas -
Constadine pines for Freeman's sister Rosamund Pike, Frost reveals his
wife has left him, Marsan deals with running into a former schoolmate
who bullied him, while Pegg is only concerned with partying (no matter
what danger surrounds the fellows, Pegg's always pouring himself another
pint) - don't get short shrift in the mist of all the silly
sci-fi-tinged chaos.



The second in the trilogy, HOT FUZZ, had a juicy extended cameo by former 007 Timothy Dalton, but this tops it by having a better known Bond on hand: Pierce Brosnan as the band of blokes' former professor.



I
love how the film never let ups or drags. Director Wright and lead
protagonist Pegg, who co-wrote the screenplay as they did for SHAWN and
HOT FUZZ, provide an infectious energy, which the rest of the ensemble
is entirely up to the task of. It had everything I wanted from it: tons
of solid laughs, likable relatable characters, and satisfying story
beats all wrapped up together in a package that's as witty as it is
rowdy.



THE
WORLD'S END is a fitting, funny as Hell, end to a what will surely come
to be known as a classic comedy trilogy. A pint and a cone of Cornetto
ice cream would be ideal to consume while viewing it for sure, but the
movie is incredibly filling all by itself.

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MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL: The Film Babble Blog Review

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - GHOST PROTOCOL 

(Dir. Brad Bird, 2011)

Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you've heard about Tom Cruise's death defying stunt scaling the tallest building in the world (Dubai's Burj Khalifa) without a stuntman in the newest MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE movie. It's a pretty damn impressive feat indeed, especially as it was one of several key scenes filmed with IMAX cameras.



What's more impressive to me is that not only can Cruise can keep the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise sucessfully afloat with this, the 4th in the series - GHOST PROTOCOL, he's also conquered the screen in what I believe is the strongest action movie of the year.



And Cruise does it looking like he's only aged a couple of minutes after the last one ended back in 2006.



Now, even though I'm not really an action genre guy, I re-acquainted myself with the other M:I movies (I hadn't seen the first or second one since they were released well over a decade ago, and I always put off seeing the third), and I have to admit that they are state of the art escapism. Sure, they are souped-up vanity projects on one level, but each, helmed by a different hot-shot director - in order, Brian de Palma, John Woo, and J.J. Abrams - is slick high speed fun, and great to exercise bike to, I've found.



With Brad Bird (Pixar's THE INCREDIBLES, RATATOUIE) making his live action directorial debut, and a sharp screenplay by André Nemec and Josh Appelbaum (Alias), Cruise's Ethan Hunt chooses to accept another globe-trotting adventure with a crew made up of Simon Pegg (reprising his role as tech agent Benji from M:I:III), Paula Patton, and Jeremy Renner.



There's no way to not make the plot sound convoluted, but trust me it flows better than this description: We catch up with Cruise doing time in a Moscow prison. Cruise's IMF (Impossible Missions Force, duh) helps him escape, and they are given the mission to infiltrate the Kremlin (that's right) to extract top secret files.



After exiting the scene, a bomb goes off (one of the first notable IMAX moments) blowing up the Kremlin, and the IMF is implicated. In an all-too-brief cameo, the always reliably stodgy Tom Wilkinson shows up the Secretary of State of IMF to tell them they have to go underground to clear their name.



This involves faking a trade for nuclear codes between a French assassin who works for diamonds (Léa Seydoux) and Samuli Edelmann, the right-hand-man of the movie's villain (Michael Nyqvist), who want to annihilate the world's population in order to begin again.



This is where Cruise's skyscraper stunt comes in, eye-poppingly shot by ace cinematographer Robert Elswit (THERE WILL BE BLOOD) which is genuinely breath-taking. Although Cruise's Hunt is a cocky bastard most of the time, he does show some believable fright in this and other heart pounding scenes, and that enhances the intensity greatly throughout.



And then, when you think they can't top that, Bird and co. serve up a chase through a sandstorm which is just as thrilling.



Also, just when you start wondering, hey - what about, Michelle Monaghan, Cruise's wife from M:i:III? Pegg, among his many amusing one-liners, mentions in vague terms that she ended the relationship, but, of course, we just know that there's more to it that that.



Sure, the plot is routine, Nyqvist (who was the protagonist in the original Swedish GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO films) isn't a very memorable villain, and the last third, mostly set in a palace in Mumbai, too resembles something out of 007 in OCTOPUSSY, in its excuse to have our hero in a tuxedo in an exotic location, yet M:i:4 is still worth an overpriced IMAX ticket for, not only the awesome Burj Khalifa sequence and several choice action set-pieces, but for the sheer entertainment value of a high fallutin' formula done right.



Renner, who does his hot-head shtick here to perfection, is rumored as a candidate to take over the series from Cruise, but you wouldn't know it here - Cruise sure doesn't look like he's pushing 50 in one pummeling set-piece after another; it is as if he's been outfitted with new bionic body parts just so he can make 3-4 more of these.



More later...

PAUL: The Film Babble Blog Review

PAUL (Dir. Greg Mottola, 2011)

STARMAN meets SUPERBAD in this sci fi comedy that has Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the comic duo from SHAUN OF THE DEAD and HOT FUZZ, aiding and abetting an extraterrestrial fugitive voiced by Seth Rogen.

Pegg and Frost, who also co-wrote the screenplay, are a couple of British geeks on an American vacation that kicks off with a visit to Comic-Con in San Diego before making a road trip to alien landmarks from Area 51 in Nevada to Roswell, New Mexico.

There’s a FANBOYS vibe going on as the pair are starstruck at meeting fictional fantasy novelist Adam Shadowchild (Jeffrey Tambor), whose name is a running gag throughout the film – the joke being that only hardcore nerds know who he is.

Right after stereotypical rednecks (David Koechner and Jesse Plemons) harass Pegg and Frost at a U.F.O. themed diner, our protagonists meet Paul – the CGI crafted little green man from another planet.

“He looks too obvious!” Frost protests, but our snarky title character explains that it’s because pop culture has been inundated with his image in case an encounter occurs.

It turns out Paul, a pot-smoking heavy-drinking party animal of an alien, has escaped from his 60 year imprisonment at Area 51 and is on the run from a government agent (Jason Bateman playing it perfectly straight), so Pegg and Frost’s rented RV becomes his vehicle to an undisclosed location for a spaceship pick-up.

Kristen Wiig, in one of her better performances, jumps on board the RV as a half blind trailer park manager who gets converted from her crazy Christian mind set by the outspoken E.T. and is chased by her father (John Carroll Lynch). Also on the chase are SNL’s Bill Hader and the creepy Joe Lo Truglio as clueless FBI agents.

Every sci fi movie ever seems to be referenced in “Paul”. Lines are lifted from STAR WARS, locations from Star Trek to CLOSE ENCOUNTERS are visited, and then there’s the presence of Sigourney Weaver as “The Big Guy” – Bateman’s boss who will stop at nothing to recapture Paul.

It’s a film for sci fi nerds by sci fi nerds. It’s sloppy and choppy, but it has so many legitimate laughs in it that I didn’t care that it didn’t come close to the visually stylish Edgar Wright films that Pegg and Frost cut their teeth on.

PAUL is fast-paced foul-mouthed fun with an infectious silly tone that never lets up. Although you can see many of the gags coming, they’re still funny when they land thanks to the playful platform provided by Pegg, Frost, Rogen, and director Greg Mottola.

Though I don’t consider myself a STAR WARS fanatic, Trekkie, or sci-fi junkie to any extreme, my inner star-child was greatly amused by these alien antics.

More later...