Contains spoilers for The World's End, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Also Spaced, a little bit.
The adult world seems horribly in evidence these days, which is the thematically appropriate excuse I'm running with for not updating in a while. I'm moving, if not 'out' then at least 'away', I'm keeping records of my finances, I'm doing horrible jobs because I need the cash - and somewhere in the midst of all this is the voice of a teenage hedonist, a furious Kevin, demanding to know what I'm doing and why and when can we get back to drinking cider out of paper bags in the park?
This, it seems, was also the mood Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright were in when they penned the final instalment of the Cornetto trilogy, 'The World's End'. When I came home from the cinema, my sister asked me casually if it was good. "It was kind of...sad," was my response. I don't mean in a pitiful way. I mean it genuinely made me sad.* Originally, I wanted to write an anticipatory post about how I really needed The World's End to be a good film but then life, as always, intervened and I ended up seeing the film much earlier than I expected. So, to make sense of all this, I decided to go back to the beginning.
Shaun of the Dead (2004) is often the most fondly remembered of the trilogy. Key word: remembered. That's not to say that it isn't, to use the correct parlance, a slice of fried gold - it's fast, it's sweet, it's stylish, it embraces the mundane and the extraordinary in one casual pop-culture-fuelled breath, and it's oh so very fucking funny. Now is the time to start listing your favourite bits, and if you said the 'Don't Stop Me Now' sequence with the pool cues, SO DID EVERYONE ELSE. But the best thing Shaun of the Dead did was to be different. It had a freshness and, at that point, a relative fresh-facedness to its leads. Pegg and Frost hadn't yet appeared in any major sci-fi franchises or terrible Richard Curtis films. At a time when British cinema was best known for the likes of Guy Fucking Ritchie, it was kind of brilliant. The lack of pressure being put on these - internationally speaking - relatively unknown quantities produced a film that is petulant and young, but with an ultimately grown-up philosophy. The seam of social satire running through it (London is a city of zombies, see what they did there) isn't over-laboured, and takes its cue from the best of the *ahem* serious zombie oeuvre. What is most palpable to me, though, is the glee of two (or three) nominally adult men being allowed to play with the toy box that infects the film throughout. It's only a few steps on from those fantasy games you used to play when you were a kid: "Oh yeah, and then the Transformer could fight the T Rex with his laser canon!" "Oh yeah, and then the zombies could attack the pub and it turns out it IS a real gun!"
But, as I hinted in my opening parlay, a fair amount of the film's subsequent status as a modern classic is because we remember it like that. Don't get me wrong, the combination of brains and guts (often literally) certainly makes it worth this title but I don't think it would have been so enduringly successful had it not tapped into something very potent in the psyche of its 20-35 year old audience: that we have somehow been forced to grow up. For all that we're Shaun, with a respectable job and a nice girlfriend, so long as Nick Frost's weed-selling, video-game-playing, layabout Ed is around, we have an excuse - we won't move out or grow up, we'll just put on the trappings of adulthood. And sometimes it takes a little zombie apocalypse to get you to realise that - it's no surprise that the film's climax is not the (rather heartbreaking) death of Shaun's mum, but Ed's self-sacrifice that allows Shaun and Liz to literally ascend (on one of the pub beer lift thingies) to safety and grown-up existence (symbolised here as the, er, military riding in to take charge). That the film tries to have its cake and eat it too in Ed's reappearance as a chained up zombie in Shaun's shed playing two-player shooters on the Nintendo always struck me as a false note, and just one of a few things that suggest the Wright/Pegg collaboration was still ironing out the creases. The tonal shifts aren't quite managed smoothly enough, in particular the confrontation with Dylan Moran's David that ends in his disembowelment at the hands of the zombie hoard. Coming on the heels of Shaun having to shoot his zombified mum and just after David makes his only real attempt at sincerity in the entire film, the gore - and it is, by a long shot, the goriest moment of the entire film - always seems to leave an unpleasant taste in my mouth (eh, you know what I mean). Kate Ashfield's Liz, as well, is a slightly underwritten creature, more a cipher of what a 'grown-up girlfriend' should be like than a real person (her one quirk, answering the phone with "hi hi hi" is Ashfield's own contribution), and Hot Fuzz wisely dispenses with the love interest completely.
The first of those problems also goes a long way towards being solved in Hot Fuzz (2007). Controversially, I actually prefer Hot Fuzz to Shaun: it's slicker, it's more confident, it's more tightly written, the performances are more finely honed, and it inhabits a bizarre universe all of its own that makes it an absolute delight. Shaun of the Dead tries a little too hard to recreate the world of early noughties north London and then slot in a supernatural element; for Hot Fuzz, the relocation to the strange bubble of Sandford (a cunningly disguised Wells, Edgar Wright's own home town) allows the action to take flight. Wright's trademark cinematography (take a mundane thing and make it EPIC) has never worked better than in Hot Fuzz, where it's less a sign of ordinary folk wishing their lives were more interesting and more a case of how interesting every day life actually can be. The social satire gets its outing here as well, with the film taking a casual sideswipe at Middle England's refusal to enter the 21st century and again, I think it's best done in this film: the Neighbourhood Watch's intolerance of youths, travellers or, indeed, mimes (can't really blame them for the last one) becomes an apt metaphor for the extremity to which racial and social exclusivity can climb, without ever beating you over the head with it. Or shoving a pair of gardening shears through your chest and calling it an accident.
The writing is brilliant in Hot Fuzz, the foreshadowing and ironic recalls are sharp, every single clue pays off somehow, and the thought that goes into things like the elaborate yet wildly incorrect theory that Sergeant Angel comes up with is astonishing. The cast too, cannot be allowed to go unmentioned, not only the frankly ridiculous wealth of contemporary comedy royalty on show (Freeman, Coogan, Nighy, Eldon, Coleman, Bailey, Broadbent, Merchant, David Bradley, Threlfall, Adam Buxton, Lucy Punch - and Paddy Considine and Rafe Spall steal the film for me every time) but the embarrassment of riches that is the Neighbourhood Watch, including, yes, Timothy Dalton, but also Billie Whitelaw (muse of Samuel Beckett!), Edward Woodward (The Wicker Man!) and Kenneth Cranham (Belloq from Raiders!). It's brilliantly soundtracked as well, with a mix of heavily anarchic 60s and 70s rock and roll alongside the original score providing a fantastic counterpoint to the idea of a town where the cops are the outlaws and the bad guys are city hall. All in all, Hot Fuzz is just a really fucking good film, and a legitimately good, thrilling action film. Which brings us on to The World's End. Except not quite. Because to talk about my reactions to the finale of the Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy, I have to go back even further and talk about Spaced.
Ah, Spaced. Spaced sits solidly at the number three point on my list of favourite sitcoms of all time (I won't tell you the top two because I may do a sitcom list blog post at some point**). I didn't watch it when it originally aired from 1999-2000 because I had the excuse of being nine and I was probably watching Toy Story. Whilst in some ways a perfect time capsule of the late 90s/early 2000s (Pokemon, original Playstations, Coldplay and Muse being not mainstream, awareness of but not ownership of internet, ditto mobile phones, going clubbing dressed in a parka), the sentiment behind it holds endearingly true. It follows the story of Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson-sorry-Hynes), who would nowadays be billed as 'slackers', living in their north London flat (for £90 a week, another sign of the times - although even Simon Pegg admitted that that was a joke in itself by the time the episode was actually aired) and pretending to be a couple in order to get the flat, though this device largely fades out after the second episode. It became famous partly for its proliferation of pop culture references, many so deft I'm still noticing them today, and partly for its creation of a universe that was cartoonishly surreal. The brilliance of this was that it's such an obvious way to tell the story of these people: it isn't self-indulgent, it's simply that that's how they see the universe, so incapable of meaningful human contact that communicating via pop culture and breaking away from conversation into imagine spots and inner monologues seems perfectly natural. As a result, the moments of reflection elevate the show to a higher level of poignancy - one of the sidebar quotations on this very blog is taken from Tim's end of Series 1 outpouring about how life fails to match up to fiction. It's not like it hadn't been done before, sure, but it's the intelligence with which the thought is expressed that makes it memorable. Other such gems include Tim's advice to Brian on break-ups - so well-expressed I had to look it up to see if it was nicked from a film, and have since tried to drunkenly misremember it to many a heart-broken friend. Cf also Tim and Daisy's Tekken 2-themed argument over his ex-girlfriend, Daisy's decision to move out and Tim's rom-com-inspired robot ride to the train station to get her back (it makes sense in context).
It is, of course, incredibly funny - and unlike Shaun of the Dead generates a myriad of responses over favourite bits. Yes, ok, the finger gun fights, the paintball and the clubbing episodes are high on a lot of people's lists but it's the throwaway lines that make it: mine is the sequence when the gang is watching Star Wars and Brian explains chaos theory, to which Tim interrupts with the line about Jaffa Cakes. Yeah. You know the one. It's also tender. Half the delight of the show is in the subtle romantic tension between Tim and Daisy - it never takes centre stage, not even when Tim runs after her to catch her at the train station, but is manifested in the way the two constantly eyeball each other, needle each other about their sexual partners, and constantly wind up back together in the pub at the end of the episode. Of course, there's also massive great hints, like Tim writing a poem nominally about his ex girlfriend Sarah that ends, "As distance dulls the memory and bitter history grows hazy,/ I realise that my one true love is in fact a girl called..." Cue confused look. And while there was some talk of the romantic storyline being more obviously pursued had the show continued on to a third series, it is to the show's credit that it never became the lynchpin of the action, allowing us instead to enjoy the company of two grumpy, lazy, dysfunctional people who just clearly really enjoyed living together. And for those of you who yearned for something more overtly romantic, watch the documentary 'Skip to the End'. And skip to the end.
I suppose one of the reasons that Spaced trumps the trilogy is that I was much more invested in Tim-and-Daisy as a unit than I ever was in the at times overly blokey Pegg-Frost dynamic. Frost's role in Spaced is brilliant and intrinsic to the show, and very much still embodies the bromance of the later films (the "He's not my boyfriend, cheers babe" gag from Shaun appears first in Spaced), but it complements the main duo without ever overshadowing or competing with it. It also means that no-one ever has to play the 'straight man', a la Shaun or Nicholas Angel or, most recently, Frost's Andy, because the dynamic is simply that of three friends who go through varying phases of oddness. It is true to say that ultimately the element I miss the most is Jessica Hynes. Her writing brought a sharp-witted silliness to the show, a fondness for daft jokes and physical comedy, as well as some of the more astute observational stuff (I'm guessing about who wrote what but going on what's absent from the trilogy, it seems clear). There's a moment on the Hot Fuzz commentary track (yes, I listen to commentaries, come at me bro) where Pegg remarks on the moment when Angel knocks out Sandor Clegane in the frozen veg. Apparently at the premiere, Hynes said to him, "You should have said 'rest in peas'." Pegg says, "And that is how much we miss Jessica Stevenson." It may be my favourite moment in the commentary.**
She's also a brilliant performer - even though her career has had something of a resurgence of late (her scene-stealing turn in Twenty Twelve comes to mind), it still disappoints me that she never got as much recognition for the show as she should have done (it's often billed now as being 'from the makers of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz'). I'm re-watching the show at the moment and there's a million fantastic little details in her performance that I missed the first time round: her strange half-rap to Mark Heap's Brian about a potential video-based installation, her delivery of the phrase "the cutting edge" with a sort of squat. Simon Pegg, too, is at his best here; it's hard to come up with examples when some of the best moments are deliveries of the word 'yes', so suffice it to say that Spaced remains better observed and truer to life in terms of essential human behaviour than anything else on the resume, however surreal and cartoonish the universe might be. I think what I'm trying to say is that Spaced has heart. Not that the Trilogy doesn't, but at times it's a bit like being a third wheel. With Spaced, they're your mates. Spaced is what you want to come home to.
So. The World's End. As a film, I think it's the best made of the three. Edgar Wright's cinematographic style is put to fantastic use here, with all the clever cuts, strange angles and adrenaline jumpiness of the first two, but just... better. His time away has clearly been well spent, and having a bigger budget (presumably) can't have hurt. Having said that, it's just less funny. This seems consistent with the first two films: they've been getting smarter and more stylish, but simply less funny. I won't deny, it is a welcome treat to see Simon Pegg in the role of the fuck-up (unlike some, I have no qualms about the role-reversal) because it means he just gets to exhibit how actually skilled he is as a performer. His performance as the egocentric Gary King, arrested in time at the age of seventeen, is both heart-breaking and inventive. It's just less...funny. Sort of. It doesn't help that the story lurches all over the place a little as well - slow to start and with a supremely unsatisfying (if not downright unpleasant) ending, it lacks the blissful narrative cohesion of Shaun and Hot Fuzz. I suspect this is a result of the makers not quite knowing what they wanted from it. Shaun and Hot Fuzz are pretty self-contained, local films, even if they deal with epic subject matter - The World's End, in its sudden lurch to global, end-of-the-universe dealings, misses a trick. Bigger is not always better.
Ultimately, though, it is the ending I was disappointed in. The World's End is the last of the trilogy, and it's natural that it should feel like the end of an era. It is entirely possible Pegg, Wright and Frost will go on to make other films together, but they won't be part of the Cornetto series and, one imagines, will look further afield in terms of style and subject matter. It is right, therefore, that The World's End should be a film about homecoming, about childhood, about adulthood failing to match up to younger days - but the mistake it makes is to yield to that misery. When Tim lamented that real life just wasn't like the movies back in 1999, he made his speech, accepted it, and then danced with Daisy while they discussed porn. When Gary King reveals that adulthood is such an anathema to his boyhood that he has actually tried to commit suicide, then goes on to head up a team of robot replicas (sorry, not robots) of his teenage best friends in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, that doesn't feel much like going out on a high. It feels strange that two creatives who are so in touch with their fans and are surely aware of how their fans how grown up alongside them would leave them with the bitter aftertaste of the idea that yeah, your teenage years really were better. Growing up really does suck. Get out while you can, and avoid being an adult at all costs. It's no coincidence that the real hero of the film was Paddy Considine's Steven who, in his blinding revelation of his love for Rosamund Pike (we've all had that moment) and subsequent soul-baring emotional honesty exhibits every admirable trait that confirms that yes, growing up isn't, in fact, the end of the world. (And actually, speaking of, Pike's character Sam was both excellently written and acted, bar removing her from the men-only climax, so well done on progress made there.)
I suppose, in the end, the reasons I'm dissatisfied with The World's End are a reflection of me, not the film. I feel like its message could have been an acknowledgement that growing up is necessary, that it generates new experiences that can be as fulfilling as those had in youth, even if not as technicolouredly hedonistic. But perhaps here that would have been a saccharine Hollywood ending (and kind of the ending of Shaun anyway), and had I seen that, I might have been disappointed in Wright and Pegg, which is far far worse than being saddened. As it is, the message is simply a little confused (you don't have to grow up if you're suicidal?) and the ending might have made me want to retire to bed with the X Men cartoon on full blast, but that's fairly standard for many members of my generation: we are the arrested development man-babies ('maybes') who might be just about pulling off a semblance of adulthood (jobs, flats, relationships) but our minds are clearly elsewhere - just look at any 'nostalgic' article on Buzzfeed. Which, ironically, puts us right back at Spaced, making Shaun and The World's End pretty dire warnings about what's ahead. I think I speak for us all, though, when I say that some days I'd rather face a zombie apocalypse or a hoard of bodysnatchers than my student loans or the Central line in summer - so in that sense, Pegg, Wright and, unforgettably, Hynes have created the most bittersweet wish fulfilment fantasies of all.
*This seems to be happening a lot lately with comedies. There's nothing worse than the emotional sucker punch you get when you realise you're not laughing any more.
**Hey, it could happen.
***I am allowed to have favourite moments on commentary tracks, it does not betoken a misspent youth.
No comments:
Post a Comment