The World's End

Mediocre summer movies getting you down?  Here is some advice.  (It's a joke about how he's British.)  From a graphic design standpoint, I hate the fact that Simon Pegg's name isn't in caps, but the online Keep Calm generator wouldn't allow me to adjust the font size, and when it was in caps it spilled off the edges of the poster.  Yes, of course there is an online Keep Calm generator.

Oh, finally 2013 gives us a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful movie!  I had almost forgotten what it was like.  This has been such a lean year for movies.  So lean that as I write this, Despicable Me 2 is still playing at the eight-screen movie theater in the tiny town in West Virginia where I live.  I mean, I like wisecracking anthropomorphic Twinkies as well as the next guy, but the title of that movie ends in a numeral and it opened in July and it is now October.  There just wasn't anything worth a shit to replace it with.  All right, so Pacific Rim was good because of Guillermo del Toro and also you can't go wrong with Ron Perlman in armored golden shoes.  And Blue Jasmine was a lovely piece of filmmaking, a sensitively rendered portrait of one woman's psychological unraveling, a Streetcar Named Desire for the 21st century,* but it wasn't a bouncing-up-and-down-in-your-seat-with-delight kind of a movie.

The World's End was.

I'll keep this review short in order to tiptoe around some spoilers.  If you haven't seen a lot of previews, don't watch them.  If you haven't read a lot of other reviews, don't read them.  (What are you doing reading other movie reviews anyway?)  There is a plot twist that I knew about from previews and John didn't, and although it still filled me with delight, John was flabbergasted and ecstatic.

As you may know, The World's End is about a pub crawl.  Five friends return to their hometown after twenty years to properly complete a circuit of twelve pubs that they started but never finished when they were eighteen, because in the UK you can legally drink in public when you're eighteen.  Seriously.  Apparently you don't need a fake ID or anything.  Four of the five have done reasonably well for themselves and they wear suits and have jobs and so forth, but Simon Pegg still dresses like an angry skinny punk, he drives the same old car and he carries himself like a rebellious teenager, but he's getting older and more grizzled and he hasn't moved on and it's sad and awkward.  Plus he always tries to jump over hedges and fences and things, but he falls down.  This happens over and over again and every single time it's hilarious.

Unlike Simon Pegg, the old familiar hometown pubs are not the same, but have become douchey and corporate and interchangeable.  All the menu boards are printed with trite, Orwellian ad-slogans in one of those antiseptic, phony-cheery fonts that look like handwriting but aren't.  The beer is all the same.  The decor is all in the same narrow, bland, autocad copy-and-paste vocabulary that neither offends nor excites.  Instead of being owned by locals, these businesses have been taken over by outsiders and refashioned into flavorless, abstract simulations of the idea of a local business.  They have been Applebeezified.

Anyway, they start the pub crawl and after that lots of things happen and then lots of other things happen, and all of them are great and I'm dying to tell you about them but I really think you should just go to the movie theater and pay seven dollars or whatever it costs in your town and hose down a paper bag of popcorn with that fake liquid butter substance and see The World's End for yourself in all its glorious, uplifting weirdness.  You will know the pleasure of watching a bunch of doughy Englishmen engage in some insane kung fu action.  Insane kung fu action is awesome when it's with a bunch of doughy Englishmen.  I don't know why, but it is.  Also, there's a delightful performance by the bottom half of Martin Freeman's head.


*When I first wrote that sentence, it read in part, "an A Streetcar Named Desire for the 21st century."  Arguably, this is correct, but it looked stupid so I changed it.