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The World’s End

The Worlds End is the final installment of the “cornetto” trilogy written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg. It’s a satisfying end to a set of fabulously hilarious movies.

I don’t make any secret of the fact that Hot Fuzz is my favorite movie ever. (Or as I like to call it: the greatest movie ever made.) I’ll admit, I didn’t like The Worlds End quite as much. But that’s kind of like complaining about the sex because you only had three orgasms instead of five and are still capable of walking afterwards.

There’s a really different tone to this move than there was to the other two. Shaun of the Dead is very much a zombie apocalypse movie, Hot Fuzz is a buddy cop film, but The Worlds End doesn’t fit so neatly into the apocalyptic move (since honestly, most movies in that slice of the genre are actually post-apocalyptic) nor quite into the alien invasion slot. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, because this movie feels much less like it’s film tropes with a side of feelings. The feelings and relationships are the red meat of The World’s End, with the blue-blooded and easily broken not-robots (robot is a word that means slave, yanno, it’s not accurate) as more of the backdrop.

And there was a lot of meat there. I very much enjoyed that it was Nick Frost’s turn to be the competent guy who has it together, with Simon Pegg as the colossal fuck up. There’s so much in the movie about how you can never go home, how you have to move forward with your life, and it makes a compelling case for an idea I’ve believed in for years: there is something seriously, seriously wrong with anyone who believes high school was the best life ever gets. Or, more accurate, there is something seriously wrong with their adult life.

Because the movie is about a set of adults going back to their old home and interacting with their past, there’s a lot of other great stuff in there that just touches my nerd heart. One of the characters interacts with someone who bullied him, and it just about broke my heart for all it was hilarious.  It’s also the reminder of the wild and crazy free-spirited guy/girl who tends to be presented as an ideal in movies (hello, manic pixie dream girl) isn’t necessarily the kind of person with whom you want to be friends. There’s also a few lovely stabs about the homogenization of local culture.

And it’s funny. It’s laugh out-loud funny. (And sometimes cringe in your seat funny when Simon Pegg’s Gary King is being particularly awful.) About the only complaints I have is that I felt like there was a teeny something missing between where we finally see Gary’s crisis and where he ends up, and that I felt like the arguing at the end (you’ll see what I mean when I get there) went on a tad too long for my tastes. But maybe it needed to for Bill Nighy’s excellent closing line as the king of the nobots.

See it. If you liked the other two movies, definitely see it. I’m hoping to go again this weekend. Hopefully with fewer problems getting there.

Because on the way to the Alamo, I had an adventure with my housemate. The kind of adventure I prefer to never have. We were trying to make it to the theater so we could also see Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz beforehand. But instead, my housemate’s car (an automatic) stopped changing gears, and then white smoke began to pour out from under the hood. So that was fun. We managed to pull off into a commercial/light industrial park that literally had nothing but fenced-in lots and had a nail-biting time trying to find somewhere to park the car before it died entirely. Then I remembered HEY I HAVE AAA, and at least we got a free tow back to the apartment. (So yes, I’ll be renewing AAA, it was worth it for that alone.)

The moral of the story, kids? If you know something is busted in your car, don’t procrastinate about fixing it.