The World's End (2013)

Just in the interests of full discolusure let me make this statement right off the bat: Shaun of the Dead gets my vote as the best film of the 21st century, and my reverence for Spaced is nearly as high. I adore Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and while I'm not under any illusions that they can do no wrong, I do contend that they can do no wrong while they've got Edgar Wright watching over them.
So I came to The World's End with a great deal of excitement, but also some trepidation. I didn't want to be let down, you know? Intellectually I know it isn't going to be another Shaun, but inevitably there's a bit of my brain that's thinking, “Oh, there's a new Shaun coming out!” and that's kind of hard to ignore. I kept telling myself that if it was just as good as Hot Fuzz I would be happy.
Our set-up is pretty simple: Gary King (Simon Pegg) used to be the ringleader of the youth in the little town of Newton Haven. We open on a now-middle-aged Gary telling his therapy group about a night when he tried to do a twelve-stop pub crawl with his gang of friends: Andy (Nick Frost), his best friend; Steven (Paddy Considine), the rival to the throne; Oliver (Martin Freeman), the uptight and ambitious geek; and Peter (Eddie Marsan), the younger boy who tags along with everything the gang does. On the original night the boys only made it through nine pubs, so Gary decides to get the gang back together for another try. Unfortunately, in the course of the evening, they uncover an invasion by alien robots, or "blanks." Easy enough.
The opening montage is pretty good, but I actually like what comes right after better, the start of the story proper, where Gary is going to the guys, talking them into doing the pub crawl. It's funny, but more than that it tells us absolutely everything we need to know about Gary: that he's always got a comeback, that he can't be reasoned with, that he's impervious to anything anyone else says. “Do you know your problem, Gary? You're never wrong,” Andy complains, to which Gary replies, “How is that a problem?”
It sets up the way the other guys look at him well, also. Peter is a little reluctant, but clearly still has a bit of a hero-worship thing going on, and is somewhat under Gary's spell. Steven is determined not to be pushed around by Gary, keeps dropping little lines attempting to assert his superiority, but somehow ends up getting dragged along in Gary's wake anyway. Oliver is sort of detached, telling himself that he's coming along for ironic enjoyment, to see how screwed up things are going to get. I get the impression that this is roughly how their relationship worked as kids, as well. Andy, of course, is the exception, because his relationship with Gary is the one that has really changed, but otherwise it's a pretty econimcal set-up for the characters, past and present.
I do have to ask a question at this point, though....why on Earth does Andy believe Gary's line about his mother's death? There can't be anyone else who knows Gary that would believe that story. He's so clearly someone who will say anything to get his way. It's a bit of a weak point, but since it gets the story going I'm prepared to forgive it.
As with all of Wright's movies, there's a ton of foreshadowing at the beginning of the movie. Practically everything anybody says, practically every image we see, will come back later in the film. Actually, Wright plays with this a little bit, having a few obvious bits that don't pay off. The scene where the guys meet at the station and Oliver says that Gary will outlive them all grabbed me the very first time he said it. “Oh, everybody's gonna die and Gary will die last, or be the only survivor!” But immediately after that comes the discussion of the Musketeers, with Gary saying that there should have been five so that two could die and they'd still have three, and that's pretty obvious as well, isn't it? So I started trying to figure out which three would live. It was easy to figure that Pegg and Frost would be two, so which of the other three? Freeman was the obvious choice just from a casting standpoint, as a much bigger star than either Marsan or Considine, but since we know from the opening montage that Steven made it to the end of the original night it had to be him. Also, I submit that Frost's “Are we there yet?” in that conversation is the best use of that tired old line ever.
Anyway, it might be fun to comb through this movie and write down every tiny bit of foreshadowing and recurring dialog, but that would run to the tens of thousands of words and this isn't a good spot for it. I mostly mention it because one criticism I've heard about this movie is that there's too much repeated dialog, and that annoys me. “Repetitive” is a word I hear a lot in discussions of The World's End, but I love the running jokes in this; in fact, that's very much the point of the movie, and is always gonna be with a Wright/Pegg script. I don't understand the complaint at all, frankly.
I adore the cast in this. In fact, it might be even better than the main cast of Shaun. Rosamund Pike, who plays Oliver's sister Sam (a love interest both for Gary and Steven), is an actress I've always liked, and it's nice to see her in something I'll actually want to watch again as opposed to, say, Die Another Day. It's not the best part any actress have ever been given, of course. It might just be that I watched this and Frances Ha so close together, and am therefore very much aware of how shallow the female characters of male writers can be, comparing them to Greta Gerwig's Frances. The character is pretty ordinary, but suffers in the comparison. I wish there'd been more here for her, but she's very good with what she's got. Also I like it that she keeps saying “Oh, crumbs!” every time she's surprised. I'm a big Dangermouse fan, and that's very Penfold.
An aside: supposedly Pike was originally cast as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class, and I want to go on record here saying that she might have given that movie an extra star; she suits the role far better than January Jones. I doubt I'll ever write about that one, since I don't expect to see it again, but I bet I'd be more interested if Rosamund Pike had been in it.
Considine is good as the smart and competent guy who somehow always gets overwhelmed by the force of Gary's personality, and Freeman nearly as good as the detached, ironic, but still irritable Oliver. Marsan is better than either, and in fact I'll go so far as to say I've never seen him better. He really nails that mopey quality, and I wish that Gary had been more obviously protective of him (I do quite like the scene in the opening montage where the bully smacks Peter with his bookbag and Gary stands up for him, but nothing is really made of that).
It was nice to see Nick Frost getting a chance to play a different kind of character. I'm so used to seeing him as a big kid, but he does a really good job as a grown-up, a lawyer wrestling with real-life issues and frustrated at the behavior in his friend that typifies the characters he usually plays. Prior to Spaced Frost wasn't an actor at all, and pretty much his whole career since then has been more or less under the auspices of Pegg and Wright. I'm hoping that after this he'll be on his own. I look forward to seeing what he's got.
Pegg's Gary has been the lightning rod for this film from folks who don't like it. Personally I think he does a great job playing a very nearly unredeemable character, but of course that means that he's a bit unlikeable on a first watch. I saw a lot of myself in Gary, and I think that's why I disliked him so much the first time I saw this, but he has definitely grown on me. I still like Pegg better as Shaun, but I would go so far as to say that I like this portrayal better than Nick Angel in Hot Fuzz. I think he does exactly what the part requires.
As with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though, the real star of this movie is Wright's direction, and I continue to be amazed at his progression as a filmmaker. In my opinion he's the best director under 40 out there (though as of April 18th that won't be true anymore). He has a real flair for how comedy ought to progress, and how to knit together many tiny threads into an appealing cloth, but what's interesting is that he's become a really solid action director. The opening fight in the bathroom is very well-put-together (the bit where Gary knocks the first robot's head off in particular), but what I really like is when Andy gets up, rips his sweater open, screams “I hate this town,” and lays into the blanks with a pair of stools. Nick Frost, Action Hero, is not something I expected ever to see, but I really like it.
The ending is not all I might have wanted it to be. In the first place, it really bothers me that Gary doesn't get his last pint at The World's End. More than anything else in the film I understood Gary's desire for those twelve drinks, and it feels like a terrible let-down that he only got eleven. Also, I don't get why the blanks leaving sent us back to the dark ages, even if they did provide the know-how for all the digitized connectivity. We already had plenty of technology before they arrived, so shouldn't we at worst go back to the world of the early nineties? No smart phones, but at least cars and radio and, you know, electricity? Allowing for a world-wide EMP that destroyed every circuit on the planet, we know how to make new circuits, right? Even I understand the principle, and I am not a practical-minded man. And the closing monologue from Frost could be better, though I do like the image of Gary wandering the countryside with the robot forms of his old friends, getting in trouble. It's not a terrible ending, but it's a bit jarring coming at the end of a film that otherwise so carefully written and smoothly directed. To be honest, there's nothing I really like after we see Sam, Gary, Andy, and Steven on the hillside watching the town burn. That would have made a great ending, if a bit abrupt. If something had to come after, I wish it had been a better something.
But the ending doesn't spoil the film for me. It just prevents it from being perfect. It's behind Shaun, of course, and behind Scott Pilgrim as well, but it's very much on par with Hot Fuzz, and as with all Edgar Wright films I'm sure I'll like it more upon the many, many re-watches I'm bound to give it.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Just the relationships between the five boys and, to a lesser extent, Sam. One thing I've heard a lot in reviews of this movie is that it might have been better if it had been just the pub-crawl, without the invasion aspect. I can't agree with that, but I do get it; the movie is at its best when it's just those six people talking. Great writing, and great performances all around.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: The first time I saw this I shouted “Don't let Oliver go to the john alone!” It was obvious that, if the blanks could get any of the boys alone, they'd be assimilated. And then Oliver comes back, no longer drunk, no longer stressed out, no longer angry when the boys make inappropriate remarks about his sister, and very much on Gary's side about not leaving town. It's obvious that Oliver is a blank, but the movie plays that out waaay too long. I mentioned that the ending let me down, and to be honest that's the worst thing, but this happened right in the middle of the movie still being really good and it jars a bit, so I had to mention it.

PUNCH THE AIR MOMENT: When the robot consciousness says “It's pointless arguing with you.” I love the idea of humanity being so stubborn, belligerent, and idiotic that higher races would simply give up on us. It's a beautiful thought, the very antithesis of the sugary Star Trek speeches you'd get once or twice a year about our great potential. I find it far more emotionally satisfying. Also, I'm a big Sisters of Mercy fan and was turned on all movie by Gary's T-shirt, so when the blank version of Gary appears with the choral opening of "This Corrosion" playing...well, that wrecked me a little bit.

SCORE: 8/10. A better ending would have given it a clean nine stars, but you can't have everything. Like I said, I told myself coming in that if this movie was as good as Hot Fuzz it would be a success, and that's what I got. Considering that this year all of my other most-anticipated films have been at least slightly disappointing (outside of The Grandmaster, which I still haven't managed to see), I'm pretty well satisfied with this.

LISTS: Favorites of the Teens (so far).

Stoker (2013)

This year has seen two of the greatest Korean directors come to the West to make their first English-language movies. Of Kim Jee-Woon's The Last Stand I can't say anything, because even though I prefer his work to Park Chan-Wook's, I haven't seen The Last Stand yet. I decided it could wait, because whatever I think of their previous work, Park's Stoker is clearly the more interesting of the two films, and I've been eager to see it.
It's easy to look at Stoker and call it a sensual experience, more about sound and visual than story. I think that's true, but it doesn't detract from the story. I don't know that it's terribly deep, or that it will change anyone's life (and if it does, a person whose life is changed by Stoker is probably someone you want to keep in front of you), but it's a coherent, well-told story. Usually when we say that a film is more about the images than the plot we're saying that the plot makes little sense, but that isn't the case with Stoker. The plot is simple but it proceeds naturally, without any missteps or foolishness. It isn't interested in surprising us; the surprises will be audio-visual, rather than plot-oriented. I have no problem with it.
It helps that the film is so well-acted. Matthew Goode, who plays Charlie Stoker, is creepy and charming by turns, as the role requires. His big puppy-dog eyes, his sweet smile, they're extremely sinister. I got the impression early in the film that Park wanted us to suspect that Charlie was some kind of vampire (the movie's title, the fact that Charlie never eats, and we don't see how he kills his first victim), but he pretty clearly isn't one. Still, he would have made a good one.
Nicole Kidman is better as Evelyn Stoker, the widow of Charlie's brother Richard. She's both jaded and wistful; there's a genuine sense of longing from her throughout the picture, a longing for the man she married (Richard had ceased being that man by the time he died), a longing for a good relationship with her daughter, an overarching longing to be cared for. She's a lonely, pointless woman and clearly has been for a long time. I assume that this happened because Richard saw something in their daughter India when she was very young, something that he had also seen in Charlie, and tried to “save” her from her impulses in a similar way to that tried by James Remar's character in Dexter, and he became so caught up in that effort that his relationship with Evelyn suffered. Ever since, she's been trying to matter to someone and has never learned how either to make herself valuable to others, or to value herself.
The big success is Mia Wasikowska as India. I was worried about her coming into the picture; I only knew her as the title character in Tim Burton's poorly-received Alice in Wonderland, and wasn't looking forward to seeing her in this. However, in Stoker she's a real star. It's a genuinely mesmerizing performance. The last time I was as impressed by an actress so young was Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone, and while this doesn't equal that performance, it's remarkable none the less.
But again, the film mostly works as a sensual experience. I love the sound in particular. In the opening scene we hear India's voiceover, saying that she can hear things that most people can't, and the sound mix constantly reminds us of how important sound is to her. We hear the footsteps of the spider crawling up her stocking, the heightened sound of the pencil being sharpened, Charlie's “See you soon” at the funeral. At the dinner table, when she and Charlie are sitting alone and he slides his wine glass across to her, that's the loudest glass of wine I've ever heard drunk. I love the scene where she's rolling the egg around on the table, listening to the shell cracking, or where she leaves the metronome running and can hear it all the through the house, timing her movements to it as she climbs the stairs, as she makes snow angels on her bed. The sound in this film is actually more compelling than the visuals.
And that's really saying something, as the visuals are both beautifully-done and intellectually interesting. Obviously there are gorgeous shots that don't require much thought, In particular there's one where a scene of India brushing Evelyn's hair turns into a flashback of India and her father hunting, visualized by Kidman's copper-colored hair transforming into tall grass that is amazing to see. You don't have to think to appreciate the film, but there seem to be rewards in figuring out the subtleties in Park's presentation. I'm still trying to figure out some of the camera movements in the film that seem to indicate a first-person perspective even though they don't. It'll stand some figuring out. I doubt that Park did that accidentally.
Park tells his story as much through these visual cues as through dialog. Take the scene in the classroom where the students are meant to be doing a still-life of a vase of flowers, and it turns out that India is actually doing the design inside the vase rather than the outside that everyone else sees. What does that tell us about India? Again, that she sees things that others don't. It's a subtle reinforcement of that opening voice-over. The whole movie is full of little clues.
The best scene in the whole movie, in my opinion, has no dialog in it at all. India is playing piano, and Charlie comes in and sits down next to her and begins to play along. Very simple, but it's one of the best sex scenes I've ever seen in a film, and there's no sex in it. By comparison Charlie and Evelyn making out to “Summer Wine” or India masturbating in the shower seem pretty pale.
I also like the bit where India comes home in the rain to find the umbrella hanging on the gate. Charlie offered it to her as she left, saying it was going to rain, and she ignored him. She also doesn't take it when she sees it on the gate. Charlie is attempting to be a shepherd for her, and she won't be herded. It's a running theme of their relationship. Charlie pays some lip service to treating her as an equal, sure. The scene on the stairs during her father's memorial service where Charlie says he'll be staying for a while, but that he wants it to be India's decision as well, for instance. But he can be insistent when she demurs. The last thing he ever says is an order: “India, come here! Now!” Charlie has come home seeking her companionship, but it's clear that he wants to be both father and lover to her. By the end of the movie she wants neither. She wants to belong to herself.
That's why it isn't surprising when India kills Charlie at the end. I believe she's fascinated by him, and the film does start with her talking about wanting to be rescued. When she first realizes what Charlie is she's attracted to him, and I think she means to go away with him when he first suggests it, but she knows that if she does she'll have to follow his path, and she would rather follow her own. In retrospect Charlie's death seems inevitable, as in fact do all the deaths in the film.
What's more interesting to me, and seems not at all inevitable, is the death that doesn't take place. Not Pitt, who dies in the original script but survives the movie, but Evelyn. Why does India spare her? She doesn't seem to have any genuine affection for her, and furthermore has just received a pretty scalding lecture from her. You might reasonably expect her to be feeling resentment after hearing it, if she feels anything at all. On the other hand, though she's clearly trying to hurt India, Evelyn seems more pathetic in that moment than anything else. “India, who are you? You were supposed to love me, weren't you?” Evelyn is very much still a child, and India has become a woman with Charlie's death. Perhaps she thinks that particular murder would be beneath her. Perhaps it was Evelyn's request to Charlie that he take her instead of India, if we can see that as her attempting to sacrifice herself to protect her daughter (I'm torn as to whether she's protecting India, upset that neither of them wants her, envious that he prefers India to her...). However India interpreted that conversation may have affected her somehow, but I don't understand her forbearance in this scene. If someone would like to explain it, I'm listening.

BEST THING ABOUT THE FILM: I've already gone on at some length about the sound in this, but on top of that the music is magnificent. Clint Mansell is really coming into his own now. He's been doing good work for Darren Aronofsky for years, of course, and his Requiem for a Dream score is rightly highly regarded, but in just the past few years, with Moon, Black Swan, and now this, he's established himself as the best in the business, in my opinion. Also, the song “Becomes the Color” by Emily Wells that plays over the last scene and the credits is perfect. I love it when a movie ends with just the right song. That's a star all by itself, really.

WORST THING ABOUT THE FILM: Aside from not understanding why Evelyn is still alive at the end I have no real problem with the movie, so I guess it has to be that. But it doesn't trouble me much.

SCORE: 9/10. I think this is the best 2013 movie I've seen so far, by a fairly wide margin. Furthermore I'll have to agree with and say that it's Park's best work. As much as I love Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and appreciate Oldboy, I found neither of them as moving or as artistically rewarding as this one.

LISTS: Top 100(ish), Favorites of the Teens (so far)