Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 25 June

The World's End (Wright, 2013)

Hunting around for qual­ity films that have been recently added to stream­ing ser­vices, I briefly got all excited about Del Toro’s Pacific Rim arriv­ing on – prob­ably for a short time – New Zealand’s ThreeNow free site.

More than ten years on I feel quite fond of it – and even have the sequel queued up for a rainy day – but it turns out that when I go back to my ori­gin­al review I find some­thing else entirely:

… inspired by (and ded­ic­ated to) the great mon­ster movies of the 20^th cen­tury – stop-motion pas­ti­cine clas­sics by the late Ray Harryhausen and Ishirô Honda (who made Godzilla back in 1954). This is a very 21^st Century ver­sion, though, with state-of-the-art digit­al giant robots fight­ing equally digit­al slob­bery giant mon­sters that emerge from a portal at the bot­tom of the Pacific Ocean. Aliens invad­ing Earth again. The effects are breath­tak­ing – it’s pat­ron­ising to say that, yes, they really can do any­thing now, but they can! Like the crappy B‑movies that inspired it, Pacific Rim fails on char­ac­ter, act­ing and plot. The World’s End shows how you can hon­our your inspir­a­tions and still be great. Pacific Rim shows how lov­ing bad films some­times means you make bad films.

A para­graph which begs the ques­tion, why not just recom­mend The World’s End?

So, here we are. I loved it then, and I love it now.

The World’s End makes every oth­er com­mer­cial film this year look like lazy, spine­less hack­work. Tightly plot­ted, sol­id char­ac­ters with real devel­op­ment, an emo­tion­al core, sev­er­al lay­ers of sub­text – it’s all here and they make it look so easy. It’s 109 minutes and not a moment is wasted. They pack more gags into every scene than any­one has a right to expect and even the jokes advance plot, char­ac­ter and theme. It’s stag­ger­ing. These three films (the Cornetto Trilogy) should be set texts at every film school, every­where in the world. Flawless.

Also in that review (por­tions of which appeared in the won­der­fully named FishHead Magazine): Steve Coogan as porn impres­ario Paul Raymonde in the dis­ap­point­ing The Look of Love, heavy-handed Israeli melo­drama The Other Son, anim­ated stinker Epic, and school hol­i­day cham­pi­on Despicable Me 2.

Where to watch The World’s End

Aotearoa, Canada and USA: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on Binge

Ireland and UK: Streaming on Sky

Further listen­ing

My love for this film has noth­ing to do with the fact that my Cinematica col­league, Kailey, and I were invited to the New Zealand première of the film, I chat­ted to Edgar Wright at the pub before­hand, and that we got to inter­view a hun­gov­er Nick Frost the morn­ing after­wards. The Pegg-Frost-Wright trio had headed to Miramar after the première to party with Peter Jackson and they were very late for the media call.

But, glor­i­ously, our ten allot­ted minutes with Nick Frost turned into twenty when he saw my West Ham badge and asked about the overnight res­ult. Ten minutes of foot­ball talk later, he waves away the hov­er­ing pub­li­cist and we get to the inter­view. An all-time highlight.

Also, my con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights last Friday is here. We talked about Donald Sutherland, Doc Edge, The Underground Railroad and The Nice Guys.