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The World's End poster

Review: The World’s End, Pacific Rim, The Look of Love + School Holiday Roundup

By Cinema, Reviews

Nick Frost, Eddie Marsan, Simon Pegg, Paddie Considine and Martn Freeman in The world's End

I can ima­gine some people not enjoy­ing The World’s End. People who don’t care about – or even notice – cine­mat­ic crafts­man­ship, people who think that being self-referential means being self-indulgent, audi­ences who prefer their action sequences to be cos­mic in scale and meas­ured in mega­bytes per second rather than laughs per minute – I expect those people might feel that the latest mas­ter­piece by Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost goes sail­ing over their heads. After all, a film like The World’s End rewards con­cen­tra­tion (and second and third view­ings) where­as most block­busters rely on increas­ingly destruct­ive spec­tacle for audi­ences to get their kicks.

The World's End posterThat’s not to say that this film is light on apo­ca­lypse – it prom­ises the end of the world after all – but its core remains the deep friend­ships between men of a cer­tain age and how those friend­ships grow when tested – the same theme that infused their pre­vi­ous two films togeth­er, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

Pegg plays Gary King, middle-aged lost soul, pin­ing for the glory days of High School and des­per­ate to com­plete his mas­ter­piece – the 12 pub crawl through Newton Haven known as “The Golden Mile”. He and his mates failed back in 1993 and he’s round­ing them up for one last crack at it. His four old mates (played by Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and the won­der­ful Eddie Marsan) are reluct­ant to leave their tidy grown-up lives behind but, per­suaded, they get to their old stomp­ing grounds only to find they are human­ity’s only hope to avoid inter-galactic colonisation.

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Review: Grow Your Own, The Chronicles of Narnia- Prince Caspian and The Jammed

By Cinema, Reviews

Grow Your Own posterThe allot­ment is one of the United Kingdom’s greatest achieve­ments, unre­peated I believe any­where else. In exchange for mov­ing in to shoe­boxes stacked upon each oth­er the British poor were giv­en a back garden some­where else – a nearby shared field con­ver­ted into small plots where they could grow some food and still exper­i­ence some­thing of a life out­doors, con­nec­ted to the sea­sons. And who could have guessed that, at the same time, the allot­ment could also be such an effect­ive meta­phor for life in mod­ern England.

In Richard Laxton’s film Grow Your Own, the spare plots at a Liverpool allot­ment are being alloc­ated to refugees, to help them adjust to life in their new coun­try and give them some­thing to do dur­ing the oth­er­wise long days. The loc­als, led by ex-cop Big John (Philip Jackson) with the help of his down­trod­den son Little John (Eddie Marsan from Happy-Go-Lucky), don’t like the idea of their patch being invaded by “gypos” and turn a cold shoulder to their new neighbours.

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