The World's End is third installment from Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, a sci-fi buddy comedy. The film opens on Gary, Simon Pegg, at an AA meeting recount the best night of his life a 12 bar bar-crawl he did when he was 18 which ended at the tenth bar. He decides to get his childhood friends back together to go back to their hometown and do it again this time to completion.
The first half of the film focus on the five one-time friends, who they were and who they are now as adults. Gary is the only one who hasn't changed and the comedy comes from a real place of maturity and honesty showing what becoming an adult is like. We get a sense of the group of friends, their past personalities and present, and what Gary did to alienated all of them slowly. It becomes more and more clear as time passes Gary's alcoholism is the motivating factor behind their reunion. The film still has the characteristic Pegg-Wright style, quick cuts, quicker dialogue, and piercing whit but The World's End unlike Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead feels more grown up.
At the half way point the friends discover their hometown has been taken over by robots and the film delves into action and chase but never loses the characters and relationships it has taken time to set up. The portrayal from all the friends are exceptional balancing comedy, realism, and truth about getting older. Nick Frost especially puts in an amazing nuanced performance strikingly different from anything he's done before.
The films in the Cornetto Trilogy are all entertaining and hilarious. The World's End finishes it off with just as many laughs with a surprising amount of depth.
See It.
The Act Of Killing is a documentary that follows former death squad leader Anwar Congo and some of his friends as they write, stage, and film reenactments that describe and convey their most horrific deeds and their feelings about them.
It is easy to diagnose the flaws of the film and there are only three. 1. The director Joshua Oppenheimer opens with an introduction from himself in the studio urging people to stay for the who film, it undercuts and slows down the incredibly complex, disturbing, and evocative film that follows. 2. Much of the film is shot with iPhone quality cameras, at points the poor film resolution takes away from whats being filmed. 3. A lot of time is spent on Anwar and his friends creating and filming these scenes that they've come up with but we only see parts of the what may be the intended finished product.
What makes the film so compelling is much more difficult to describe. The film goes after a broader more global truth about humanity. These men we see aren't monsters, its too easy and not accurate to view them or categorize them as such. We see, we discover that they are people, that although not likable, some despicable, they are human beings. The focus is on Anwar and as the film progresses we see his charm. We see the struggle he has with his past. We see his contradictory nature regarding the things he's done and the status he has. As much as Oppenheimer uses Anwar to discover something about killing and murder Anwar uses the camera to discover these same things about himself.
There is no judgement in the film. No excuses or explanations are made but neither are these deaths avoided. We get a direct and unflinching portrait of the act of killing.
Don't Miss It.
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