Don Jon

Time for a confession. There was a time, not too long ago, where I would get home from work and sit down to a reality television show. It was a reality television show I had tried to avoid for quite a while, until morbid curiosity and the year-long wait for the next season of Breaking Bad got the better of me. I succumbed, through an agreement with a co-worker to go halves on the first season so neither of us had to admit to buying it if, technically, it didn't have an owner. And, for a while, I admit with no shortage of shame, I was obsessed. That show was Jersey Shore. I think my initial appreciation of the show was a fascination with the slice of humanity it was representing. Driven entirely by booze, sex, muscles, hair gel and house music, they repeated the same self-destructive process every episode in seeming complete denial of their outward perception. I found it hilarious, because I couldn't believe that people like this existed. Until I found it depressing, because I couldn't believe that people like this existed. That's pretty much my experience with Don Jon. It's very impressive technically and thematically for Joseph Gordon-Levitt's first foray into feature writing and directing, and initially I got a lot of amusement out of his portrayal of a porn-addicted Guido trying to find love in between the sit-ups. But eventually, the mind-numbing banality and repetitiveness of his life left me feeling bored and disappointed that this guy thinks watching too much porn is his biggest problem.

Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a man of almost militaristic routine. His day consists of cleaning his apartment, working out, going to church, having dinner at his parent's house, grinding on girls at the club with his buddies and getting the hottest one to come home with him. Oh, and rubbing one out to porn straight after. Rinse and repeat. That all changes upon meeting Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), however, whose refusal to fuck a dude she met an hour and a half ago is grounds for falling in love. Eventually, she catches him doing the five knuckle shuffle and loses her mind, unable to fathom the very idea that someone could buy into such fantasy, in spite of her very similar notions regarding romantic movies. Jon tries to honour her wishes, but as he finds his life changing more and more to meet her expectations, he slips back into old habits. Along the way, he meets Esther (Julianne Moore), a free-spirited mature woman with secrets who teaches him shit he should have known all along. Eventually, it ends. ... Yep, that's the movie.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that a lot of people watch porn. Some more than others, sure, but it's definitely not a niche market. So it kind of makes Don Jon a little hard to swallow (pun always intended) when it presents this aspect of Jon's life as something that's particularly damaging to his well-being. Granted, he watches it at a comically-high rate but all that really means is he'd be coughing dust most of the time. However, if we buy that its genuinely a debilitating problem, what's its rationale? Jon fails to get the same level of satisfaction from sex that he does from porn. He's bought into the fantasy of it; he thinks porn is real. Yeah, fair enough, but I still just don't buy his "addiction" as something this bad. It becomes even more apparent when examined alongside the other aspects of his personality. Trust me, he's got worse things going for him than spending a lot of time on Pornhub. The aforementioned daily routine is played for humour initially in the film, but over time it serves to highlight just how empty this guy's existence is. There's no room for error or lack of adherence to his schedule. For instance, he goes to church, confesses to multiple accounts of sex out of wedlock and masturbation, and receives his daily quota of "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys". The very next scene is him lifting weights and reciting a line with each exhalation. Every. Single. Time. Heaven forbid he ever rear ended someone. He'd probably just kill himself out of inconvenience. Initially, like Jersey Shore, it's funny. But then you're seeing the same process repeated a fifth time and it starts to become pathetic. 

On top of that, by movie's end he doesn't even go through the typical transformation into a good person. He just realises how much of a colossal fuckhead he was being and changes into the regular fuckhead most normal people are. Returning to the aforementioned confessional scenes, at one point Jon heads in and proudly declares he's had sex out of wedlock a bunch, but he hasn't watched porn at all. He gets a lesser sentencing, and does a little fist pump, successfully haggling out some easy absolution. Later still, he heads in to say he hasn't watched porn and he's had sex once, but this time it was different. It was real. "10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys," the priest says. Jon is staggered, because in his mind he's on par with Jesus Christ here, but in reality, a reality he still doesn't quite comprehend by film's end, he's just a normal human being. At the very least, he rises above most of the people he associates with. There's a scene towards the end of the film where he meets up with Barbara, post-implosion of their relationship. She's ready for him to come pleading on his knees for another shot at her beauteous perfection, and is given quite the rude shock when all he wants to do is say sorry. Sorry it didn't work out, sorry he appreciated porn more than her and sorry that it took him so long to realise he had a problem. She wasn't prepared for this, but far be it from her to acknowledge any sort of mutual wrong-doing. Instead, she has to belittle him once again, and tell him that his idolisation of the perfect woman is false and if he doesn't change that he's going to die alone. And even if he does, he sure as hell isn't getting back with the closest thing the world has to a perfect woman. Jon smiles, comfortable with the internal knowledge that he's the better bad person, and says, "I'm sorry."  

It might sound like I didn't dig Don Jon. Ultimately, I did. It's well-written, Joseph Gordon-Levitt boasts incredibly competent directing abilities for his debut, possessing deft comic timing and editing, and the acting is really fucking good, from Scarlett Johansson especially. But I doubt I'd watch it again. For all of its wit and underlying sentiment, these are just boring people whose problems are clear as day, and you spend the entire film hoping tooth and nail that they realise them. Really the only times I became genuinely interested in the film were the dinner table scenes between Jon and his family. You see, in this den, Jon immediately becomes the lesser to Jon Sr., his father, played unbelievably well by the fucking boss, Tony Danza. You begin to understand the construction of his personality a lot more, for better and worse. It almost makes him, dare I say it, sympathetic. And for all of my harping about watching a lot of porn not being a bad thing, especially compared to the rest of his life, I've got a sneaky feeling that's Don Jon's point. It's muddled, and often self-contradictory, but so is reality. And in reality, a guy like Jon isn't going to magically become a cool guy overnight. It takes baby steps, and Don Jon is content in just showing you the first couple. And at the end of the day, I got to look at Scarlett Johansson's bits. What the fuck am I complaining about?

Filth

One of the worst people I ever knew was an old boss. From his first day, he targeted me and the only other male staff member. "Women just work better," he proudly declared, and it didn't take very long to become clear that he was trying to get rid of us. I had a pretty strong relationship with some of my female co-workers, and he saw that as a threat. He spent the next year playing mind games with all of us, to lengths that even in retrospect seem outrageous. Eventually, I screwed up and he jumped at the opportunity to get rid of me. About a month later, he was fired. My sudden disappearance from the roster caused management to come down and do some investigating. Turns out he'd been stealing money and fudging the numbers. Badly. In the months that followed, little bits and pieces of information started to leak out about what sort of a person he really was. We used to go into the back room of a night time to find things in different places, and often the office would smell like it had been lived in, which caused us to joke that maybe he was living there. He was; the share house he was staying in kicked him out for playing the same mind games he did with us. He also spent a week bragging about having a hot new car, which we all knew was a lie. When the owner came down for a meeting, he suggested this guy go and get some food with his flash ride. We could see him sprinting away from the back room to the pizza shop. He was so full of bravado and confidence that you would almost believe him to be as powerful and persuasive as he portrayed, if it weren't for always getting a glimpse at the other side of the coin. My point is, I've often wondered what motivates a person like that; what sort of trauma or event triggered them into becoming the person that they are. Filth has a go at answering such a pondering. Its conclusion? Nothing that hasn't happened to any other miserable cunt.

Within the first ten minutes of Filth, Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) manages to be racist, misogynistic and homophobic on multiple occasions, sometimes within the same sentence. Even more impressive, he manages to simultaneously exude impossible charm and charisma. He's a detective working in Edinburgh, and word around the office is a promotion is coming up. He sees this as a great opportunity to keep his wife happy, and begins planning and executing schemes to ensure his co-workers couldn't possibly be considered, something he refers to as "The Games." For instance, his closest friend at the cop shop, the mild-mannered Bladesey (Eddie Marsan), finds his patience and masculinity put to the test as his wife continues to be harassed with very sexual prank phone calls that she herself is engaging in too. Guess who's making them? It's all part of "The Games", including Bruce's subsequent framing of Bladesey for the calls. On top of all this, he's working on solving the murder of a young Japanese girl, a case that gets all the more difficult as his drug abuse, bipolar disorder and general mental stability begin to steadily and increasingly spiral out of control. Does he eventually learn from his all-encompassing destructive tendencies, acknowledge his rampant, glorifying dishonesty and make, if not completely, then at least the first steps towards being a somewhat decent human being? Nope, he hangs himself. Credits.

Seeing Filth in a sold-out theatre was an interesting experience, because I was able to witness the trick it pulls on its audience on a large scale. Initially, as I've already mentioned, Bruce Robertson is a disgusting human being, but damn it all if he isn't smooth about it. The audience (myself included) laughed uproariously as he freely and wittily disparaged anyone who had the misfortune of being in his proximity and not a straight white male. At the office Christmas party, he sees his co-worker, Ray Lennox (Jamie Bell) finally getting in close with his crush. Utilising his prior knowledge that Ray's not the most well-endowed fellow, he suggests a party game in which they all photocopy their assets in private and get the female staff to guess which belongs to whom. Ensuring that he doesn't give up a chance to glorify himself while humiliating someone else, he goes ahead and hits the enlarge button on his own not-so-impressive hang dang. At another point in the film, he's masturbating to porn on his flat-screen, until the camera pulls out and he realises the woman is with a black man, prompting him to shout "FUCK OFF" and change the channel to a children's television show. This gets him going again, and he gives Bladesey's wife a ring to help him rub one out. As the film's title suggests, this is low-down and disgusting, but it's presented with an energy and wit that somehow makes it accessible. Because right now, all we're seeing is this man with a winning grin who can do anything to anyone, and he's letting us in on the joke. It's funny, until it isn't. Later in the film, Bruce is watching home movies of his wife and child. The weight of his emotions begin to overwhelm and he breaks down, sobbing. But rather than allow himself to have a genuine moment of humanity, he desperately fumbles for the phone so he can call Bladesey's wife again. It's the same situation, with similar lines and the same cheeky smile, but now we've seen the man behind the curtain. As Bruce comes, with tears, snot and spit streaming down his face, a voice in his ear begging him to fuck her and a TV displaying a still frame of his once-happy wife in their kitchen, it's not so funny anymore.

There's a very long segment in Filth where Bruce really starts circling the drain. He erratically shifts from one encounter to the next, inhaling more drugs and medication wherever possible and rapidly becoming more and more psychologically unhinged. He regularly has hallucinatory flashes where the people in front of him resemble the animal he most closely identifies them as (it's a pig when he's looking in the mirror). He also regularly has hallucinatory sessions with his psychiatrist, who either advises him to consume more drugs or warns him about the dangers of talking tapeworms. At one point, Bruce wakes up by vomiting all over himself in his car. He stumbles to work and is advised that he's being replaced on the murder case by his female co-worker, Amanda Drummond (Imogen Poots). As she leaves the office, he drunkenly stumbles after her, shouting that all she's done is fuck her way to the top. Amanda has the gall to turn that back around on him, and for a flash-second he advances on her, jaw clenched and fists balled. She stands tall, and invites him to hit her, if that's what he needs to do to feel any less insignificant. Bruce stops, and the weight of everything hits him again. "Oh...oh, love, I'm so sorry...I wasn't going to hit you...I would never...I wasn't going to hit you..." He collapses on the stairs and starts crying. Amanda sits with him and speaks the most eloquent summary of his condition ("You need to sort your shit out, Bruce."). And it's here that he reveals the lies he's been telling about his supposedly picturesque family life. When he tells his co-workers that they're off seeing the grandparents for the weekend, it's false. The truth is, they left him. And he's so fucked up that he can't even remember why. "I used to be a good person," he whispers, and you feel that, maybe, he might come around. But then Amanda touches his shoulder, and he has a flash that makes him see a green-faced witch in front of him. He reverts to his violent and vitriolic self, abusing Amanda until she leaves and running out the front door to destroy the first life he can get a hold of. Throughout the film, scenes are book-ended with his wife dressed in a burlesque costume spouting aggrandising parables regarding her husband. It turns out that was Bruce dressing as her to, as he put it, "keep her close." Dressing as his wife isn't the concerning part, it's that when he puts on the dress he becomes her. It's getting easier and easier to see why she got the fuck out of dodge.

At one point in Filth, Bruce and Bladesey are sitting in a gay bar, Bruce discussing how much homosexuality disgusts him and Bladesey saying that he doesn't disagree with their lifestyle, but he knows for sure and certain it's not for him. Bruce nods as he slips four ecstasy tablets into Bladesey's drink, and seconds later he's in between two men with Christmas lights around his neck, kissing them and dancing to European house music. You laugh, as you're supposed to, and then in a flash Bruce is pushing Bladesey into their hotel room, desperately trying to talk him down from his freak out. Bladesey is thrashing on the bed in a crazed panic as Bruce runs his hands through his hair and tries to remain calm. "You're fucking up my trip, man!" he shouts before following that up with, "Fuck it, you're on your own." He retreats to the bathroom, where he backs up against the door, frantically chewing his fingernails and shivering. Eventually, he stumbles out to the street, where he finds a prostitute that looks just like the projection of his wife that he dresses up as. He claws desperately at her, crying, before she fights him off, he realises his mistake and carries on, eventually collapsing in a puddle of bodily fluids. That's Filth in a nutshell. You don't get to just see the drug addict in that ten-minute window where they're fun to be around. You're stuck with him, for the whole sordid journey. He's had some bad things happen to him. On top of losing his family, he was also negligently responsible for the death of his brother when he was a child and has failed to save a couple of citizens in his line of work. But beneath all of the personal tragedies, all of the sympathy, all of the bravado, all of the handsome charm, what is there? Nothing but a pathetic shell of a man who has to ruin the lives of everyone around him so that he can avoid even a single second of acknowledging his own failures. Perhaps it's good that he kills himself. He records a video for Bladesey apologising for the person that he is and offering words of encouragement to him and his marital troubles. As Bruce is about to tip the chair over, there's a knock on the door. It's a woman and child the father of which Bruce tried and failed to resuscitate earlier in the film. They're a shot, a real shot, at him achieving some warped sense of redemption, at returning to the good person he once was. But for once, Bruce is honest with himself and, knowing that in the end he'd just ruin their lives too, he looks straight in the camera, says "Same rules apply", grins and lets himself go. His first act of human compassion is removing himself from the equation. Maybe the saddest thing about Filth is that I didn't learn anything new about people like my old boss. I walked in thinking, "People like this are fucking pathetic", the movie replied with, "Yep. They sure are", and we went our separate ways. But in the end, I appreciate the honesty. And I really appreciate getting to see Professor X in fishnets. 

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is a heart-warming story of family love that features an old man thrusting his unnaturally long scrotum at terrified women in an all black male strip club. Go see it.

Mystery Road

Australian films make me patriotic. Check that, good Australian films make me patriotic. Nothing gives me greater pride in my nation than one of our own showing the world that we're more than Fat Pizza, Young Einstein and The Wiggles Movie. They're few and far between though, unfortunately. With most Australian productions going through the government-run Screen Australia, it's hard to get any serious financial backing for production, let alone distribution or promotion. This has a habit of sorting the wheat from the chaff, however. When you're operating on a shoestring budget, everything falls down to the limited resources at your disposal. Some films become Animal Kingdom, some become You Can't Stop the Murders. Mystery Road is thankfully one of the former. With next to no money, it's a naturally-lit, bare bones, gorgeously filmed piece of art that takes a very slow walk through rural Queensland, turning over every dark rock to expose even darker secrets before it shrugs its shoulders and continues on.

A fusion of neo-noir and westerns, Mystery Road opens with a trucker discovering the body of a young Aboriginal girl, throat slashed open and body positioned delicately underneath a highway bridge. Returning to his home town from a 10 year job in the city, Aaron Pedersen's Aboriginal cop Jay is the only officer tasked with investigating her murder. He's met with resistance wherever he goes: some of the fellow officers see him as nothing more than a racial token, and treat his police work like he's a child playing pretend. The local white community is often the same, openly treating him with racial insensitivity, and though the Aboriginal community does see him as the same degree of police officer as his white colleagues ("You a copper, brah? We shoot coppers, brah."), they in turn see him as a traitor, a man who is happy to lock up his brothers. As he slowly, ever so slowly, continues down the rabbit hole, he uncovers a network of lies, betrayals, drugs and murder that's hiding in plain sight on all sides; a community that simultaneously reviles and requires its corruption.

Mystery Road ends with an unbelievable shootout. Almost every shady character, cop or criminal, that Jay has encountered is involved, and with no clearly defined alleigances or rivalries, everyone starts shooting at everyone. It's brutally realistic; snipers carefully line up their shot and then wait breathlessly as their bullet travels the distance to see if they need to try again. The bullet hits a car hood or rock beside their target, causing their target to flinch and curse, and then it's their target's turn. People on the ground fire blindly from cover in the general direction of their target, while others stand fully exposed firing until their clip empties, causing them to scurry desperately to cover. By the end of it, everyone is dead but Jay. He walks over to the car, reminded of couch cover fibers buried deep underneath the first victim's fingernails, and discovers claw marks in one of the vehicle's back seats. She was definitely in this car, so it's a logical conclusion that these men were her killers. But why? Why was she murdered in the first place? And why was almost every key player in the community involved in this deal? Not to mention what was the deal in the first place? And why did Hugo Weaving's dirty cop Johnno spend the whole film vaguely threatening Jay's life only to save it in the end by firing at his fellow police officer? Mystery Road answers none of these questions, nor the others that I've neglected to mention.

Parodoxically though, the film simultaneously presents no answers while confirming the conclusions the audience is invited to draw within the first thirty minutes. Initially, this left me feeling hugely frustrated. I was right in my assumptions, and yet I received no closure on them. The film merely said, "Yes, you were right." And then I realised that was the point. If someone seems shady, they probably are. If a neighbourhood looks like it has racial relation problems, it probably does. This is a community small enough that instead of a street and house number, directions are, "It's on your old street. The green roof across from the red roof." Everything's so lethargic, because it's all so obvious. Johnno asks if Jay's ever killed someone and not told anyone because he knew he could get away with it. It's a thinly-veiled, very real threat made against Jay's daughter's life, and he keeps going at his steady investigative pace, because he knew it was coming, and he knows where it will be coming from. And so the 'what' is answered, but not the 'why'. The film's themes of racism aren't even really drawing any conclusions, which once again, is the point. It's not excusing the existence of racism, it's just saying that it exists. More than that, it's not always clear the motivations are racially driven. It's certainly easy to assume Jay's being treated as inferior by his fellow officers because of his race, and in some cases it's certainly true, but is it true in all cases? He left this town for 10 years and though the sergeant says that it's good for him to be back, it's clear he's not being honest. Why did he leave in the first place? He spends the entire movie on the brink of emotional explosion, be it rage, despair or any emotion other than stone-faced inquisitiveness. Once again, there are no answers. Corrupt government-run establishments exist. Racism exists. Just plain bad people exist.

Throughout Mystery Road, the community is being terrorised by wild dogs. They're never seen, beyond a quick glance at one of them, but they're heard often, either literally or through the citizens that have come in contact with them. One of them had been biting the murder victim's arm and the coroner's report returns unidentifiable saliva. "It's almost like she was bitten by some sort of...super-dog," Jay is told. Initially, I thought they were perhaps just another unanswered question, but then I began to see them as representative of the town's corrupt citizens and their nature; that they seem to be able to run wild, attacking and eating whatever they want, with no-one willing to stop them. They just sit around complaining about it. It's a sentiment that also ties into the racial issues raised in the film. No-one in the town denies that there's disparity between the white and Aboriginal communities, but no-one is willing to do anything about it. Even Jay is guilty of this; he thinks that by trying to make an honest go of his life that it somehow solves the societal problems of his community, when in reality it just makes him selfish and naive. Which is not to say he shouldn't have pursued a career, but that he shouldn't then assume that this simple personal achievement is going to break down barriers for his entire race. A problem can't be solved with bare minimum effort and bitching. Mystery Road knows this. It also knows that the preferable action to sitting around complaining is to get objective; to stand back and view the picture as a whole. What it doesn't know is the answer. Because it's just not that simple. Racism seems like a problem, because it is. Time for me to shrug my shoulders and continue on.

Prisoners

A misconception I often see made about movies is that their worth is based upon their ability to be enjoyed. I respectfully disagree. A movie's worth is based upon its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners is not an enjoyable film. It's bleak, uncomfortable and uncompromising. You're not supposed to enjoy it. It intends to make you feel the way a parent does when faced with the reality that their child has been abducted: lost, helpless and filled with directionless rage, and it does this very well in every department but the narrative. It's smart, but it's so busy jumping between smart topics that it fails to resonate with any of them. Prisoners is hands-down the most expertly crafted episode of Law and Order I've ever seen. It was a wild ride, but I'll have forgotten all about it by next week.

Prisoners questions what a person will do to reclaim someone that they love. In the first fifteen minutes, the young daughters of two Pennsylvanian families disappear. The prime suspect is the mentally-disabled, RV-driving Alex (Paul Dano), but Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is unable to compound any evidence on him and is forced to let him go, at the behest of Keller (Hugh Jackman), the father of one of the girls, who begs him to keep Alex in lock-up for one more day. When the judicial system fails him, and with his statistical knowledge of mortality rates when it comes to child abductions, he takes the law into his own hands by kidnapping and torturing Alex for the location of his daughter. As the days creep on, neither Keller nor Loki get any closer to the girls, and we the audience watch a small, rural American neighbourhood eat itself alive in defeated grief. Feel-good romp of the summer, folks!

God's pretty important to everyone in Prisoners. When there's a cross hanging from almost every rear view mirror, with Loki going so far as to have one tattooed into his hand, you know you're dealing with a town that's pretty good at keeping the faith. You'd think then that these would be some pretty decent, good-hearted people that believe in universal love and forgiveness, right? Well, it seems almost everyone in this town is just using God as a way of shirking responsibility. The film opens with Keller reciting the Our Father before teaching his son how to shoot game. Fair enough, he's apologising for the death he is about to cause but acknowledges its necessity so his family may eat. But later in the film, he has Alex boxed up in a shower. He's rigged the hot water system so there's only two temperatures: freezing and scalding. He drops to his knees and starts reciting the Our Father again, but stops when he has to forgive those trespassing against him. His blind belief aside, he doesn't actually know whether Alex abducted the girls, or whether he even knows where they are. The responsibility for Alex's well-being lies upon his head at this moment, but that's too heavy a burden for Keller. So he quickly scores some absolution so he doesn't have to feel bad about it. Later in the film, when the serial abductor is finally revealed, she claims her multiple crimes to be a Holy War against God for allowing her son to die of cancer. In making children disappear, she forces parents to become faithless to get back at the deity that took her child from her because grieving was too difficult. No-one in this town is willing to accept responsibility for anything, and for most of them it's because there's a book that tells them they don't have to. 

As well as religion and responsibility, Prisoners deals with a third theme: futility. As soon as it began, I felt trapped. I felt claustrophobic and helpless, like a rat stuck in a maze constructed without an exit. How appropriate then that the serial abductor's MO is placing children into a pit with a book of mazes, allowing them to leave once they've completed all of them - an achievable feat if it weren't for the last one being unsolvable. Huge praise to cinematographer Roger Deakins for creating a visual feast that made me feel utterly devoid of hope. Claustrophobia exudes from every frame: it was filmed in an aspect ratio lower than most films today, the Pennsylvania location is a bunch of close-together, similar-looking houses surrounded by dense forest and many camera angles consist of either extreme close-ups, shots angled upwards from a hole or external shots of people in boxes, be they offices, bedrooms or basements. It works thematically, too. Revisiting the opening scene, as soon as it begins you know that the deer is dead. You're just left waiting for the deer to be aware of it. That bleeds into the rest of the film. You know, without a doubt, this cannot end well for anyone. Keller may get his daughter back, but he's going to have to answer to his own abduction of Alex. The girls may be found, but there will be long-lasting psychological impacts to the horrors they were subjected to. Keller sums it up best when he says, "Pray for the best. Prepare for the worst." You spend the film holding onto hope that there's a happy ending on the horizon, but deep down you know that's just a childish belief and you've already reserved yourself into defeat. 

Ultimately though, Prisoners jumps so erratically between these different ideas that I was left wondering what the point of it all was. Is America's reliance on God ultimately a crutch? Are we doomed to self-destruction until we can stand up and accept responsibility for our own actions? Is the downfall of society a township's widespread misinterpretation of the "How To Not Be A Cunt" handbook? The answer's probably all three, but its frustrating for a film so strung up on criminilasing irresponsible people to cower in the corner when questioned and say, "Not my problem." You can tell this screenplay desperately wants to be told it's clever, and it is, but it hasn't yet graduated from the school of crime show writing, and it's here that my problem with crime shows becomes apparent. When you're only given 40 minutes to hop into the mind of a criminal, you don't have time to do any more than scratch the psychological surface before it's time to make way for next week's serial masturbator. Prisoners has 150 minutes, and it still doesn't get there. When you give serious thought to the criminal and their motive, it makes the film seem kind of...goofy, not to mention some of the gargantuan plot holes. But at the end of the day, we come back to my opening paragraph. A film's worth is measured on its ability to make you feel something. Prisoners succeeds in that, with all of its flaws. It can go home, head held high, knowing that Criminal Minds only wishes it was this good.

Gravity

Talk with me about movies and eventually the subject of 3D and my total disdain for it will surface. A lot of people said they felt the same way until they saw Martin Scorsese's Hugo. I wouldn't know; I saw it in 2D on DVD and didn't feel like I'd missed out on anything. As far as I could tell, the movie was brilliant without it. There's no denying the technology is impressive, however, and maybe if I'd seen Hugo at the movies I'd be singing its three-dimensional praises like I'm about to do for this movie. It seems what we're seeing now is the end of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture era and the beginning of the Wrath of Khan era. The tech demo is over. Now the artists can start playing with it, and next up to bat is Alfonso Cuaron with Gravity. I'm going to get something out of the way really quick: I loved Gravity. Bear that in mind as I say two things I never thought I would about a film that I loved:
1. You will only ever watch it once.
2. You will have wasted that one chance if you don't see it in 3D on an IMAX screen.

One of Gravity's greatest strengths is its simplicity. It's hard to be this simple, to strip away all temptations of deeper character complexities so that the audience may immediately empathise and identify with them. It's very important that the audience has this connection straight away in Gravity, because when Sandra Bullock's Ryan is cartwheeling through infinite space, we're supposed to be in that suit with her, wondering how the fuck we're going to survive this. Ryan is an impossibly rigid professional rookie on her first space walk who focuses unnecessarily on her job because she's haunted by the death of her daughter. George Clooney's Kowalski is an impossibly charming seasoned veteran on his last space walk who's never gotten over the view of Earth and likes listening to country music in his helmet. Ground Control is an impossibly warm and familiar voice on a routine space walk played by Ed Harris, the same Ground Control voice in Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff. We know people with these personalities, some of us may even be these people, and it's through that familiarity that we immediately impress ourselves upon them. You'll never stop and say, "They'd never do that" because the characters have zero complexity; they're driven completely by the compulsion to survive, which is exactly how you'd like to think you'd be.

On top of survival, Gravity deals with themes of rebirth. The death of Ryan's child resulted in a type of death for her as well. She confides in Kowalski that when she's on ground, at night she drives endlessly and listens to any radio station she can tune in to, so as to tune out her grief. She swallows herself in work so that she never has the ability to acknowledge mortality. Put simply, she's dead on the inside. And it's only when she's faced with the very real possibility of her own death that she realises her (and our) desire to survive. And so when the satellite is beset upon by the field of space debris ten minutes into the film, Ryan overcomes her emotional death by being born again. The evidence is everywhere: Kowalski somehow colliding with her after she tumbles way out into space, the way a single sperm in a few hundred million finds the egg, Ryan floating in anti-gravity and curling into the fetal position as she boards the ISS, finally back in the womb, even her going through labour as the landing pod hurtles down towards Earth, bringing her once again into the brave, new world. But perhaps the greatest example comes at the film's conclusion, when Ryan emerges from the pod, into water. She reaches land and, overwhelmed by the gravitational pull, can't even push herself up. She literally learns to crawl again, before she can walk.

So now that all of the pretentious theming discussion is concluded, we can start talking about the heeps sik graphix. Gravity could have been set anywhere. Alfonso Cuaron made a fucking genius decision to put it in space. When you're dealing with that much negative space (pun always intended), any foreground element is going to seem like it's coming out at you. When you pair that with what technology is capable of today, you're finally achieving those "GOSH! WOW!" moments you saw in those old, cheesy 3D movie ads. I'm unashamed to say during a scene where debris was rapidly colliding with objects and flying towards the camera, I flinched. A lot. But where Alfonso Cuaron truly excels with this is that he doesn't let the 3D just be a gimmick. It becomes an essential component to the emotional connection we have with the film. When Kowalski sacrifices himself, realising he and Ryan are going to float away into space if he doesn't release the tether holding the two of them together, he slowly recedes into the distance, forever a stark white spot on a black canvas. He's there. He's just right there, and it never feels like if we didn't just reach out a little further that we couldn't save him. But we can't, and neither can Ryan, and the visual effect makes it hurt that much more. Another brilliant example comes later, when Ryan has finally made radio contact with someone only to find they're unable to understand English. Language barriers are broken however, when Ryan hears the cries of a baby and the barking of a dog. Together, they bark and howl as Ryan resigns herself to death and allows the oxygen to be drained out of the pod. She begins to cry, and her tears collect into a single sphere that lifts off her face and into the foreground, taking the camera's focus and frosting up in front of us. I'm crying as I type this; it was a stunningly beautiful little moment achieved only by 3D.

Gravity reminded me a lot of Jaws. Apart from one direct reference, at its core I see them as very similar films for this reason: they're both about human beings struggling to survive an environment that is simultaneously familiar and alien. Most of Jaws takes place on the ocean. We're surrounded by it, it's very much a part of our existence, but we're completely out of our element in it. We're slower and unable to breathe in it. On the ocean, we're the inferior species to the shark. We desperately want to think we can survive the ocean though, and when we do, we feel like we've been born again, like our existence has been validated. In Gravity, the shark is replaced by the debris field. Completely unbiased and unforgiving, it hurtles around and around the Earth's circumference, wreaking havoc on whatever falls in its path every time it comes around again, just like the shark. But we're human. We're out of our element, but we're human. This life has meaning. We can get through anything. We're strong. We're survivors. We're The Goddamn Batman. Right? The credits for Gravity started rolling. I exhaled deeply and leaned forward. As I did, I realised that my hands were adhered to the arm rests, my back was sweating and the only thought running through my head was, "I made it." That's a pretty good endorsement of this film. It was an exhilarating, unbelievably tense, life-affirming examination of human survival that I will never watch again.

P.S. I couldn't find a place for it, but an all-too-brief heaping of praise has to be given to the sound design. The trailers would have you believe Gravity was going to ignore the audial restrictions of space, but that is not so. Space is silent, and we only hear environmental sounds through the vibrations that would be heard inside of the character's suits. As a result, drama is intensified through the soundtrack, an incredible ongoing instrumental score that occasionally sweeps into an overbearing cacophony as the film calls for it. Truly, it has to be heard to be believed. 

Kick-Ass 2

Kick-Ass wasn't too bad. I'm referring to the film and the comic. Both took an honest and darkly funny look at the logistics of a superhero in our reality, and both did a pretty good job of it. They diverged paths a bit - the film injected a little bit of Hollywood heart where the comic was content to keep everything dark and ugly, but that just comes down to your personal preference. The problem both had though was that they stretched the reality of the situation just a bit too far. I bought it, but at the back of my head I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that the whole thing was coming dangerously close to imploding on itself. Because superheroes can't exist. A guy doing shit like this would be dead in a day - something the movie states itself. So how can the stakes possibly be raised for Kick-Ass 2? Well, they can't really. But the movie tries, and therein lies the problem: it tries to be more realistic, it tries to be more sensational, it tries to be more serious and it tries to be more funny. And it succeeds at none of them. A scene where a teenage trained killer is brought to her knees by high-school bullying is followed by a scene where she gets revenge by making a chick projectile shit across a cafeteria floor. Get me the fuck out of here.

Where Kick-Ass asked the question, "What would happen if superheroes really existed?", Kick-Ass 2 follows that up with, "What about a supervillain?" McLovin, still upset about his dad being launched out of a high-rise by a rocket launcher, desperately wants to destroy Kick-Ass and everything that he loves, but unfortunately lacks the physical strength and attention span to take care of that himself. So he uses his enormous wealth to amass a team of professional psychotics and serial killers from around the world to do it for him. Meanwhile, at the Hall of the Super Best Friends, the events of the first film have inspired a city to put on lycra and be idiots too, and Kick-Ass finds himself involved with a team of superheroes, featuring among them an ex-mafia goon, two parents hoping their exposure can get them some information on their missing son and Kick-Ass's best friend. Yep, these nice guys are going to go up against some of the world's most well-trained, cold-blooded killers. MEANWHILE, AT THE...SOMEWHERE ELSE, following the death of her father, Hit Girl has promised her new adoptive dad that she's done with her butterfly-knife twirling ways and she's going to be a normal teenager. An easy enough task, if it weren't for the fact that one high-school girl contains more venom and evil than any entire mob organisation. Hit Girl quickly finds herself way out of her depth, and unable to shake the feeling that she's just running from the person she really is. Somehow these three separate, bloated and unfocused storylines blindly stumble into one another for the film's climax and I then got to go home.

I'm going to be one of those people that roll their eyes, take a big self-important pause and say, "The book was so much better." Here's the thing, though: I didn't really like the comic, either. But they both try to accomplish the same thing, and the comic did a much better job of it. Because basically, what's the realistic representation of a supervillain? Evil. Pure evil. The comic takes that idea and flies off with it into the stratosphere, jumping headfirst into incredibly dark waters with a manic grin. The movie takes that idea and dips its toes in before deciding it's too cold, diving headfirst into the much more comfortable spa instead. Let's run a quick checklist. In the movie, Fogell robs a shop owner because he wants to go viral with the security footage. In the comic, he murders him. In the movie, when his team kill a hero, one of them asks whether she should also kill the dog locked up in a cage, to which Fogell replies, "Jesus Christ, I'm not that evil!" In the comic, he shoots the dog because it's the only living thing in the room he has any power over, and its head is fixed to the hero's body. In the movie, the supervillain team murder a bunch of police while Fogell beats and attempts to rape Kick-Ass's girlfriend, failing to because he can't get an erection (funny stuff!). In the comic, he asks for directions from a group of children before gunning them down, shoots everyone he sees on the streets, kills Katie's parents and rapes Katie, while his team massacre more people in the neighborhood and all police that appear. I'm not saying it's good. I'm saying it delivers the message effectively. If the filmmakers were afraid to go this far, they shouldn't have even started down the path.

The other big problem Kick-Ass 2 has is that it suffers the reality implosion I was talking about earlier. The comic does too, but as I've already established, it knew that from the beginning and adopted a totally different tone to compensate. The film tries to have its cake and eat it too. I found myself wondering the entire movie why McLovin didn't just get one of or all of his supervillains to find Kick-Ass and shoot him in the head. Or why, when the final battle did come about, his supervillains didn't just gun down the melee-wielding heroes. I didn't have these problems with the comic, because it threw reality out the door from the first panel, allowing sensational, disgustingly sick evil to reign in its stead. The film still desperately clings to reality, and thinks the turn of events can remain the same in the process. Another example comes about two thirds of the way through the film. Kick-Ass's dad claims to be Kick-Ass so his son doesn't get arrested. McLovin finds out his identity and has his dad beaten and hanged in his jail cell, sending a picture of the murder to his phone. Kick-Ass breaks down - he can't even find the words to tell his friend what he's looking at - and drops to his knees, sobbing. Within ten minutes of that, he's dressed in his super-suit along with all of his super buddies fighting Fogell and all of his super buddies, cracking jokes and throwing punches with all of the confidence in the world. There's no consequences to anything in this film, it's just a set of schizoprhenic moments. Within ten minutes he forgets all about the brutal, cold-blooded murder of his father because the movie doesn't know what it wants you to feel. So feel everything, but do it quickly!

I'm not completely negative about this flick, though. At it's core, I did enjoy it, with all of its flaws. I really appreciated Hit-Girl's narrative arc; it was a genius idea having a trained killer face the unfathomable horrors of high school. There's an amazing scene that follows her being victim to a brutal prank, one that leaves her, for all of her mental and physical strength, crying helplessly at the foot of Kick-Ass's bed. He embraces her and tells her how in awe of her resolve he always is. The person I saw the flick with leaned over to me and said, "Ah fuck, I hope they don't kiss." I replied, "They won't. Their relationship is stronger than that." Because it is. They need each other on a much deeper level than a Hollywood romance. They are both, in different ways, a father to each other. And then the movie ends with them kissing. Goddamnit. My favourite part of Kick-Ass 2 was the cheesy family photo of Nic Cage that hangs in Hit-Girl's gym. He struck the perfect balance of reality and sensationalism the first movie went for - he was a loving father trying to raise his daughter the best way he saw how: teaching her how to slaughter criminals. It's an approach the filmmakers could have either doubled down on for the sequel, or thrown right out the door. They could have had heart shine through the darkness, or good engulfed by evil in its purest, most maniacal form. Instead they tried to have both, got neither and lost everything. But nobody will notice if there's a diarrhea joke, right? Right?

Now You See Me

About 90 seconds into Now You See Me, I leaned over to the person I was watching it with and said, "I hate this already." No, hear me out. Jesse Eisenberg was playing Jesse Eisenberg, standing in the middle of the street performing a card trick to a large group of people. His ability to talk like a tommy-gun translates well to playing a magician, as a large part of a magic act is being able to charm the audience so as to control them. As the cameraman refuses to sit still, swooping and ducking and weaving like an amped-up four year old, Jesse Eisenberg tells a pretty girl to pick a card. He spreads the deck out and asks the pretty girl if she can see her card. She cannot. "That's because you're looking too closely. And what have I been telling you all night? The closer you look..." Right on cue, the crowd shouts back, "THE LESS YOU SEE!" as the camera swoops up into the air and the lights on a skyscraper reveal the 7 of hearts or whatever the fuck it was. The crowd goes nuts. Jesse Eisenberg sneers and pimps away. Was it even her card? Doesn't matter. Was I not supposed to think this was a very basic magic trick in which he had already gotten an electrician to set the reveal up and just used suggestive gestures to get the pretty girl thinking of the 7 of hearts? Doesn't matter. As far as the movie was concerned, in 90 seconds it had just shattered my brain. It's a dangerous line you walk when you think you're smarter than your audience. It's even more dangerous when you're a fucking moron.

Now You See Me has actors playing characters, but their character's names are just a necessary formality. This movie is about Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson and Mini James Franco, four people who work in magic brought together by an unknown magic mastermind who gives them the tools to perform a trick in which they stand in Las Vegas and rob a bank in Paris. Money rains down on the crowd, the camera swoops across financial benefactor Michael Caine and The Four Horsemen's stupid smug faces and I guess I'm supposed to be mesmerised. Enter Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent, two clashing-head cops brought together to solve the whodunit and fall in love. They enlist the help of Morgan Freeman, a cynic who makes a living ruining magic on television, but darn it all, he just can't crack how these kids keep stealing shit. It's almost as if it's...magic? Or he's just as fucking stupid as everyone else in this movie.

One of the most effective tools a magician has is reality. The amazing thing about actually bearing witness to a magic trick is that you know it can't be real, because magic isn't real, and yet you can't deny you just saw the magician who's been in the tank of water for the last three minutes spit out the exact same card the dude in the audience signed and gave to other magician. You're left in total awe, wondering how they did it, because your mind is unable to resolve what just happened. Do you want to know how they did it in Now You See Me? IT'S A FUCKING MOVIE. The first big trick The Four Horsemen perform is the aforementioned bank heist. What I didn't mention was that they sent a man through space and time to the vault in Paris. So much of the scene is devoted to him hopping in the gigantic device they have on stage, strapping on the cheapest, goofiest looking piece of headgear I've seen in a big budget production and vanishing when the device compresses and closes on him. It's insult to injury when the CGI is so painfully obvious. It's even worse when Morgan Freeman says "Oh no no no, they didn't really transport him. It was an illusion!" No. Fucking. Shit.

The difference between Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve was that in Ocean's Eleven, you were in on the joke. You got to bomb along with The Super Rich Friends Club as they tricked and stole from Not So Rich Andy Garcia, laughing at how silly and poor he was. In Ocean's Twelve, The Super Rich Friends Club was laughing at you. The whole movie was an experiment in how much the audience can be told "Look at how much smarter than you I am", as if for some cosmic reason, that's why people go to the movies. I don't know about you, but I go to the movies to be given a few obvious puzzle pieces concealed well enough that when I put them together I feel clever. I don't go to the movies to be told, "We were going to steal this, but then we decided not to, but then this guy said he was going to, so we decided we were going to again, and then we stole it by making him think we stole it when we actually didn't, but while he was thinking that we didn't steal it, we stole it. Except we didn't. You dickhead." Can you guess which of the two I think Now You See Me is? Towards the end of the film, The Four Horseman start pulling off increasingly-escalating feats that are supposed to seem almost superhuman, and during the film's climax, everything they did is explained with smug dialogue and swooping camera angles. I'd have been piecing together my blown-apart mind if I hadn't long before been saying things like, "Well, that was a mirror" and "Yeah, they used a body-double like they did in that earlier trick" and "I get it. I fucking get it. If I say you're super duper smart, will you just end and leave me alone?"

The only characters in Now You See Me I felt anything other than blind hatred for were Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent. Ruffalo spends almost the entire movie becoming increasingly infuriated with the self-indulgent, elitist fuckheads he's surrounded by, that can't do anything other than say how much smarter than him they are. He's almost driven to violence more than once, and even begins doubting Melanie Laurent's loyalties, when she's the only other person in this smarmy universe that isn't an asshole. Honestly, the biggest mystery in this film is how he managed his self-control long enough to not just shoot Jesse Eisenberg in the face and say, "THERE. NO MORE MAGIC. PROBLEM SOLVED. FUCK OFF." I genuinely felt for him. At least, I did, until it's revealed in the last five minutes that he was the unknown magic mastermind who brought The Four Horsemen together so that he could get revenge on Morgan Freeman for driving his father to magic-induced suicide after he debunked one of his best tricks. ...What? Congratulations, Now You See Me, you finally got me. Though it wasn't because it was a twist I should have been able to see coming but didn't, or because all of the pieces were there in front of me, so I got a double whammy of being blown away by the revelation and feeling smart because I could then see exactly how it came to be. No, it was because it was a twist that made absolutely no fucking sense at all. It turns out Mark Ruffalo's an uppity cunt like the rest of them. I don't know, if you like sitting down and having a dumb person tell you how dumb you are for two hours, then Now You See Me will rock your world. Me, I'm going to go watch some Penn & Teller.

The Conjuring

There's a scene in the original Saw where one of the characters is snapped out of sleep by a strange noise. He fumbles at the light switch for a while before realising the power is out. As it always is, the batteries in his torch are dead and so the only source of illumination he has available to him is the split-second flash he gets when he takes a photo with his camera. He navigates through his pitch-black apartment, jumping at every disfigured, household object that emerges from the dark before he hears a noise come from the closet. He slowly moves the door, until it's wide open. Whatever is in there has been staring at him, unmoving and unknown, for a good ten seconds before he clicks the shutter button. The light goes off and we catch a second's glimpse at the monster before it screams and runs at him. In a film much more focused on being a well-written, smart murder thriller, it's a terrifyingly effective horror scene, and one that would happily sit in a Top 10 Scariest Movie Moments, should I ever create one. Since then, James Wan has gone on to make quite a few horror flicks. He made Dead Silence, a longer and slightly more mature episode of Goosebumps. He made Insidious, a love letter to the fun-loving spookiness of Poltergeist. And he's now made The Conjuring, a love letter to the holy fuck shit-your-pants terror of Poltergeist.

One of my favourite things about The Conjuring is that there are no cynics. There's no token asshole who exists just to sneer and say "There's no such thing as ghosts, doofus!" so the story can justify why they don't just say "Yeah, alright" when the ghost tells them to fuck off. The tormented family of The Conjuring can't bail, because their finances are tied to the house. They didn't know about the series of murders before their arrival because Rhode Island state law prohibits realtors from releasing that information. But more importantly, when the calm, level-headed man of the house sees and hears genuine terror from his daughter, he gets the Ghostbusters in whip-fucking-smart. And it's those Ghostbusters that this movie's actually about. Did you know that back in the 70s there were two rock-star demonologists named the Warrens, one of whom was the only Vatican-certified exorcist to not be ordained, who checked out the Amityville house? Yeah, me neither. This flick is loosely based on their real experiences with a family tormented by a scraggy old dead woman and her prankster dead son. It's a genius move that I'm surprised to have not seen in more horror movies: if we come to know and care for the superheroes and they start to get scared, what does that say about the evil they're up against?

I fucking love horror. It's one of, if not my favourite genres of film and as such, it's also the genre I'm most snobbish about. Paranormal Activity (hear me out) didn't scare me when the ghost accidentally ran into a wall and decided to make the sound resonate so it would seem intentional. Paranormal Activity did scare the shit out of me when the female protagonist was ripped out of her bed and dragged down the hallway screaming and clawing at the floor, trying to escape the unseen entity. Of course, fear is 100% subjective, and I'm totally aware that some people find the Mr. Magoo Ghost really very spooky, and that's fine, but for me, it's not scary, but startling. Real horror isn't switching the lights off when I'm walking down a hallway, jumping in front of my face and shouting "FUCKIN' BOO WAAARRGHHH." Real horror is presenting me with an image so astonishing, so terrifying, so...horrific even, that I can't jump at it, because I'm frozen in fear. Those are the images that get under my skin and prevent me from sleeping. And The Conjuring got me fucking good a few times. I'm not going to spoil the fun, but there's a scene involving a game of hide and seek and another involving laundry that gave me chills and have been burned into my brain. The smartest thing Wan does here is employ the best trick in the horror book - sometimes, something is scarier the less you see of it - and takes it one step further: sometimes, something is scarier when you don't see it at all. Many scenes employ a beautiful level of restraint and silence, so that rather than keep you jumping and filled with anxiety, it may keep you frozen and filled with dread. Take note: this is what makes a horror movie memorable.

Next to the scares, the two most integral elements to a horror flick are characters and camera. In Halloween, the relationship Laurie shares with her friends feels real, not overblown and full of stereotypes, which makes it all the more tense and harrowing when these likable people start falling prey to Michael Myers. In The Conjuring, there's no suburban drama bubbling under the surface of paradise or suppressed familial hatred that jeopardises their safety in a time of peril. This is a large family that loves each other very much, being protected by a husband and wife that exude warmth and affection, and it's these attributes that makes the scary things happening to them all the more scary. As for the cinematography, holy shit. You can ask the person I saw this with: I squealed when a long zoom tracking shot was used. John R. Leonetti deserves a massive cuddle for shooting a film that understands the power and potential for terror that grace and stillness can provide. Just like Insidious too, his eye for framing is unbelievable as well, lending as much weight to the film's most terrifying shots as the monsters themselves. Clapping hands will make you shit yourself. 

So, in case it's not yet apparent, I really, really dug The Conjuring. There's a few things I haven't yet praised it for, such as its balls to the wall awesome soundtrack (The Zombies and Ryan Gosling's music project Dead Man's Bones? FUCK!), its almost total lack of CGI (read my Evil Dead review if you haven't yet for a rundown on my love for practical effects), its location (somehow, the location scouts found a spooky as hell old American home, with a twisted up dead tree and a black lake out back), and its loving nods to Poltergeist (including the TV static and two goofy characters that show up to help the exorcists), but ultimately, that's just sprinkles on the ice cream. All up, it's a beautiful, restrained, scary-as-all fuck tribute to the great horror films of the 70s and 80s, and in a world where a studio will make millions from Paranormal Activity 18: Loud Noises and...I Don't Know, Fuck You, it's nice to see they can make just as much from a real movie. Thank fuck for James Wan.

The World's End

A quick disclaimer: I usually don't bother with spoiler warnings, but this is a movie that kept some of it's bigger secrets hidden away, and I'm going to talk about all of them. If you don't want the magic spoiled, wait until you see The World's End before giving this a read. Hell, I'd prefer it if you did.

One of the biggest problems people will have with The World's End is that it's not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. And they'll be right. The World's End is not Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. But let's be honest: Hot Fuzz was not Shaun of the Dead. And Shaun of the Dead was not Spaced. It's been 14 years since Spaced, 9 years since Shaun of the Dead and 6 years since Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are much older than they were when they started The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy. How could they possibly catch lightning in a bottle again? It's easy: they couldn't. They're not who they once were, so they made a movie about not being who they once were. If Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are about getting older, then The World's End is about being old. Oh, and body-snatching robot aliens.

The World's End opens with Simon Pegg's Gary King cheerily recounting the greatest night of alcoholism he and his four friends shared; a twelve-stop pub crawl when they were beautiful teenagers with the world at their fingertips. "I thought that life couldn't get any better than this. And you know what? It never did," King proudly states, as it's revealed he's regaling this story to an addiction support group. Not the brightest way to start a film. Gary decides it's time to get the band back together and give the "Golden Mile" another crack. The problem is, while he's stayed rooted in the free-wheeling, devil may care attitude of his youth, all of his friends have come to terms with the dangerous consequences such a life carries and have moved on to promotions, families and fitness instructors. This won't stop Gary, who's less concerned with seeing his old friends again and more concerned with indulging his alcoholism in company that allows retention of his arrested development. Their triumphant return to their hometown of Newton Haven isn't quite the loving welcome Gary was hoping for. Nobody seems to recognise him, all of the pubs have been swallowed by corporate franchising and the youth look upon his attitude and demeanour with total apathy. "Perhaps we're not the local legends you thought we were," says Nick Frost's Andy. It seems that way until Gary accidentally decapitates a teenager in the toilets, popping his head off like a Ken doll and shooting a blue, inky substance all over the toilet walls. It turns out that most of the town's citizens have been replaced with replica robots, in some sort of intergalactic merger designed to eradicate humanity's uglier traits. Does this revelation give Gary King the wakeup call he needs to realise the selfish, self-destructive path he's dragging his friends down and force him to call off the 'Golden Mile' so that they may focus on getting out of town alive? Not even a little bit.

Now, I can talk about how this film is funny. Because it is very, very funny. But I was just as affected by and would rather discuss the equally as prevalent serious side The World's End presents. Because I like a comedy that can make me cry; good humour has to come from relatable experiences, and life is never just the laughs. Gary King comes very close to being an irredeemable dick. He lies about his mum's death to convince Andy to join the drunken reunion, he hastily changes the subject when the conversation strays from drinking and when everything goes to shit, his top priority is finishing the 'Golden Mile'. It starts out funny, if a little bit pathetic, but as the movie continues, it starts to become much darker. Why is Gary so intent on finishing this arbitrary, adolescent activity? We are watching a man who is so unbelievably desperate to recapture the false former glory of his youth that even an alien invasion doesn't sway him from that determination. Andy sees this from the start ("We're not your friends, we're your fucking enablers"), and it's his relationship with Gary that is the most emotionally complex and rewarding in this film (as it always is with Pegg and Frost). Something's clearly been driven between them, more so than the others, and about two thirds of the way through, we find out that sixteen years ago, Gary had a drug overdose and Andy, four times over the limit, totalled his car trying to drive him to the hospital. Gary woke up and took off into the night, leaving Andy to nearly die. He doesn't drink anymore, against Gary's oblivious behest, and when he realises Gary was lying about his mum, he's almost overcome with hate. But when Gary takes off to finish the mile when a clear exit out of the city is in their reach, it's Andy who resigns to the fact that he has to follow after his best friend. Because he knows this man, he loves him, and he can see where he's going. And where it's going to end. When Gary eventually reaches the final pub, a pint has already been poured for him. He's about to take his final first sip when Andy smacks the glass out of his hand. They begin to fight, and all of their demons come spewing out. "YOU'VE GOT YOUR PERFECT LIFE," Gary screams. "THIS IS ALL I HAVE LEFT." Andy reveals that he doesn't; his wife left him, and he's trying to get her back, but he knows he won't win. It's not enough for Gary, who tries to have that last drink again. Andy throws him back, Gary's sleeves come down and we see the bandages wrapped around his forearms. He wasn't in a rehab clinic at the beginning of the film; he was in a hospital. "It was never as good as that night," he says, tears in his eyes. "You don't have to do this," Andy implores. "Yeah," Gary says, hand on the lever, glass at the ready. "I do."

Previously in the film, Rosamund Pike's Sam says, "Not everything's about that night, Gary." "Isn't it?" he replies. What does it take for someone as blindingly self-destructive as Gary to change his lifestyle? It's simple: the end of the world. When he pulls the aforementioned lever, he and Andy are lowered into a cold, metallic chamber. A big, bright light appears and, with the smooth, sultry tones of Bill Nighy, it explains that what they've become privy to this evening is the result of nearly a decade of intergalactic espionage; a merging operation to get Earth on track socially with the rest of the galaxy. Advances in telecommunications are their biggest present to us: making us more robotic and disconnected from each other, but hey, at least we're not pissing in the streets anymore! What follows is an unbelievably hilarious and razor sharp argument between the "big lamp", Gary, Andy and Paddy Considine's Steven, in which the drunken fucks point out all of the flaws inherent with this grand scheme: none so much as the fact that everyone in the town bar three people resisted and have since been replaced with robots. The three guys drunkenly berate the luminescent alien ("Why don't you hop in your rocket and fuck off back to Legoland, you cunt"), until it can't stand any more. "Just what is it that you want?" it politely asks. Beautifully quoting Primal Scream's Loaded, Gary says "We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time. And that's what we're gonna do." The alien relents. "Yeah. Fuck it," it says as it switches the lights off. Unfortunately, in switching off, it also releases a massive EMP explosion that sets the world back to the Dark Ages. They are literally left to their own devices. Their individual fates are covered in a very brief epilogue, but what happened to Gary? With young robot versions of his four friends, he roams the wasteland looking for water (not alcohol) and slaying robot racists. I'll admit, this threw me a little. At first, I wasn't sure if this hurt or helped support everything the movie had said about Gary preceding it. But then, I came to this conclusion: a man like Gary King can never change who he is fundamentally. When he's willing to attempt suicide because he doesn't understand the concept of growing up, that's a tough shell to break out of. But if there were two things he did well, even if it only applied to a few years of his life, it was being a leader and being a rebel. He rebelled against growing up, he rebelled against life, he rebelled against an all-powerful spacial entity and now he's rebelling against the new world the apocalypse has wrought: one that doesn't accept robots. And there's a whole mess of those robots looking for some leadership.

Early on in The World's End, Eddie Marsan's Pete encounters the bully who made his life a living hell when he was a child. Their exchange? He asks Pete if he can use a vacant stool. "The worst part is he didn't even recognise me. It's like all of that torture meant nothing," Peter says. Of course, the real reason he didn't recognise him is because he was a robot, and later on, when Peter's had much, much more to drink and gets lost in the forest, the bully appears again, and offers a hand, to apologise for his actions when they were younger. When Gary, Andy and Steven catch up, Peter is savagely beating him into the ground. "Come on mate, it's not worth it!" they implore. "YES, IT FUCKING IS," Peter roars back at them, tears streaming down his face as he throws the last punch and breaks open his head. It's a brutal, gut-wrenching scene that gave me chills and made me cry. And then it made me laugh, uproariously, when in the following shot Pete is running at the robot with a large tree branch in a fantastic throwback to a Fawlty Towers episode. And to me, there's no better summary of The World's End than that. Edgar Wright and Co. have created an utterly beautiful commentary on adulthood, friendship and addiction that somehow also manages to socially satirise the human race in the most affectionate way possible and bring an end to their genre-drenched legacy. As repetitive as I know I'm beginning to sound, it made me laugh just as much as it made me cry, but I think the reason I keep saying that is because I'm struggling to find the words to say just how much these movies mean to me. The list of what I truly treasure in this world isn't very long, but The Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy is most certainly on there. They are a fucking triumph of modern film-making, and the day I get to show them to my children will be as monumental to me as the day my father took a fourteen-year-old me to see Shaun of the Dead.