Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Learning to Love The World's End

When it comes to Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, I'm almost always a fan. Spaced is an absolutely brilliant show, and it's sad it only lasted two seasons. Shaun of the Dead was where it all started for me though. I remember Comedy Central playing it over and over one year, so much so that I ended up getting it on DVD shortly thereafter. Such a great movie! Then came Hot Fuzz, which I wasn't originally sold on, but I learned to love it. I've even gone through and watched Big Train and Man Stroke Woman to see more of their talents when they're apart. The one exception to the Cornetto Trilogy has been The World's End. I love it for having familiar faces, but to me it didn't feel like it fit. Oh yeah, I even liked Paul, even though I find a lot of the American talent to be extremely annoying.

I get that all three films have their own themes, their own settings and their own characters, just with the main actors recurring as the leads, but still The World's End just felt off. What it was, I can't quite explain. Maybe it was the time between the release of the first two and The World's End? I've found myself being petty over smaller things than that, so maybe.

The reality is that our internet company can't figure their shit out, and we keep losing internet. In October our internet was out for three of the four weeks. Since then it's gone out numerous times, for brief periods of time, yet long enough to force me to dig through my digital movie collection for entertainment. In doing so, my go-to movie has become The World's End. Why? Because I don't want to burn out Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz, but also in doing so I've picked up many details about The World's End that make me like it more, dare I say maybe even start to love it.

The brilliant writing of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright is undeniable. The brilliant acting of Nick Frost and Simon Pegg is just as undeniable. So why did I not click with this movie before? I still honestly have no answer. It's not at all like most trilogies where the first movie is a smash hit, the second is kind of good and the third is a straight to DVD bin at Walmart release, just to earn the trilogy moniker. No, all three movies are great in their own rights. Oops, did I just say all three movies are great? Yeah, I did. It just took our internet company being a massive pile of shit to realize how great The World's End was. And in saying all this, I fully expect another massive outage of internet service. You wait and see!  

On a side note; I remember being at a Best Buy store in 2009, either buying Hot Fuzz or something to do with the Cornetto Trilogy. The man at the cash register asked me if I had heard a third film was coming out. I was shocked to find one of my own out in the wild, so we started talking about how good Shaun of the Dead was, how he preferred Hot Fuzz over Shaun of the Dead, and we even touched upon Spaced. I had read online that the final movie was coming soon, so I told him the final film wound be out the following year. We both rejoiced and said our goodbyes. Whoever you were, if you ever read this, I'm sorry I unintentionally lied to you.

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