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Robot invaders, haunted pasts, and beer, oh my! Julia, Paul, David, and Shaun offer their thoughts on the last film in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, The World’s End.
Spoiler Alert: the following podcast contains spoilers for the film being reviewed; if you wish to see the film without having it ruined for you, download this podcast and save it for later.
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Show notes (info about our contributors can be found on the about page):
- The World’s End (2013)(IMDB)
Note: We’re shifting over the Shoot the WISB segments from my personal blog to The Skiffy and Fanty Show. Why? It just makes more sense, I suppose. If you’ve never listened to the Shoot the WISB casts, you’ll likely see them pop up in your iTunes or RSS feeds over the next few weeks.
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Great episode. I have three thoughts:
1. I completely agree that Nick Frost’s performance is remarkable.
2. If they hadn’t finally played This Corrosion during the credits, my brain would have exploded.
3. On the benevolence or not of the alien intelligence: when the plan to replace just a few humans at select insertion points is explained, one of the characters points out that they’ve ended up having to replace the whole town except for the two sell outs. This suggests to me that the intentions of the alien(s) are good, but things spiraled out of control (as colonialist projects always do). So they may have not intended to relplace all the humans, but based on their current trajectory, that’s what was going to happen.
To your #3: That’s a great point. There’s certainly the implication that to maintain this system, they’d *have to* assimilate everyone, and perhaps that’s embodied in the computer’s response at the end (giving up). I do think they could have made that point more clear in the end, but I also found the whole “we just want to have a good time” stuff quite amusing.
Thanks for the comment!
Echoing the above, great episode. I’ve just started listening and apparently there’s quite a few to listen to 🙂
Just a quick comment on the gender balance in the movie. It’s possible that the movie didn’t feel quite as skewed to me as the pub crawl is a very male dominated thing in the UK. Every pub crawl I’ve ever been on has always been all male, especially compared to other types of drinking excursions.
And I think a lot of the other gender stuff then falls out from it being the adventures of a group of middle aged men. E.g. the “Fitness Instructor, 26” is not the film mocking the fitness instructor but rather mocking Steven Prince continually describing her as such.
Anyway, you can take this with a pinch of salt, it’s possible I’m just identifying too much…
That’s actually something I had wondered. Since we don’t exactly have a tradition of pub crawls in the U.S., it’s a genre that I’m not altogether familiar with (most notably because I’ve only fairly recently — say, the last decade or so) got into British film production (TV and movies). So it may be that the gender imbalance is a result of pre-established genre restrictions.
That said, while it may be part of a tradition, I’m curious if the film couldn’t have still played its female characters differently while still clearly making an homage to the pub crawl genre (whatever that may be — this is my ignorance at work). And there me be some part of our criticism on this point that results from an unfamiliarity with that genre, which may actually make our perspectives useful in another way (new blood vs. stagnation, as it were).
That said, we loved the movie despite its one flaw, and that really says a lot. It’s just a wonderful film 🙂
Now the big question I have for you: are there examples of comedies of some form in the UK in which women are the central figures in the pub crawl? And if so, are they in it as a critique of the crawl itself? Because someone needs to make that movie right away. So much potential!
Having thought about it a bit more (clearly with nothing pressing to do at the moment…) the pub crawl, as an event,is a lot more mixed when at university. So if the characters were recreating something from their university days, then a much more mixed group would have been likely. But as the characters aged and grew past that, it would probably have slipped back into a male dominated thing.
That said they could have easily added some women in, it wouldn’t be a big change, but I have a suspicion that as Edgar Wright is writing from his own experience he felt more comfortable having the core of the movie as it was.
Off hand I can’t think of any specifically “women in pub crawl” situations. There must be some, but for the life of me I can’t think of one. Plenty of women drinking heavily in various pubs, bars and clubs. But it’s not really the same…
Hi Graeme:
Reading your comment made me think about one of the hilarious moments in Shaun of the Dead where Shaun’s ragtag group runs into a similar group. What might have been hilarious in The World’s End: including a similar meeting — one group as all men; another group as all women. And they’re basically gendered mirrors of one another, just to sort of draw out the absurdity of the very “genre” of the pub crawl.
I also realized that I sort of misspoke about the absence of pub crawls in the U.S. We might call it bar hopping, though there isn’t anything quite like the “Golden Mile” or any kind of tradition of jumping between pubs in any kind of systematic sense. And it’s also just not the same. A pub isn’t remotely like a bar, in my experience (having been to England four times myself…pubs can often be classy joints).
Anywhoodles! Thanks for listening and your comments thus far 🙂