I don't like looking back at the past. I'd rather think about the present and the future, which is why a recent subject in this blog's Throwback Thursday series, The World's End--a cautionary film about the dangers of nostalgia and remaining in the past--resonates so much with me. Edgar Wright's film agrees a lot with me about staying focused on the future and never looking back. If I look at the blog archive at the bottom of my blog and the last few posts I wrote are all about subjects that took place before the '00s, I get really worried. "Uh-oh, I better not spend too much time in the past. Stay in the now," I think to myself. That's why I did for a couple of years a weekly series of posts about new TV (but focused on animation). Newer TV is always more fascinating to me than older TV. I don't even like film or TV blogs where the authors write only about old films or old TV, a.k.a. what Arthur Chu would call the pre-Selfie, pre-Fresh Off the Boat world. It's like those authors are basically saying, "Film and TV were better when it was all white folks." Uh, no, it wasn't, Teabagger.
This year, UC Santa Cruz--the university whose alums include Maya Rudolph, Cary Fukunaga and more recently, DJ Dahi--is celebrating its 50th anniversary. As part of the festivities, UCSC's campus radio station is inviting all former DJs, from Bullseye host Jesse Thorn to a classmate who occasionally keeps in touch with me, Yukiya Jerry Waki, to return to the station later this month and reminisce about their time there. I hate reunions and prefer to avoid them like the plague. So on some mornings in the past few weeks, I'll wake up thinking to myself, "Nah, I'll skip this Santa Cruz one." But then on other mornings, I'll wake up thinking, "Okay, maybe I'll drop by, probably tell someone a wacky story about that terrible time I did my radio show immediately after a sweaty, all-white drum circle performed live at the studio--so the studio smelled like the inside of an outhouse at a summer music festival for the rest of that afternoon--and after only a couple of hours of reminiscing, I bounce, and then it's straight to grabbing both a burger at Jack's and the next bus back north."
I'll always be grateful for what the station taught me about radio, broadcasting, chart reporting, interacting with the labels and so on--it was where AFOS began, as a two-hour show where I got the chance to interview on the phone Mark Hamill, '60s Star Trek composer Gerald Fried and my personal favorite interviewee on the phone during those UCSC years, a now-retired TV critic named Joyce Millman--but my time at the station also consisted of a few things I'm not proud of or that were just plain stupid. A reunion will just make me relive those cringeworthy moments I'd rather not revisit.
Sometimes I'm just in awe of some of the people who read this blog. For instance, Edgar Wright stumbled last week into my Throwback Thursday discussion of the brilliance of The World's End as both an anti-gentrification satire and a midlife crisis comedy and retweeted it to his fans. And I know that writers from Bob's Burgers and the short-lived Motorcity, two animated shows I greatly admire, have read this blog because they've thanked me on Twitter for what I've written over here about their shows.
A Bob's Burgers writer is as amazing to me as, say, Rick Ross (ruh!) is amazing to some female fan who faints over getting his autograph. Now I wouldn't faint in the presence of either the controversial MMG impresario or a Bob's Burgers staffer--and I wouldn't say I'd get "the feels" around either of them because I'm over 21, and if you're over 21 and you go around telling people that you get "the feels," miss me with that asinine-sounding shit--but around that Bob's Burgers staffer, I'd be like, "So in episode S05E04, was H. Jon Benjamin actually blotto when he ad-libbed that turkey baster monologue? Was he? Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh?"
In another instance, I once blogged about regretting not buying when I was a kid an issue of Billy Nguyen, Private Eye, a largely forgotten indie comic book that remarkably featured an Asian American P.I. as the protag. My post caught the attention of Billy Nguyen artist Stan Shaw. Stan and I exchanged a few e-mails about Billy Nguyen (Stan turned out to also be an AFOS listener), and months later, he sent me in the mail a gift I'll always treasure: an issue of Billy Nguyen.
About a couple of months ago, I wrote about a now-defunct Canadian DJ mix podcast I miss hearing, Sounding Out the City. It was where I first encountered the late Amy Winehouse's "Valerie," and it was also where I first took notice of Mayer Hawthorne and TOKiMONSTA. The TOKiMONSTA track I heard on Sounding Out the City was "The World Is Ours," which flipped a classic Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet and is a tune TOKiMONSTA says she loves so much that she's never released it officially.
Back when I had a day job in the racist and misogynist shithole called the Silicon Valley tech world, Sounding Out the City helped make getting through that job, which I started to get bored with about four years into it, a hell of a lot easier. Sounding Out the City selector Rob Fragoso saw my post about his podcast and is now the latest person whose work I've admired to surprise me with an appreciative comment that made my day.
It turned out not to be the Ernestine Anderson "Love for Sale" that Rob featured on his podcast in 2009, but a completely different jam of the same name by Bay Area singer Lillian Alexander, as Rob realized several hours later. Come back to the ones and twos, Rob, we need you! Or if you're actually still mixing, the podcastosphere needs you! Some currently miserable Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley worker who's basically me eight years ago might need you!
Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS.
British director Edgar Wright is at the peak of his comedic filmmaking powers in 2013's The World's End, the third and final film in the Cornetto trilogy he co-wrote with Simon Pegg, the star of Wright's groundbreaking sitcom Spaced. Each film in the trilogy is a standalone piece--none of them take place in the same universe--but they all have a bunch of things in common: a Cornetto ice cream treat (a favorite hangover cure of Wright's) always makes a cameo appearance, hence the trilogy's unofficial name Cornetto; Wright reuses several actors; Pegg and his old Spaced co-star Nick Frost always play a pair of friends who are grappling with either the fear of losing their identity or being forced to let go of their adolescence; a fence jump always goes awry; and a seemingly tired genre gets revitalized in the inventive hands of Pegg and Wright each time.
The first Cornetto film, 2004's Shaun of the Dead, expanded upon Pegg and Wright's obsession with George Romero flicks from an early Spaced episode, and the result--a Romero flick with bumbling, hungover Crouch End blokes as the heroes--is still my favorite zombie movie ever. The second Cornetto film, 2007's Hot Fuzz, took Joel Silver and Jerry Bruckheimer cop flicks from America and amusingly tried to wedge the much more mundane reality of British policing into the body of one of those over-the-top cop flicks. Frequently described as "Lethal Weapon in Somerset," Hot Fuzz is not like any other action genre spoof. It's full of humor about fascism, conformity (a theme that resurfaces in The World's End), British genteelness and Grand Guignol violence that's often smarter than the average hacky "hey, let's just reference this recent movie and that recent movie and then call it a day" Friedberg/Seltzer spoof film. Hot Fuzz's genuine affection for American action flicks also elevates Wright's film above action genre spoofs that harbor contempt for the films they're parodying, much like how Shaun's affection for Romero flicks was key to making that film so appealing.
The World's End is more ambitious than the other two Cornetto films and juggles several ideas at once: it's a school reunion comedy about the dangers of nostalgia (set not at an actual class reunion but at a pub crawl Gary King, Pegg's immature alcoholic character, failed to finish as a teen and wants to finally finish with his estranged, now-teetotal friends), an addiction drama, an alien invasion flick and a critique of gentrification, or as Paddy Considine's character calls it, "Starbucking." In lesser hands, this all could have turned into a hot mess--an unwieldy, overly busy third movie that, like so many other third movies in a series, strains to juggle all the ideas running through Pegg and Wright's heads--but like the other two Cornetto films, The World's End is so tightly constructed by Pegg and Wright that the disparate components mesh beautifully and the seams never show.
When the comedic sci-fi action gives way for a scene straight out of an addiction drama, the dramatic scene doesn't feel out of place. Speaking of which, The World's End and Flight would make for a great double bill about alcoholics in denial. But why do the on-the-nose existing songs--particularly Saint Etienne's "Join Our Club" and The Doors' "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" in one great marriage of song and scene, due to the actors walking in step and drinking in time to the Doors tune as it was being blasted on the set--work so well for The World's End, while the on-the-nose existing songs don't work as well for Flight? That's because with the exception of the Soup Dragons' overplayed and annoying cover of the Rolling Stones' "I'm Free" and Primal Scream's '90s advertising staple "Loaded," neither of Wright and music supervisor Nick Angel's selections, which are mostly from the late '80s/early '90s era of Britrock, are tunes I've heard a million times before in movies or on TV, like Flight's overplayed choices of "Gimme Shelter" and "Sympathy for the Devil."
The original score by Gravity composer Steven Price is equally effective. My favorite moments of Price's score, which can be heard during the AFOS weekend block "Hall H" and "AFOS Prime," are textural rather than tuneful. They all involve cell phone interference sound FX, which represents the Network, the extraterrestrial collective of gentrifiers behind the gradual robot invasion of the friends' former hometown of Newton Haven, as well as all the technological advances on Earth from the early '90s to 2013 (that means Steve Jobs was a robot, which explains all those black-turtleneck-and-mom-jeans ensembles), and those advances are a huge part of the Network's strategy of seducing the smartphone zombies of the human population into getting rid of their humanity and becoming robots, or "blanks." The interference audio first appears in Price's score when Gary accidentally decapitates the teenage blank in the restroom. Never has cell phone interference sounded so menacing. After Black Mirror and the Network scenes in The World's End, the British are proving to be the craftiest satirists when it comes to material about how smartphone or tablet addiction is causing society to become even more soulless than it was before.
The result of Pegg and Wright's skills with meshing disparate components--and making inspired use of little things like mobile interference audio--is the most entertaining and clever critique of gentrification ever made. It's also the only gentrification satire to involve rousing and dazzlingly staged fight scenes where humans decapitate with their bare hands their blank adversaries and pulverize them with whatever weapon they can find, whether it's a pair of pub stools or the blanks' own torn-off limbs (the terrific World's End fight choreography was done by Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Kingsman: The Secret Service stunt coordinator Brad Allan, a.k.a. the short white guy Jackie Chan fought during Gorgeous).
The film is so packed with detail that you pick up something new in each viewing. For instance, while watching The World's End for the fourth time in preparation for today's edition of Throwback Thursday, I switched on Pegg and Wright's Blu-ray audio commentary and learned that the film's school disco sequence--in which the Network attempts to lure Gary and his friends into becoming blanks by bringing back a trio of hot girls they liked who were known collectively as "the Marmalade Sandwich" and have eerily not aged a day--is based on an actual clubbing phenomenon. I didn't even know this was a thing in England--women get paid to dance in schoolgirl uniforms, which Pegg and Wright both find to be rather creepy as a male fantasy--and after listening to the commentrak, I received a crash course in school discos from a 2002 Guardian article about the then-new "formula of uniforms, booze and tacky tunes."
The grand entrance of "the Marmalade Sandwich" in The World's End
Sophie Evans (Marmalade Sandwich girl Becky Salt), out of uniform (Photo source: Wales Online)
In The World's End, Wright didn't just revitalize the old sci-fi trope of your friends and neighbors getting replaced by creepy duplicates by brilliantly linking it to the horrors of gentrification. He also revitalized the midlife crisis comedy, taking it back from the Wild Hogses and Old Dogses of the world. A pre-Gone Girl Rosamund Pike does wonders with what little screen time she has--she was pregnant during filming--in the role of Sam, the lone female in Gary's circle of friends (both Pike's delivery of "What happened to you?" to Pegg in the bathroom and her comedic gasp after first seeing Pegg decapitate a female blank are sublime bits of acting), while Pegg and Frost, who switched the roles they had in Shaun and Fuzz so that Frost played the more responsible half of the duo this time, show remarkable range when their characters' respective midlife crises take a turn for the dramatic. Speaking of midlife crisis movies, why do so many SNL alums, whether it's Billy Crystal or Adam Sandler, star in the same old goddamn movie about a middle-aged guy who has to learn to be a better dad? It's why my favorite Billy Crystal movie remains the not-so-maudlin Running Scared, and it's also partly why Anchorman 2, with its "Ron needs to be a better dad" subplot, isn't as consistently funny as its predecessor.
Looking back lately on the artistic triumphs that resulted from Wright revitalizing weather-beaten genres for his Cornetto projects has made Wright's decision to walk away from the movie version of Ant-Man all the more heartbreaking (he had enough of getting into creative disagreements with Marvel Studios). Think of what Wright could have accomplished in revitalizing the superhero movie, a genre that's lately been showing signs of repetition, whether it's pointless and clumsy world-building or tiresome destruction porn. (Speaking of which, I love the shade Pegg once threw at the ways Man of Steel handled its destruction porn: "At the end, they're all at the Daily Planet office just going, 'Hey! Let's go see the Dodgers!' Isn't everyone dead? Isn't New York flat? What do you mean, go see the Dodgers?!" Pegg's involvement in the writing of the next Star Trek movie makes me more hopeful about the Trek movie franchise's return to quality after the mistakes that were made during Star Trek Into Darkness, and one of those mistakes was the same type of destruction porn Pegg was critiquing.) I wouldn't be surprised if Wright, who's kept mum about his tumultuous working experiences with Marvel, quit Ant-Man because what its studio execs wanted to do with his vision for the movie was too reminiscent of the Starbucking he so astutely skewered--or rather, decapitated--in The World's End, a rare third film that doesn't suck.
