The World's End and the Possibilty of Getting Older

by Christopher Barr

 

Star Wars was where I think it started.  That was when the man-child was born, which was followed by many imitators, the Kevin Smith’s and the Judd Apatow’s made their careers on it.  The 70’s was a time where reflection on society and government was pervasive and Star Wars, although an allegory of overcoming totalitarianism, was a place of relief, a movie unlike any other of its time, was a film where you could forget the current reality of our human disposition, at least in the first world.

 
The World’s End follows five buddies, who have since went their separate ways, around an English hamlet on a pub crawl, known as the ‘Golden Mile’, 12 pubs in one night are as is follows:

The First Post 

The Old Familiar

 The Famous Cock 

The Cross Hands 

The Good Companions 

The Trusty Servant    

The Two Headed Dog 

The Mermaid  

The Beehive  

The King's Head 

The Hole in the Wall 

The World's End

In all three of the ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ films, Simon Pegg’s protagonists, disliked change.  In Shaun of the Dead, the zombies were more of an inconvenience to Shaun than anything else.  Nicolas Angel in Hot Fuzz was a control freak and had no interest in changing and Gary King, the rude, self-centered, manipulative center in The World’s End is a man trapped in the past, a point where he naively believed was the highlight of this life.   All these men had a fear of the future, they all saw themselves as the center of the universe and they tried to live life like there’s no tomorrow.  Then life caught up with them and slapped them in the face in the form of zombies, a cult and an alien race known as the ‘Network’ forcing strict rules of conformity onto mankind.

 

All three of these men, Shaun, Nicolas and Gary, didn’t want to grow up.  But the films aren’t black and white because they explore the notion of not blaming them.  There is a routine to adult life in modern society, when checked, is unappealing.  So in a lot of cases, while watching the characters in Clerks discuss the on-going construction jobs on the Death Star and a talk that Bill has with The Bride at the end of Kill Bill Vol.2 about Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent, we see that these people have no wish to ‘grow up’ and join the rest of the herd in office towers and mindless warehouse jobs.  These films and this man-child view of the world are speaking about the banality and routine of what it is to be a working adult in modern day society.  This form of rebellion has become increasingly pervasive and maybe necessarily so.   

The robots in the film represent the loss of youth and curiosity and wonder.  They just require functionality, that the aliens believe will better humanity.  The film explores the idea of the aliens being right.  Maybe we should just function, but the film ends up fighting for our freedom at all costs.  Sending us back to the Stone Age was a last comment and optimistic view on the filmmaker’s part to give us all a second chance.  They are aware that the human project has failed but the human heart is something worth preserving.

We all get older, fact of life.  But is it that, what changes within us, edging toward death?  So it’s interesting what various people do to combat such an unfortunate calamity.  Some buy Ferrari’s, those that are financially fortunate, others kill themselves, which always seems odd to me because they are shortening a life they believe to be too short in the first place.  But some of us, including mee-self, drink.

When you’re a little kid you could give a shit about most things because most things could give a shit about you.  You just wanted money for candy and to stay up late, watch a little TV and make forts out of your blankets.  But then you get a little older and come to realize that all the fun isn’t as fun anymore and you need to survive, in some cases viciously, in this capitalistic, money hungry world.  You have to come to terms that you can’t have all the things that you want and you have to share with others, even though those others would sooner slit your throat then look at you.  Then you die….

The World’s End is a movie about putting the inevitable off to the end.  But in the mean time, let’s have a pint of your finest lager.  The drinking in the film represented what is present in real life, escapism.  Life is hard and fight we must and all the booze provides a relief from all our current and past plights in life.  But we have a future, a future that is worth fighting for.  As fun as it is to have a pint with a couple of friends at the local pub, people need to reflect inward on themselves and attempt to stabilize the rocky drift we are floating towards.

But even though the film explores the past and the present, it’s actually about the future.  The future of mankind and its up to us in the present to provide the future generation with a safe and livable world.  It’s not about getting old it’s about saving the young.  This the human project.

Ben Affleck and the Dark Knight Returns

by Christopher Barr









I want you to remember, Clark...
In all the years to come...
In your most private moments...
I want you to remember...
my hand...
at your throat...
I want...
you to remember...
The one man who beat you...








With the news that Ben Affleck will dawn the cowl and cap and play Batman in the yet untitled Man of Steel sequel, as surprising as this may seem, why not see what happens.  As much as I enjoyed The Dark Knight Trilogy, Christian Bale was the less memorable part of the trilogy.  The prospect of Affleck doing the Bruce Wayne thing seems, believable. 

The fan boys need to calm down and let it just be.  The film is two years away, let’s see some footage before we tear him a new one.  Man of Steel had its problems but let the sequel get off the ground before we all set fire to it.

Mark Steven Johnson was responsible for screwing up Daredevil, we can’t blame Ben Affleck for that failure.  As much as this may anger people, I thought Ben Affleck’s Matt Murdock was the best thing about this bad movie.  He tried in a film that failed, yet another Hollywood tragedy.  We can bring up all of Ben’s recent successes to justify this casting.  But, what we need is a Bruce Wayne that isn’t Christian Bale and that is still Bruce Wayne, a Batman that will wear an armored bat-suit to fight Superman, thinking that they are enemies.  We need to quickly divorce ourselves from Nolan’s Batman trilogy to birth a new batman.   

Personally, I think this is the films biggest problem, reboot something that was so successful without a blink.

 

Maybe that’s what’s so great about Superman and Batman and James Bond.  Their myths and ideas transcend their physical form, hence recasting.  With that, maybe they might be able to pull it off.  Batman vs. Superman.  Just as a comic book fan side note: I hope that Batman rides a horse is this film.  It’s just a dream.

I would also like to suggest the casting of Paul Bettany as the Joker.  He would bring an insane nature to the Joker that wouldn’t undermine Heath Ledger’s career best Joker.

The film will come out, it’s on the way.  Sit back and see what happens.  I think that Jon Hamm, Ben Affleck’s cast mate from The Town would have been better but what do I know.  The choice of casting Affleck isn’t a horrible one, no matter how you spin it.

Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen and the Pointless Universe

by Christopher Barr

“Anxiety, nightmares, and a nervous breakdown.  There’s only so many traumas a person can withstand before they take to the streets and start screaming.”  - Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), in Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine is a film about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  A film told in present day as well as the not so distant past, within the last couple of years.  Thank you Mr. Allen for not reminding us with dates and times at the bottom of the screen when you flipped from one time to the next.  Like Midnight in Paris, Allen figured his audience would get the drift.

That is one of my favorite aspects of Woody Allen movies; they don’t treat their audience like children.  These films are for adults, not to dissuade young people from watching by no means, but they are mature and uniquely cultivated.

I think that Woody Allen knows, like Sigmund Freud did during the last years before his death, that people are generally impervious to psychoanalysis.  Neurosis and trauma exist in the subconscious and on a conscious level, we don’t have access.  These psychological maledictions are in the driver seat guiding us all through life without any regard to our consent.

People can read all the self-help books and watch all the talk shows they want.  If you don’t educate yourself on getting over what it is to be you, you are doomed to living a life of always wondering why bad things keep happening to you.

"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering." – Dostoevsky

Woody Allen generally creates characters without hope.  They philosophize over art and music, lament about the existence of God and the meaning of life, while in New York cafes to their friends, but they rarely ever reflect on themselves.  Like Jasmine, they blame everyone else except themselves for their current station in life.  In Annie Hall, Alvy Singer, like Groucho Marx, wouldn’t want to be in a club that would have him as a member.  His character is an intelligent and cultivated guy, like most of his leading characters but they don’t learn.  I think Woody Allen, along with Freud, thinks we are at least better off knowing how fucked up we are.  And intelligence through life experience and education doesn’t end there, life is learning till death.  The point is to try and live with that.  Which I think is where a lot of his characters end up at least, is knowing to live with the fact that they’re going to die and alone the way they aren’t going to get everything they want.  But then again, a lot of his characters struggle with never letting go of their egotistical views of the world.

So why do so many people dislike Woody Allen’s work?

Allen: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allen: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous lonely emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allen: What are you doing Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allen: What about Friday night?

Prior to investigation, like his often referenced Freud, Woody Allen is disliked. And also like Freud when asked why, people fall back on Freud’s cocaine use and Woody's infidelity with Mia Farrow's step daughter. When asked about the meat of their respective professions, one often is left with vacuous glares and 'just-becauses'.  Woody Allen movies aren’t for everyone and he’s the first person that would agree with that.  His Schopenhauer use of humor and dread is often too confusing to the average Michael Bay movie lover.  They want their happy ending and Woody says, like in life, fuck that.

I can’t remember the first Woody Allen film I ever saw.  It was likely Annie Hall or possibly Hannah and her Sisters.  But I can say that I fell in love with his films.  They, to me have also been a relief from contrived, predictable movies.  I could also relate to the frustrating fact that generally people are ignorant and wish to stay dumb down and uninteresting.  So Woody Allen’s films allowed me to see a lot of what I was thinking, played out.  It was also nice to hear his characters give cultural references that I understood, as well as one’s I wasn’t familiar with, but later had the intuition to learn about.

 “To you I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.”

Religion has always played a huge part in Woody’s films, and it wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst to discover why that is.  Transgression, fault, accusation, blame, plea, shame, contrition, remorse, repentance, apology, punishment, revenge, forgiveness, reparation and reconciliation.  Guilt is a concept that forms part of a matrix to do with moral division and reunion.  Comedian Lenny Bruce put it this way, ”There should be a statute of limitations….why do you keep breaking our balls for that crime?  Why, Jew, because you skirt the issue.  You blame it on the Roman soldiers.  Alright.  I’ll clear the air once and for all.  Yes, we did it.  I did it, my family.  I found a note in my basement.  It said: ‘We killed him. Signed Morty.’”

“ Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities.” - Freud

Crimes and Misdemeanors, a masterpiece of cinema, dealt with a profound amount of guilt, but its main character was ultimately selfish in nature.  Man has affair and affair backlashes, now man must illuminate the problem so wife and career won’t be affected.  Man goes through much religious turmoil then hires a hit man to kill his girlfriend on the side.  This to me is when religion, to the believer, no longer becomes convenient in their life and begins to work against the natural behavior of desire, where it becomes inconvenient in a person’s pursuit of happiness in all its disloyalty and deceit.

“I don't believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.”

One of Woody Allen’s most beloved films, one I might add he hated; Manhattan was about transference, just not on the surface.  On the surface it is about the fact that the universe is meaningless and life is pointless but that is no reason to kill yourself.  But I think it is about a man who realizes that the young woman he is unethically seeing, hence the transference, needs to stop.  What I love about this film is it’s either telling us that Isaac doesn’t care about all that and he’s being selfish or love isn’t so easily defined.  I’m going to go with the fact that Isaac is much older than Tracy and he loves the attention.

Jasmine also loved the attention of her husband and chose to look the other way, when the reality of their relationship interfered with the luxurious life she was living under.  Reality did finally slap her in the face but it came at much cost.  Blue Jasmine ended with uncertainty, like in life, we don’t really know what’s going to happen to us.  Woody just wants us all to hop off the pedestal of our ego driven narcissism and live in the world, in all its dreadfulness, but I think more importantly while we do that, enjoy learning, listening to music, analyzing art, talking to people and try, just for a moment, like at the end of Midnight in Paris, to enjoy being with the lady on the bridge in the rain, with Cole Porter playing in your head.