Movie review: The World’s End- Empty Nostalgia for the Loser Generation

Written by: Edgar Wright & Simon Pegg.

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Martin Freeman.

Release Date: July 2013

Box Office: $46.1



Simon Pegg is Hollywood diet body gaunt, he looks wealthy, his new hair must have cost him a fortune, but is Nicholas Cage bad. Nick Frost, his old buddy, is still Humpty Dumpty rotund, an everyman foil to the overachieving Pegg machine. That Office bloke is here as well. He plays the same character that he always plays, with the wide-eyed facial tics and air of bemused exasperation that has served him so well during his entire acting career.

Mocking nostalgia, whilst making money out of nostalgia.

The plot is perfunctory and involves some boring middle-aged gits and their pathetic old mate (Simon Pegg) going on a final pub-crawl around a sleepy English town. The movie sags as the boring old men sit in pub chatting about the past. Pegg is wacky, but the rest of the cast look bored and not into it at all.

Imagine a group of tired middle-aged salesmen having a chat in a pub with a ‘wacky’ 1990’s character trying to get a reaction out of them. That’s the first third of the movie. It then gets purposefully silly as some ridiculous alien robots are introduced into the narrative. They had to appear, as nothing else was happening. The movie then descends into fight scenes with aliens exploding into blue goo, lots of running around, and sight-gags involving Simon Pegg falling over fences, as he tends to do in all of his other movies. Hey, isn’t this the same plot as Shaun of the Dead?

Yeah, it’s Shaun of the Dead 2, just like the first movie, but with an added sense of overwhelming sadness and nostalgic regret. The narrative is unsure of itself, it sags, it’s overwritten, it’s dull and it lacks a strong new idea to give everything a sense of urgency and life. The attempt is to criticise nostalgia, whilst making money from nostalgia. The contradiction comes across as hypocrisy, as the movie is nothing if not painfully, apologetically self-aware. As it concludes you can feel the producers panic as they realise that their theme of an invading alien population might be misconstrued as an attack on the open borders mass immigration policy that is turning the UK into a segregated nation of warring tribal communities. It doesn’t want to do anything that might upset the neo-liberal corporate consensus of cultural genocide of indigenous European culture, so it shoehorns in a politically correct ending to appease the almighty god of cultural diversity. Nice one lads. I think you got away with it.

Here comes the forward rolls and fights in a pub.

It’s all very sad, to see the cool of the past, regurgitated with diminishing returns. What you have in this movie is a nostalgic unit shifter aimed at a generation that gave us Tony Blair, the Iraq war, Police state surveillance, lies and corruption. It’s a generation that paved the way for what we have now. A crumbling western civilisation, being looted by a political class of neo-liberal lunatics with an enslaved population losing itself in I-Phones, fantasy, gambling, sports, celebrities, nostalgia and anything that helps to distract their minds from the painful reality that surrounds their everyday waking lives.

I left ‘The World’s End’ with my mind very much on waking concerns. There was no distraction from painful reality here. It left me with a familiar feeling of sad emptiness and regret that you always get from indulging in corporate sponsored nostalgia. What was new and cool has become old and lame, and try as you might, you cannot reinvent what is now gone. The World’s End is an old man sitting in a pub, alone, thinking about the good old days, unable to recreate them. He’s alive, but lost in a dead past. He’s out of time, and his cool old friends are married/buried (as Kurt said) in the suburbs.

The old man looks pathetic, but then reality kicks in and you realise that Simon Pegg is a Hollywood career actor. He appears in Star Trek. He’s a star. There’s no austerity for him. He escaped the UK. He did very well for himself. He might be playing the sad old man in the pub, but that sad old man, drinking alone, stuck in the past, wrapped up in useless nostalgia, he’s not Simon Pegg. That pathetic old man is the 1990’s generation, the defeated, retreated viewers of this movie.

I loved these guys in 'Spaced.'

We cannot recapture a lost feeling. We cannot live off of the fumes of the past. It’s dead, gone, we need to move on, and we need to deal with the reality that is now. If we stay in the nostalgic past we are the suckers, because we are the people paying for the nostalgic movie that does not resonate with concerns of today. The actors are doing very well, don’t worry about them. They’ll go home to big houses and careers, we’ll go home to debt caged routines and dreams of the days when our world still had possibilities.

Simon Pegg is a winner, just like he always was. These days he’s selling nostalgia to losers, a winner, milking the failures that make up his audience of ageing fanboys, a well he can drain before going back to making irrelevant movies in Hollywood with unfunny American actors. Why then does he still go through the old UK routine, with diminishing returns, when he can stay in Hollywood making nonsense movies for the big US market? Who knows? Perhaps he just needs to sure up his UK fanbase every now and then? I think that’s probably it.

I don’t want to be reminded of a useless past. Pegg portrays a loser in these movies, but he’s no loser. The audience fanboys stuck in useless 90’s nostalgia are the losers, he panders to them, he pretends to be them, and why not? He’s a winner, and winners always portray themselves as losers in order to gain favour with their audience. I don’t want to be a loser. I don’t want to be stuck in the past. The 1990’s created what we have now. I live now, not then, I want to talk about now. I want to move on.  I have no desire to live in the useless, dirty old past. I want to live today. I want to talk about today. I want to do something about today. Today is all we have. The past is a graveyard, an overgrown nowhere land of sad-eyed nostalgic losers. I don’t want to go there. I have to move on.


Rating: 4/10 (The movie is nostalgia aimed at UK males who grew up in the 1990’s. I grew up during that time period, and loved ‘Spaced’ so I’m in the target demographic, but all it did for me was to leave me feeling empty and depressed)

Comic review: Weirdworld #1- A Flabby Voice of Surrender.

Artist: Mike Del Mundo
Writer: Jason Aaron
Colours: Mike Del Mundo & Marco D’Alfonso
Publisher: Marvel (Disney)
Released: 10th June 2015


I didn’t find this ‘WeirdWorld’ to be particularly weird. The art portrayed weird, if weird is psychedelic trippy hippie 1960’s weird, but the narrative itself was just another mainstream comic book story of a lost Conan clone trying to get home, and fighting monsters.

I don’t think that it’s unfair to call Arkon (the protagonist in this book) a ‘Conan clone’ because, well, just look at him. He’s Conan, and it would be daft to pretend that he’s not. I read a lot of Conan books, and there’s no mistaking it. This guy is as close to being Conan as you can possibly get, at least visually speaking anyway.

Jason Aaron writes Arkon as a generic, indistinguishable 2015 era comic book protagonist. The narrative unfolds with Arkon as narrator, telling his own story as he waves his chopper at sharks and jumps off waterfalls. The actions are blood and guts toughness, but the voice of Arkon, unfortunately, is not in the least bit Conan. In place of the iron willed barbarian voice of defiance, courage and brutal integrity we get wet, limp and border line comedic.

‘How does one eviscerate despair? How do you strangle hopelessness?’

What a wuss. Is this Conan the Emo? I don’t think that it’s supposed to be. No, it’s just another limp comic book character written during very dire times for western masculinity. As I read this comic book, enjoying the beautifully painted artwork and lovingly crafted panels, I’m becoming painfully aware that this barbarian, this man of muscles and swords, isn’t really any different to any other whining ‘hero’ that I would read in a mainstream comic book of today.

Five pages in and he’s crying like a child lost in a supermarket. On page seven he is already done. A victim of despair, he’s ready to kill himself, not because of any great problem, not because he’s injured and about to be torn apart by a pack of dogs and unable to defend himself, but because he’s lost, and can’t be bothered to keep on trying to fight. I’m not joking. Seven pages in and this child-man is looking to jump off the nearest cliff. Now that’s a modern emo barbarian hero for you. Why continue to fight to the end when you can moan like a little girl and then do yourself in?

Before our hero takes the final leap into self indulgence, he’s forced into another fight, and the narrative goes into the usual ‘cool’ mode of story-telling that is so common in books (and movies) of today. You know how it goes, right?

Do you have nothing to say? Do you spend your entire life in a fantasy world where reality never peeks, thus making you incapable of saying anything about the world or what it means to have real human experiences? No problem, do something ‘cool’ instead. ‘Cool’ is God now, the comic book geeks live for ‘cool,’ so give it to them until they drown in the stuff.

The cool continues in Weirdworld #1 until the end of the book where the narrative POV switches to a sexy villainous, a girl for Conan the Emo Barbarian to have adventures with. Who knows? If he’s lucky he might even get a small peck on the cheek from her? No girl with anything at all going for her would want to give this drip a proper kiss, so friend-zone is the best that somebody like Arkon the weak could ever hope for.

Poor old Jason Aaron. He’s trying to write tough, and all he’s doing is writing another limp-wristed death of masculinity contemporary ‘hero.’

The artwork by Mike Del Mundo is great. I loved his swirls, his colours, and his artistic theme of harsh bloody, dirty reality mixing with the golden shine of magical fantasy. Mike Del Mundo is a new name to me, and I’ll be keeping an eye on him, but the writing, Aaron’s version of masculinity in particular, is embarrassing. There’s a sense of passive aggressive wetness about it all, and the supposition heavy, narrative voice of the protagonist reads about as well as the awfully stilted dialogue in a Stephen King novel.

It’s a shame. I loved the art, but the voice of the hero, the voice of everybody in the book actually, was just too much wet for me to take.

I really tried to like the book. It’s swords and sorcery, and I love swords and sorcery. It’s Conan (it is) and I love Conan, but it’s an old genre with a modern voice.

That modern voice is completely unbearable. It feels soft, bloated, unused to difficulty and unwilling or unable to endure empty days of useless toil for zero award. There was a feeling of entitlement to it, of expecting that life will be easy, that it will have meaning, that there will be rewards, when anybody who has actually lived a life knows that existence is usually just routine, pain, indifference, frustration, nothingness and toil, toil, toil.

I couldn’t help but take a dislike to the flabby tone of the book, and as much as I loved the artwork, that narrative voice of surrender ultimately stopped me from having the fun that I was desperately trying to have.


Rating: 5/10 (For the art alone)

Comic review: Minimum Wage (So Many Bad Decisions, Part 1)- It’s about a boring bloke and his relationship difficulties

By: Bob Fingerman
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 6th May 2015

I didn’t understand this comic book. It was everyday, and dull, and about relationships, and the protagonist was just a bloke, and not a very interesting bloke at that.

I didn’t get it. What was the point? Can somebody tell me why I should care about anything that happened in this book? I want to care, but I just, err, don’t.

Is it supposed to be witty and hilarious?

Oh dear, perhaps I’m a closet sociopath? I’m getting a bit worried now.

Can you help me out here? Perhaps I’m being stupid, a bit slow, and a bit too unkind?

Tell me it’s great. Go on. Enlighten me. Tell me that I missed a masterpiece here, because here’s how I saw the book:

Bloke in old man band t-shirts (Pantera, Sepultura) can’t get over his ex, it’s messing up his new relationship. He writes comic books, has a crappy birthday and umm, no hang on, I’m sure something else happened. Hang on, I’ll check….

Oh, yeah, there was a dream sequence in colour (the rest of the book is in black and white) where he talks to some of his comic book creations and his ex pops up to torment him a bit. The book concludes ***SPOILER ALERT*** with the boring bloke getting dumped. Reason given is that he can’t get over his ex. Sounds fair enough to me.

Why should I care at all about this bloke? He’s just a bloke, an ordinary bloke, and his life is dull. He has long interior monologues with himself, his mate talks about defecating, and umm, crud, that’s it, that’s really it.

I don’t get it.

Was it supposed to be an illuminating window into the inner turmoil of a guy who can’t get over his ex? Was that what it was supposed to be, or was it just very subtle comedy, so subtle that I entirely missed it?

Am I supposed to identify with these characters?

Please, tell me, I need to know. Why do people read books like this? To me it was pure bore, from beginning to end. There was nothing to it, nothing but self-obsession and talk about relationship difficulties. If I want that then I’ll read one of those fake problem pages in newspapers, and I really don’t want any of that nonsense in my head.

Am I being a bit harsh here? I probably am.

Please help me out.

If you’ve read this book and absolutely love it then tell me what the hell it was trying to do. I’m obviously missing something here, so go on, do me a favour and tell me why it’s great. Tell me why I’m a fool for missing that greatness and tell me that I am some dense stupid head for not immediately falling in love with the book and giving it a 10/10 rating.

Please, help me.

I’m not clever enough for this book.

I need help.

Please help me.

Please help.


Rating: ?/10 (I’m obviously missing something here, so please fill in the rating for yourself)

Comic review: 2000AD PROG 1920- You don’t fix a rotten barrel by throwing out a couple of maggoty apples

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 4th March 2015


My 2000AD reviews have been a bit too long recently, so this will be a condensed version.  I’ll do the reviews, but I’m not going to dissect the book panel by panel. Does the book resonate in a contemporary context? Does it deal with neo liberal/new world order issues? These are my concerns, so that is what I will talk about.

So, here we go with PROG 1920 of 2000AD.

The cover (by Dylan Teague) is great, and it made my cashier at WH Smiths feel uneasy (it has a girl with a gun in her mouth) so that’s a win as far as I’m concerned.

The first story (Judge Dredd) is your usual statism propaganda nonsense with the cops portrayed as brave heroes.  I’ve already discussed this in my previous reviews so I won’t repeat myself here. Great art, boring story, horrible message about human enslavement to a control system of sociopathic, order following, uniform wearing dogs of the elites.

Second story (Survival Geeks) was a Kevin Smith fanboy pleasing comedy thing with references to Star Wars. If you are this kind of geek then you and me will not get on. Next story…

Third story was the conclusion to ‘Station to Station.’ I read it as an individual’s attempt to make a mark on a world of hive mind conformity. I can relate to that. Very good, very good indeeed.

Great art, blah story

Fourth story (The Order) was a fight scene with worms. Not much happening here this week.

Last story (Savage/Grinders) disappointed me somewhat as the ‘resistance’ were basically portrayed as deluded terrorists who were then executed by our hero, a man who sees the problem not as the system itself, but ‘a few rotten apples’ in a perfectly good barrel. That’s the mindset that the mainstream relies upon to keep the system going. It’s a mindset that makes excuses. A mindset that helps control systems, a mindset that doesn’t want to rebel. It’s the mindset of one of the dogs of the centralised control system. It’s a mindset that doesn’t want freedom, and has no interest in being free because the very idea of being free terrifies it. In other words, and to be brief, blunt and direct. IT’S THE MINDSET OF A COWARD.

That’s the book for the week. A bit disappointing really. I liked the cover, the art in Judge Dredd and everything about Station to Station. I want to read more from Eddie Robson (the writer of Station to Station) so hopefully I’ll see more of his stuff in upcoming issues of 2000AD. More freedom, more individuality, more breaking free from the hive mind control system of our times. That’s what we all need to start thinking about, and demanding. You don’t fix a rotten barrel by throwing out a few maggoty apples. You smash it to bits, and start building all over again.

Ratings:
Judge Dredd- 5/10 (I really love the art from Greg Staples)
Survival Geeks- 3/10 (Kevin Smith stuff)
Station to Station- 9/10 (Contemporary, interesting and by far the best thing about this comic book)
The Order- 5/10 (A lull in the story this week as our heroes fought against the worms)
Savage/Grinders- 2/10 (Protestors equal Terrorists)


Overall: 6/10 (Worth getting for the cover, the art in Judge Dredd and a contemporary sci-fi story that actually resonates with what is happening in the world today in ‘Station to Station’)

Comic review: Green Lantern #37- Godhead, Act 3, Part 1: Ranting away about sofa geek culture

Writer: Robert Venditti
Artist: Francis Portela
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 3rd December 2014


I had something like six or seven back episodes of Gotham (the new television show about a young Bruce Wayne) to watch on my futuristic surveillance device/television, but yesterday I deleted them all.

I did this after watching half an hour of an episode that was focussed on the young Penguin character. He’s the best thing about the show, but as I was watching his violent and manipulative adventures something dawned upon me. It was the realisation that this man on my television set, a murdering psychopath, was being portrayed as a strong willed hero, a man that we should be looking up to as a role model. The television viewer was being manipulated into feeling admiration and empathy for the man. Everything the Penguin was doing was made to look cool and empowering. I could almost here a voice coming from my television set saying:

‘Hey comic book geeks, isn’t it cool to be a psychopath? Don’t you just want to be a psychopath as well?’ 

Okay, so I’m exaggerating to make my point, but I hope you understand what I’m getting at here. I keep seeing this glorification of illness, with diseased, feeble, broken cowards made to look like the coolest guy in the room. It’s the Dexter effect, the Breaking Bad effect, the Game of Thrones effect, the Joker tormenting Batman with his own face held on by rubber bands behind his ears. It’s this sense of joy at embracing the worst elements of humanity. A celebration, a glorification of inhumanity towards your fellow man, but all dressed up in this soft voyeurism that screams suburbs and smart bombs and drone attacks and pathetic, lame, flabby cowardice.

Is this a 2014 trend, or was it always there, lurking in the back of sofa geek culture? I call it ‘sofa geek’ culture for a good reason. It’s a flabby watching but not getting involved culture that isn’t really a culture at all. It’s the reason why I don’t attend comic-cons, even though I’m sure I’d pick up some good rare books there. It’s this feeling that my comic book hobby reflects the worst aspects of myself. It turns me into something that I don’t want to be. A lazy, silent watcher, an audience member, an anonymous face in the braying idiot crowd, a man who thinks that violence is cool, but has never been in a real fist-fight in his entire life.

Why I am bringing up this unappealing sense of weakness and the revelling in disease and violence from a distance that is indelibly imprinted upon the sofa geek culture? Why am I mentioning the Penguin character and my deleting back episodes of the Gotham television programme? It’s because there’s a character in Green Lantern #37 who encapsulates every sick aspect that I’ve just been railing against. That character is another sofa geek hero/psychopath called, ‘Black Hand.’

Black Hand sadly laments, ‘I was born after all the good wars.’ No you weren’t mate. You are living in a period of never-ending war right now. If he really is supposed to be some creature that gets off on war then he would know that, but no, he’s that curious mainstream media murder junky that can’t see reality past his television set.

This Black Hand character dominates the narrative of Green Lantern #37. He’s seen revelling in the worst aspects of humanity. He loves war and death, but he’s strangely stuck on the History channel version of war and death, and doesn’t appear to recognise that war didn’t end after the Nazi’s were ‘defeated’ in 1945.

His character reminds me of somebody who sees war as a story told in a history book, not something that is happening all around him right now. Not something that he himself funds through quiet acquiescence to the unaccountable state apparatus of slavery, torture, incompetence, misery and death.

War is Hitler isn’t it? War is a dusty history book, a black and white television documentary, a DVD box set? It’s that kind of mentality, that kind of wilful ignorance about the world as it is today that I see again and again in my comic books and it bugs the Hell out of me.

It really does sicken me, and for the rest of the book this death obsessed, but out of touch sofa geek is portrayed as a grim reaper with cool factor. He’s a child with suburban serial killer fantasies, but with access to power that backs up what he’s saying, making him look far more important and impressive than Hal Jordan, the character in this book who is supposed to be the hero that the audience identifies with.

I’m getting the sense here that writer Robert Venditti actually admires the Black Hand. The Black Hand is soooo kewl, and Green Lantern is so lame after all. I can’t stand it, and that voice is talking to me again, it’s saying again and again:

‘Hey comic book geeks, isn’t it cool to be a psychopath? Isn’t it cool to be a psychopath? Isn't it cool to be a psychopath?

ENOUGH!!!!!!!

It is not cool to be a psychopath. It is not cool to obsess over death and stamping on your neighbour’s face forever. Torture is not cool. Drones are not cool. War is not cool. Death is not cool. These things are a symbol of weakness, not strength. Celebrating these aspects of humanity makes you spindly, feeble, enslaved, stupid, weak and ugly. You are a drone pilot with a jumbo carton of Pepsi diet poison, medals on his chest, flabby gut hanging out, press fire on the console, wedding party destroyed, time for more medals and football. Oh, a kid just shot up a school again? How did that happen? We better ban guns now, eh? War is peace, ignorance is strength, I’m voting for Bush/Clinton again.

That is the image I get when I see the Black Hand, or the Joker or the Penguin or whatever new psycho of the week portrayed as a sofa geek hero. It bother’s the Hell out of me, because it’s a symptom of the underlying disease that runs through the comic book industry, and the entire mainstream media as a whole.

It’s ugliness, celebrated, lauded and then put up against Batman, the Green Lantern, Commissioner Gordon, all of these statist control freaks who are there to restore order and protect the poor innocent victims/civilians. It’s a con game, a simplistic light and dark show for simpletons where the light are uniformed order followers and the dark are celebrated sofa geek cool psychopaths.

It’s a slaughterhouse psychological operation targeting the collective mind of the corporate media consuming slave public. They are telling you that it’s cool to be a psychopath, but at the same time they are telling you that the state must prevail to protect you against the very thing that is being pushed as cool and desirable. I’m not saying it’s deliberate. I’m not saying it’s a ‘conspiracy,' but it’s there, a disease that is messing with us all. That’s a mind trip, don’t you think?

I need to explore this celebration of psychopathy and it’s duel aspect the control system of the state a bit deeper, but for now I’ll finish this up as it’s already far too long. Hopefully I’ve managed to convey something in this review, something more than you’ll get in your typical comic book review anyway. That’s the entire point here. That is why I am doing these ‘reviews.’ They are not really ‘reviews’ at all, but you knew that, right? Thanks for reading. Hopefully I managed to say something here, and yes, this train of thought will continue on my blog, writing, as I do, free from corporate constraint, and free to say whatever the Hell I want to say.

It’s not about comics, it’s not about getting myself a job on a stupid keep your mouth shut and get re-tweets corporate comic book web-site. It’s about saying whatever is on my mind. Comic books and the other media that I consume feed my mind, and stimulate a response. I’m a big-mouthed annoying guy, and when I read something I like to tell people all about it. I say things that people don’t want to hear, but sod it. I’d rather say it than keep it to myself. That’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m writing on this blog. 

Rating: 5/10 (for the narrative progression that is keeping me interested in the arc)