Baby Driver (2017)

Baby Driver (2017): written and directed by Edgar Wright; starring Ansel Elgort (Baby), Jon Hamm (Buddy), Eliza Gonzalez (Darling), Lily James (Debora), Kevin Spacey (Doc), CJ Jones (Joseph), Jamie Foxx (Bats), and Paul Williams (The Butcher): It's my least favourite of the movies Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) has directed. That still makes it pretty good. Baby Driver, named for a Paul Simon song, is slathered in songs. Our hero, 20ish guy 'Baby,' drives the getaway cars for a heist operation run by Kevin Spacey. He doesn't want to, but he's stuck. When 15, Baby stole a car loaded with stolen property from Spacey. He's been paying it off ever since.

How are the car-chase scenes? Very good. Anedgar wrightd the conceit that Baby listens to music constantly to drown out the tinnitus suffered in the car accident that killed his parents means, well, a nearly constant, eclectic flow of pop music. Wright gives Baby a couple of interesting quirks -- most notably a deaf African-American foster father whose existence, and Baby's mastery of American Sign Language, tells us that Baby is All Right. Lily James plays Baby's cute-as-a-button diner-waitress love interest, labouring away in the world's (or at least Atlanta's) largest yet most empty diner ever.

The improbably named Ansel Elgort seems to have been intentionally selected for his sweet, occasionally blank niceness. I don't know that it entirely works. He's often overpowered by the other actors, most notably the acerbic Spacey, a mercurial Jamie Foxx, and Jon Hamm as The Terminator. Wright nods to one classic 'Driver' film, The Driver (1978), directed by Walter Hill, by casting Hill in a cameo. One is also reminded of the more recent, excellent Drive with Ryan Gosling as a preternaturally cool heist driver. In all, Baby Driver is an enjoyable entertainment, the sort of summer movie that used to be more common before the Rise of the Tentpoles. Recommended.

Rise and Fall

The World's End: written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg; directed by Edgar Wright; starring Simon Pegg (Gary King), Nick Frost (Andy Knightley), Martin Freeman (Oliver Chamberlain), Paddy Considine (Steven Prince), Eddie Marsan (Peter Page), Pierce Brosnan (Guy Shephard), and Rosamund Pike (Sam Chamberlain) (2013): Even more fun upon a second viewing. The movie gleefully subverts cliches from dozens of science-fiction sources while nonetheless making more sense than most 'serious' summer movies.

As with previous films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz from stars Pegg and Frost and director Wright, The World's End strikes a fine balance between dialogue comedy and often uproarious slapstick. And as goofy as the fight scenes are, they're still better choreographed than those in the vast majority of action movies. The soundtrack offers a time capsule of late 1980's/early 1990's BritPop, with an appropriate Doors song (appropriate to a pub crawl, that is) thrown in for good measure.

There's a certain amount of seriousness floating around just beneath the surface, especially concerning addiction and free will, but the filmmakers wisely don't bash the viewer over the head with it: they know when to jump back to comedy. Highly recommended.

The Steve Ditko Archives Volume 3: Mysterious Traveler: edited and introduced by Blake Bell; written by Joe Gill, Steve Ditko and others; illustrated by Steve Ditko (1957; collected 2013): The great Steve Ditko, co-creator of Spider-man and Dr. Strange in the early 1960's, can be seen herein becoming a great comic-book artist less than a decade into his illustrious career. The character work, panel composition, and experimentation with layout are those of a mature artist approaching the peak of his powers.

The weirdness of Ditko is that all this rising greatness comes on short horror and science-fiction stories for the lowest of the low of 1950's comic-book publishers, Charlton Comics. Charlton paid the least of the major publishers. However, they also didn't care what appeared in their comics, just so long as it passed the scrutiny of the new Comics Code Authority and then made a profit on the newsstands. That freedom set Ditko free, and he knew it -- that's why he worked for Charlton. He was doing a graduate course in comic-book illustration. And creative freedom has always been one of Ditko's needs.

Most of the stories here are competently written, though there are some stinkers. But Charlton's desire for 5-page and 6-page stories so as to give them flexibility in assembling comic books also means that even the worst story ends quickly. And you've got Ditko to watch. Many of the stylistic choices that would make Spider-man, Dr. Strange and many other later Ditko work so appealing and idiosyncratic find their first expression here.

The character work, especially with faces and with body poses, is already exquisitie and quintessentially Ditko. While Ditko was a poet of the ordinary-looking, he was also a master of the weird, and that too finds expression here. And as usual, editor Blake Bell does a fine job in assembling the material and in penning the autobiographical introduction to the volume. Highly recommended.

Allegorical Alien Alcoholics

The World's End: written by Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg; directed by Edgar Wright; starring Simon Pegg (Gary King), Nick Frost (Andy Knightley), Martin Freeman (Oliver Chamberlain), Paddy Considine (Steven Prince), Eddie Marsan (Peter Page), Pierce Brosnan (Guy Shephard), and Rosamund Pike (Sam Chamberlain) (2013): The third film in the Cornetto Trilogy (so named for the British ice-cream treat that appears in Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and this film) is a lot of serious fun.

40-year-old alcoholic Gary King's greatest life moment was the night in June 1990 when he and his four best friends attempted the Golden Mile, a 12-pub pub crawl in their quaint English home town. Now, 23 years later, Gary wants to get the band back together so as to actually finish the crawl, which ended at pub 9. But he's a genuine toxic screw-up whose friends haven't talked to him in years. And he lives entirely in the past, still listening to the music and wearing the clothes of 1990. He's frozen in time, a Goth time traveller still decked out in dyed-black hair and a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt.

But primarily through skullduggery and guilt-tripping, he gets the crawl going. And then things go bad. Science fictiony bad. And it ends up looking like the fate of the Earth will rest on Gary's drunken shoulders, and the shoulders of his friends. All this in a small town whose main claim to fame, as a giant road sign tells us, is that it's the site of England's first roundabout (in 1909!).

The science fiction in The World's End holds up better here, in a comedy, than it does in pretty much all the 'serious' releases of the summer. It's a droll homage to science fiction British (Village of the Damned, Quatermass, and any number of Doctor Who episodes) and American (most pointedly the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also The Day the Earth Stood Still, classic and remake). And the movie, while making something of a serious point about addiction and man-children, doesn't necessarily suggest any personal growth by the end of the picture. Or the hope of it.

As in other projects from Pegg, Edgar Wright, and Nick Frost, The World's End teems with pop-culture riffs and references, though here they're as much to the music of 1990 as they are to science fiction and comic books. It's a great, fun piece of work, and maybe the most consistent in tone of the films in the trilogy. Highly recommended.

Elysium: written and directed by Neill Blomkamp; starring Matt Damon (Max), Jodie Foster (Delacourt), Sharlto Copley (Kruger) and Alice Braga (Frey) (2013): The allegory is thick as syrup in this second project from Neill Blomkamp, whose first foray into feature-film science fiction, District 9, was a bit lighter on its metaphoric feet (though admittedly not much). It's a film that could easily have starred Charlton Heston and been released in 1972. It's exactly that sort of science-fiction film. It's Silent Running, but the plants are made of people, and the people are jerks.

That this is a heavy-handed allegory about the Haves and Have-nots short-circuits an awful lot of plausibility in the film, which looks great but just has too many ridiculous moments crafted entirely to allow the allegory to lurch towards its endlessly telegraphed conclusion. To name just one, the air defences of the giant orbital habitat of the rich that gives the movie its title consist of...a guy on the ground with a rocket launcher. Seriously? And that goofiness occurs in the first 20 minutes. Further goofiness is to come.

The acting is fine, so far as it goes -- no one's really playing a character here, so there's only so much anyone can do. Damon is Christly as action-Christ Max, and Jodie Foster is cool and sinister as the power-hungry defence minister of Elysium. Sharlto Copley, who played the mutating nebbish-hero of District 9, seems really miscast here as Elysium's kill-crazy enforcer Kruger. It doesn't help at all that much of his snarled Afrikaaner-inflected dialogue is nigh-incomprehensible. He sounds a lot of the time like an Australian with marbles in his mouth.

In any case, this is an enjoyable action-allegory that doesn't bear any scrutiny for plausibility. And I wish filmmakers would assume that we could come to believe in a hero's actions by observing those actions, rather than telling us how someone (in this case, a loveable nun) tells the child who will become the hero how he someday will become a hero who does great things. Because, you know, foreshadowing or whatever. Lightly recommended.

BritZom

Shaun of the Dead, written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg (Shaun), Nick Frost (Ed), Kate Ashfield (Liz), Lucy Davis (Dianne), Dylan Moran (David) and Nicola Cunningham (Mary) (2004): Pegg, Frost and Wright made the jump from the loveable BBC series Spaced to the big screen here with this part-satire, part-straight take on zombies and the film geeks who love them. It's become a cult classic, and deservedly so -- it's sharp and funny.

Shaun is a retail drone (the movie overtly and repeatedly hammers us with the idea that modern jobs, and modern life in general, have made zombies of us all) saddled with a hilariously lumpen best friend, Ed, who messes up the apartment they share and steadfastly refuses to get a job. Shaun's having girlfriend troubles, partially because of Ed and partially because the only thing Shaun wants to do after work is have a few pints at the Winchester Pub.

Zombies really shake things up, and soon Shaun is the only remotely competent person in his group of survivors (which includes his girlfriend Liz's roommate and her boyfriend, Shaun's mother, and Shaun's stepdad). Who will survive and what will be left of them?

As with the later Pegg/Frost/Wright movie Hot Fuzz, comedy gives way to (relatively) straightforward action over the last 20 minutes of the movie. One's reaction to this will depend a lot on how many zombie movies you've seen and how funny you think the blood-and-gore stuff is. All in all, a dandy movie. Highly recommended.

'Kay, Cera, Cera

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, written by Edgar Wright and Michael Bacall, based on the graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, directed by Edgar Wright, starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jason Schwartzman, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, and Alison Pill (2010): With its disappointing box office take, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World became a cult hit pretty much the day it was released. Directed by perennial Simon Pegg collaborator Edgar Wright (Spaced, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) and based on the series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim is a zippy, meta joyride in which Toronto gets to stand in for...Toronto.

Pilgrim (Michael Cera) has to fight the League of Seven Evil Exes to win the hand of Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a rollerskate-wearing, Amazon.ca delivering alt-chick from the United States. The battles play out as a series of homages to superheroes and third-person fighter games, with the loser turning into points (and coins) when defeated, and with extra lives occasionally being awarded for particularly good play.

Of course, Pilgrim has other problems. His band, Sex Bob-omb, is competing in a Battle of the Bands competition; his current girlfriend, 17-year-old Knives Chau, is blissfully unaware of Scott's love for Ramona; Scott's history of dating pretty much paints him as a thoughtless crud. Will Scott Pilgrim defeat the bad guys, break up with Knives, and learn a valuable life lesson that makes him a better person? Wright makes the whole thing poppy and zingy and fast, much like Spaced -- the pop-culture references proliferate almost as much as the T.O. references, making this a Wayne's World for the 21st century. Sorry, but that's the best comparison I can think of. Actually, the underrated Wayne's World 2. Highly recommended.