The Festival

Year:  2018
Director:  Iain Morris
Screenplay:  Keith Akushie and Joe Parnham
Starring:  Joe Thomas, Hammed Animashaun, Claudia O'Doherty, Emma Rigby, Jemaine Clement, Hannah Tointon
Running Time:  98 minutes
Genre:  Comedy

Nick (Thomas) is dumped by his girlfriend, Claudia (Tointon) on the day of their graduation.  To make matters worse, he makes a fool of himself by begging her to take him back on stage during the ceremony.  Claudia refuses and Nick falls into despair for days.  To cheer him up, his best friend Shaun (Animashaun) suggests they go to a huge open-air music festival, where Shaun, an aspiring DJ, hopes to give a sample of his music to his idol DJ Hammerhead (Noel Fielding), who performs wearing a hammerhead shark mask.  On the train Shaun befriends chatty Australian Amy (O'Doherty).  However, when Nick discovers that Claudia and her friends are also at the festival, the stage is set for a succession of humiliating disasters.

This marks the solo directorial debut by Iain Morris, who is best known for co-creating the British TV comedy series The Inbetweeners (2008-2010) which also starred Joe Thomas, and featured Hannah Tointon as his girlfriend (incidentally, Thomas and Tointon are together in real life too).  In fact there are so many parallels with The Inbetweeners that this film at times feels like some weird spin-off, Joe Thomas plays basically the same character in both, and the film opens with almost a reprise of a gag from an episode of The Inbetweeners.  The film is packed full of crude, gross-out gags, and there is one sequence involving a nipple ring and a fence that I found genuinely hard to watch.  It is a funny film though.  If you like crude humour then there is plenty to laugh at here, and it goes form one set-piece to another, so it doesn't really drag.  The main problem the film has is that Nick is such a deeply unlikeable character: selfish, whiny, boorish and rude, so it's really hard to care about what happens to him.  In contrast Hammed Animashaun and Claudia O'Doherty provide the heart of the film, funny and genuinely likeable, I wanted to see more of them than Nick's self-involved moaning.  It's the kind of film that is fine for some late-night post-pub viewing, and it is an enjoyable romp, although not as good as The Inbetweeners.  I have never been to a music festival, so if you are a fan of camping out in a muddy field with a few thousand other people you may see it in a very different light.  It has a few fun cameos from comedians including Noel Fielding, Jemaine Clement and Nick Frost and rapper Big Narstie. 

             
Joe Thomas, Claudia O'Doherty and Hammed Animashaun are at The Festival

Hot Fuzz

Year of Release:  2007
Director:  Edgar Wright
Screenplay:  Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
Starring:  Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton
Running Time:  121 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, action

Police Constable Nicholas Angel (Pegg) is one of the best officers in London's Metropolitan Police.  Fed up with Angel constantly outshining the rest of the force, his superiors transfer him to the sleepy, rural village of Sandford.  Angel reluctantly resigns himself to a life of turfing underage drinkers out of the local pub, collaring shoplifters, mediating disputes over garden hedges and occasionally finding lost swans.  However, it soon turns out that Sandford suffers from a disproportionately high number of fatal accidents.  Angel soon suspects that there is something deeply sinister going on in the village, but the only one of Sandford's lazy and incompetent police force who believes him is eager, childish Danny Butterman (Frost), whose idea of policing seems to largely come from American action movies, and who also happens to be the son of the head of the Sandford Police, Inspector Frank Butterman (Broadbent).

This film forms the second of Wright, Pegg and Frost's "Cornetto Trilogy" (the others being Shaun of the Dead (2004) and The World's End (2013)).  It can best be envisioned as being like a big Hollywood action movie plunked down in the middle of a quiet, Miss Marple style English village.  The film constantly references action movies, frequently spoofing the cliche's of the genre.  It's consistently funny, and the jokes keep running thick and fast throughout.  The sometimes graphic violence and over the top action are played as almost slapstick comedy, and Wright is a great visual director, and he choreographs the carnage very well.  Pegg and Frost perform very well together and their bond provides the emotional core of the film.  However the film feels about ten minutes too long and lacks the resonance of Shaun of the Dead and The World's End.  Also female characters barely get a look-in.  The eagle-eyed may spot cameos from Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson (as a man dressed as Santa Claus) and Cate Blanchett (as a forensic investigator, with her face alomst completely concealed by a mask).

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost bring the noise in Hot Fuzz 

Shaun of the Dead

Year of Release:  2004
Director:  Edgar Wright
Screenplay:  Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright
Starring:  Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Dylan Moran, Lucy Davis, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy, Peter Serafinowicz, Jessica Stevenson
Running Time:  99 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, horror

29 year old Shaun (Pegg) is an electronics salesman with little to no ambition or direction in life.  his free time is torn between the two great loves of his life: his girlfriend Liz (Ashfield) who is increasingly frustrated by what she perceives as his laziness and lack of ambition, and his best friend Ed (Frost) an even bigger loser than Shaun, who prefers to spend all his time in the local pub or playing video games.  Finally losing patience with Shaun, Liz dumps him.  Heartbroken, he determines to win her back.  However, the course of true love never did run smooth, and Shaun's romantic quest is hampered, not only by the fact that Liz's friends, obnoxious David (Moran) and his dippy aspiring-actress girlfriend Diane (Davis), obviously hate him, but also by the fact that London is overrun with flesh-eating zombies.

Following their success with the cult sitcom Spaced (1999-2001), writer-director Edgar Wright reteamed with writer-actor Simon Pegg and actor Nick Frost, with this lively, dark and hilarious blend of comedy and horror.  The film opens as an almost conventional romantic comedy, with only slight hints initially of what is to come, and the characters are so wrapped up in their own lives, they don't notice the disturbing signs around them until it is too late.  Comedy and horror are two deceptively difficult genres to make work - it's hard to make people laugh, and even harder to scare them.  Combining the two successfully is like catching lighting in a bottle.  However this manages it.  The comedy is genuinely funny, and the horror elements are genuinely disturbing; the zombies are threatening, and when characters die, there is real weight to it.  The film shows off Wright's hyper-kinetic style of film-making, full of pop-culture references.  Fans of British comedy will no doubt recognize cameos from Martin Freeman, Reese Shearsmith, Tamsin Greig, Julia Deakin and Matt Lucas among others.  It is a hugely entertaining film that will appeal to hardcore horror fans, but also to general audiences.  It forms part of the so-called "Cornetto Trilogy" along with Hot Fuzz (2007) and The World's End (2013).

     Dylan Moran, Kate Ashfield, Simon Pegg and Lucy Davis prepare to battle the undead hordes in Shaun of the Dead

Paul

Year: 2011
Director: Greg Mottola
Screenplay: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Jane Lynch, Sigourney Weaver, Blythe Danner
Running Time: 104 minutes
Genre: Comedy, science-fiction

Summary: Two British science-fiction fans, aspiring artist Graeme Willy (Pegg) and unsuccessful author Clive Gollings (Frost), visit the San Diego Comic-Con and go on a road trip to visit famous UFO crash sites. On their way they encounter foul-mouthed alien, Paul (voiced by Rogen), who crash-landed on Earth in 1947 and is currently on the run from the US Government. Graeme and Clive decide to help Paul, and so they set off across the US, along with devoutly religious Ruth (Wiig), who they are forced to take with them when she sees Paul. However, they are pursued by a trio of "Men in Black" type Government agents, headed by Agent Lorenzo Zoyle (Bateman), and controlled by the mysterious 'Big Guy' (Weaver). As well as Ruth's angry, shotgun-toting father (John Carroll Lynch).

Opinions: Actors and writers Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have previously worked together on the television series Spaced (1999-2001) and on the films Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Hot Fuzz (2007). This film has a slightly different flavour to their previous collaborations due to them working without their regular collaborator, writer and director Edgar Wright. It is slightly more commercial and sweet-natured then their previous work. Very few writers/actors have such a strong connection with their audience as Pegg and Frost. They portray the "nerd" world with genuine affection, because they are part of that world themselves. Fans of science-fiction movies and comics will love the multiple references to movies, TV shows, books and comics, in particular Steven Spielberg movies such as E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
The film is aimed squarely at the kind of audience who know about Comic-Con, and are avid viewers of science-fiction movies and TV shows, but there is enough genuinely funny knockabout humour to appeal to non-fans. The humour in the film is very broad and bad-taste, but it's also leavened with a lot of sweetness. The friendship between Nick Frost and Simon Pegg provides a lot of the film's charm, Seth Rogen has a lot of the film's best lines as the wise-cracking alien, and Kristen Wiig is engaging as the repressed fundamentalist who finds herself liberated through her travels with Paul and co.
The film is a must-see for science-fiction fans, but there is also enough to appeal to general comedy fans as well. For an evening's entertainment it is definitely recommended.


Nick Frost and Simon Pegg have a close encounter in Paul