Monday, March 21, 2011

Paul

When Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (of Sean of the Dead and Hot Fuzz fame) work together they always seem to impress me. For those of you who don't know, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are two screen writers and actors who make movies specific to people who love movies, and, even better, these people really know comedy when they see it. This film has humor that is completely original and movies that are supposed to be "funny" have really been lacking lately. This movie is something to be desired and actively sought after by the mainstream American Cinema. It is never boring and, except for a slow part at the beginning, it is hilarious almost the entire time.

Plot: Two friends and fellow nerds from England, Graeme and Clive (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) come to America to attend a Comicon in LA. Afterward they decide that since they're already in America they aught to rent an RV and go across the country to visit alien sighting hot spots that they've both followed since childhood. But as they travel looking for aliens they actually find one. Paul is foul mouthed, rude, smokes and has been here since the Roswell incident.Paul explains that he needs their help because he's escaped from the secret base at Area 51 and the government's now trying to kill him. Now Graeme and Clive need to take Paul to a place where he can be safe from the American agents sent to stop him.

What I Liked/Disliked: There was very, very little I disliked about this movie, so I'll start with that. There were only two things that I could think of and really they're both kind of trivial. One was that at one point Paul brings a bird back from the dead (you've probably seen this scene in the trailers) after he does one of the guys asks him if he could bring a human back from the dead and Paul replies that if he did it would be very dangerous for the both of them. As if to say, "when one of us dies later on in the movie would you be able to bring us back?" "Yeah, but it would probably almost kill us both if and when I do." I hate it when movies assume that the audience themselves couldn't figure something like this out. I know you wouldn't know that healing a human is different from healing a bird but I feel they could have set this up in a much more interesting way.

The other thing was the music, and not the music they chose to be in this movie and on the soundtrack, but I'm talking about the original music that they hired a composer to write and an orchestra to perform. It was like listening to any music from any emotional scene from any movie. What it lacked was originality in an otherwise completely original movie.

What I liked was everything else. The acting was superb, and Seth Rogan was perfect as the voice of Paul. Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, and Joe Lo Truglio all did a great job at playing the somewhat befuddling government agents after them. Kristen Wiig also did a good job in this playing a fundamentalist christian who first comes into the movie wearing a t-shirt with Jesus shooting Darwin in the face and spouting how the world is only 4000 years old and God created everyone in His image, only to be "shown" how evolution works by Paul and turning her world completely around. And, of course, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg were perfect for the roles they played.

Another thing that I think should be noted about this movie is how much homage it gives to movies like it in the same genre. The references are nearly non-stop. Think of any movie with an alien in it, Star Wars, Close Encounters, or even Mac and Me, somehow they've managed to put an allusion to it in the film. This is much like Pegg and Frost's previous films wherein they were able to perfectly reference a movie that they are obviously inspired by without totally ripping them off (like many other films tend to do).

Overall: A. The thing I appreciate more than anything else when it comes to cinema is originality. Paul manages to be a nearly perfect film and if not for the 2 problems I had with it it would have been. But despite the minor flaws this is still a film that I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys movies either new or old.

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