Not with a whimper

I have a fantasy of curating a film festival at some crucial part in our history – the turn of the new millenium would have been ideal but I'm not sure I can wait for the next one – featuring only movies that are about the end of the world. Like planetary annihilation end of the world, ones where the military doesn't save the day by blowing something up. It seems odd to me that there are so many of these movies. We are as a society justifiably worried about our world-ending behaviour, but other than “The Road”, I can't think of another recent movie that deals with slow environmental planetary death of our own making. We prefer to outsource our doom to meteors and invasions from outer space. At any rate, here are four movies that I would definitely put on the schedule. In this order, lightest to gloomest, so that you are guaranteed to leave the theatre either considering throwing yourself under a bus or else thanking your lucky stars that this is all fiction.

This Is The End

On the surface, this is definitely not my kind of movie, and I don't know why I picked it out from the library shelf. It stars a whole bunch of actors whose popularity has mystified me for years, but whose movies I'll be more open-minded about in the future. It has Seth Rogan and Jonah Hill and guys like that who always seem to travel in a pack. They are all playing characters with the same names and resumes as their own, though they are probably exaggerating their personality traits. I probably missed some of the humour because I don't know them as well as their fans do, but I still found the movie very funny.

Seth Rogan and Jay Baruchel are best friends who go to a party at James Franco's new house against Jay 's wishes. The house is filled with pretentious celebrities, all playing versions of themselves. Michael Cera seems to be acting out someone else's dark side, because I doubt that he even fantasizes about being Michael Cera the absolute pig and self-centred ass-hole, doing lines of coke off of starlets' buttocks to the amusement of the other guests. After a giant pit opens out in front of the house, most of the party guests die in the immediate aftermath including Michael Cera's epic death. Left is a core group of guys who try to figure out what is going on and how to survive, as LA burns in the distance. Is it the apocalypse or just a really big earthquake? There are probably a lot of in-jokes that I didn't get, and a lot of it is crude and juvenile, but enough of the humour got through to my 52 year old self that I laughed a lot. All the way to the end of the world....

It's A Disaster

A group of friend meet for their monthly”couples” brunch, one of them bringing her new boyfriend to be introduced to her oldest and dearest. It's clear that this particular group is starting to outgrow one another as some of the relationships are beginning to fray a bit at the edges. Most of the men would rather be watching the game (there's always a game on, isn't there?) than visiting with one another, and some of the couples seem to be experiencing a bit of tension. Just as it starts to seem that the title of the movie is referring to this awkward social get-together, something happens “out there”. TVs and internet connections aren't working, so the group can't really get a clear handle on what's happening, but eventually a neighbour in a haz-mat suit appears at the door. They learn that “dirty bombs” have been dropped all over the U.S. including one that is very close to them.

The scenario is played for both comedy and drama, which really mix quite well here. All the characters are simultaneously trying to cope with their imminent death while still caught up in all the personal dramas that they are involved in. There is a funny scene in which the couple who is perennially late for all the brunches shows up outside the barricaded house and tries to convince their friends, who clearly think they had this coming, to unseal the door and let them in. They really should learn to arrive on time.  The final scene of the movie when all of the characters realize that death is inevitable, is about as humorous as you could possibly imagine it to be under the circumstances. We now pause for an intermission and popcorn break.