And the drums and the drums and the drums

Each Day, A Film:
January 24th 2012 (Retrospective)

It's probably - having introduced Edgar Wright previously - time to talk about Shaun of the Dead.



This is, however, a little difficult for me, because, for a while, I was Nick Frost to a wannabe Simon Pegg. I've talked about this in the pre-EDAF days, in veiled terms - the post about the bridges we form, and burn, and let rot away, and there was probably some other moaning about that godawful new term "frenemy" that my current contemporaries use (although it's strikingly accurate, and also entertaining in that there's a film with Zack Galley Gallifrey Galifianakis that my local supermarket has which has been re-covered to make it look that much more like the DVD case for The Hangover).

Don't get me wrong, I'm chunky, and occasionally slothful and inappropriate, but the guy I'm talking about was... Actually, now I come to think about it he pretty much was Shaun, in a boring-job not-great-life girlfriend-leaving-you sort of a way. And so we listened to the soundtrack, and I got to be the one always trekking to him to go out drinking, and there was the vague general degradation, and then I decided I didn't need that anymore.

Fun story, no?

But I do remember seeing Shaun of the Dead in the cinema, because I'd been obsessing about it ever since the first trailer came out, which is something I do less these days. At the time it was a kind of white-hot obsession, and I went into town as soon as the film was on general release, and watched it in a probably 1/10th full cinema, and loved it.

Then so did America, which was nice.

Now, there are a lot of debates to be had over the Simon Pegg > Nick Frost equation, because if you look at it from a 2011 - 2012 point of view, Simon Pegg = Mission Impossible 4, while Nick Frost = Attack the Block. It's an interesting and potentially vital source of research - how a comic partnership can be cemented, dented, rented and bent out of shape, because then you can look at Paul - although Paul is Pegg, Frost and crucially not Edgar Wright - but at the same time, it's fun to look on it as Englishman done Good (plus his mate done okay).

At the time, though, Shaun of the Dead was the microcosm of every single thing that was cool about cinema for me back in the day; nerdy jokes, English humour, zombies. Now, maybe, I don't know how I'd feel watching it, but I'd be happy to give it a go...