8/10

Let’s just get it out of the way and say it; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz were both better. Alright, alright, but The World’s End  is still pretty funny and more than worth the time spent sitting in front of a computer, television, or movie screen to watch it.

The film did cause me to start skipping down one of my mind’s back corridors in search of an imagined future where I will reunite with my friends for an End All Drinking Expedition similar to the one undertaken by the group pictured on the poster above. We’re going to have to go with my college group of friends here, because, (and you would know if you’ve been following my writing) I didn’t have many friends in high school, and those friends and I certainly never had any drinking experiences. I didn’t have any drinking experiences until I got to college (with the exception of a few beers pilfered from my father and drank in our basement bathroom in the middle of the night; a shining moment in the history of my young life right there…).

But, yes, I did drink with my college friends, and, I still do, so it wouldn’t seem to be totally unusual for us to reunite for  a pint of ale at the local pub in twenty or thirty years. I’d like to think there would be no need for a big reunion because we have all kept up with each other, but who knows? Twenty years is a long time and people change and people get busy and you may wake up one day with a full house and and a dearth of recent memories about your old college chums.

So then we make a plan and we get together and grab a couple beers and wonder where all the time went and remember the trips we made and the drunken nights and the laughs and the people we knew and we’ll compare pictures of wives and children and mistresses and outwardly congratulate each other on our successes and inwardly grade who has led the best life and who has led the worst and we’ll smile at the points in our lives when everything was golden and we’ll whitewash over the moments when it all turned to shit.

Will we even know each other well enough at that point to be honest? Will we all even be alive? Which among us will be the richest? Which will live in a foreign country (I’m gonna put my money on myself for that one)? Who will hold the biggest regret?

But we don’t have enough time to make an answer for every question, so we make plans to stay in touch better and meet again soon; though it’s unclear which of us intends to uphold that spoken agreement, and which has already vowed to be busy when the next call comes their way from an old friend from an old life.