First off, I am going to say that “Spaced” gives me endless pleasure and I think it may be the ultimate Edgar Wright piece, it’s all there, every piece, in an audacious TV show blasted out at you like a clever cinematic shotgun. BUT it is a TV show and I am not going to count it, but I love it deeply and you can see where everything else he does comes from.
1. Hot Fuzz (maybe the best comedy since I have been alive)
2. Baby Driver (this film scratches many of my personal cinematic fetishes)
3. The Worlds End (Simon Peggs best performance, surprisingly deep and emotional. Nuanced look at suicide and addiction through the lens of a sci-fi genre film).
4. Scott Pilgrim vs The World (One of the best edited films around, amazing production design, and maybe the best merging of video game aesthetics/language into cinema; not an easy task.
5. Shaun of the Dead (the film that I drove 140 miles to see on the big screen when it was released in the US and instantly made me order a region free DVD player so I could order the UK only (at the time) DVD of Spaced. Such a great film and it feels weird that this is #5 but shows how good Wright’s batting average is.
6. Don’t (his fake trailer as part of Grindhouse is a perfect love letter to a very specific kind of Euro horror trailers that I used to see all the time as kid on questionable VHS rentals)
I have never seen his first film A Fist Full of Fingers, but Arrow should be releasing the Bluray any day now.