Thank Dog for Paul

It’s like the mak­ers of Fan­boys and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back got together and had a more mature, British step-son who is just as geeky and gross, twice as nice and friendly, a shade or two more polit­i­cal, and less than half as scared of women.

I’m talk­ing about Paul, the lat­est com­edy brain­child from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead).

One of the rea­sons why it res­onated with me so much was that, stripped down, Paul really just felt like a long love let­ter from Simon Pegg to the geek com­mu­nity. (Don’t believe he’s a card-carrying mem­ber? Find Pegg on twit­ter and read every­thing him and Nathan Fil­lion have ever tweeted at each other about space­ships. You’re welcome.)

But Paul will be infi­nitely more suc­cess­ful — box office wise and review-wise, I sus­pect — than the other come­dies in this genre, such as the pre­vi­ously men­tioned geek­leetist “Fan­boys” and cult-ish Kevin Smith flicks. Why? Because Paul, at its root, seems like it’s just Pegg and Frost mak­ing fun of them­selves, and invit­ing the audi­ence to laugh either with them or at them, depend­ing on the rela­tion­ship you have with geek culture.

This isn’t to say that Frost and Pegg didn’t give the “Yes! Comic Con DID make me EXACTLY that happy, too!!”-viewers plenty of obscure scifi nerd fod­der to chew on through­out the movie. The movie was full of in-jokes dis­trib­uted evenly across areas of fan­dom, which was actu­ally sur­pris­ing to me, con­sid­er­ing Pegg’s recent invi­ta­tion into the Star Trek movie canon gave him any and all excuses to go totally Trek crazy. But, hap­pily, he didn’t leave those of us in the Lucas camp out of the fun — one of my favorite movie moments involved the char­ac­ters walk­ing into a bar and the Can­tina Band song start­ing to play by a blue­grass band, an awe­some Mos Eis­ley nod that went over the heads of all but a hand­ful of review­ers in the theater.

Also, while I had my doubts, a CGI alien chain-smoker may have actu­ally been the role Seth Rogan was born to play. Seriously.

Sure, Paul had its down­falls. *cough* Can peo­ple stop pre­tend­ing to give Kirsten Wiig things to do (although of course hav­ing her say the word ‘poop’ is always hilar­i­ous), and actu­ally give her things to do?! But, at the end of the day, when the token female char­ac­ter goes to Comic Con with our heroes and thus has to wear the token-girl-in-geek-buddy-flick Leia cos­tume, this is the out­fit they go with:

And I think we can all agree, there is pretty much noth­ing hot­ter than that.

(P.S. These are the droids you’re look­ing for…)