The Tribal Mind

<em>This Is the End</em>: (From left) James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride.

This Is the End: (From left) James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel and Danny McBride.

This Is the End, not to be confused with The World's End, has been showing now for five weeks and has sold half a million tickets. And since it's the kind of flick that must be seen by hip people within a fortnight of launching, I'm not spoiling anything when I reveal some of its characters wind up in a better place.

It's the latest attempt to explain a fundamental question of life, the universe and everything: what happens after death? It's also the latest film to tackle another biggie: what would you do if you knew civilisation would be destroyed in a matter of days?

The answers are: 1. The afterlife is a non-stop party where everybody wears white and has their wishes granted; 2. Take every drug you can lay your hands on, make a sequel to Pineapple Express, and worry about whether it's appropriate to lust after Emma Watson (the grown-up Hermione from Harry Potter).

Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray star in the movie 'Groundhog Day.'Supplied for publicity purposes 1997 by Foxtel.

Over and over: Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

The World's End - not to be confused with Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, End of Days, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Armageddon or Melancholia - deals with neither of those questions. It's a mildly amusing geek comedy about aliens invading via a British village, but it doesn't fit our theme today, which is Movies That Make You Ask ''What Would I Do If This Happened To Me?'' (let's call them Big Idea Flicks - BIFs, for short).

The End of the World is also a mildly amusing geek comedy, but it does fit our theme, because it assumes the apocalypse has come, all good people have been sucked up to heaven, and the planet is left with slackers, stoners and sinners, which means a lot of Hollywood actors, who gradually fall victim to rough beasts unleashed from hell. It makes you laugh and, amazingly, it makes you think.

There are some similarities to Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which went straight to DVD because Keira Knightley was tackily miscast as the love interest of Steve Carrell, but is worth renting for the tragicomic scenes of people pointlessly trying to continue with normal life.

My favourite BIF is Groundhog Day, which causes the audience to ask ''What would I do if I had to repeat the same experiences over and over?'' It reached so deeply into our soul it contributed a phrase to the English language. Google ''groundhog day experience'' and you'll get 549,000 results.

Next month Richard Curtis, writer-director of Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, launches a kind of remake of Groundhog Day called About Time, which changes the question to ''What would I do if I was able to repeat the same experiences over and over?'' About Time differs from its inspiration in two ways: 1. The repetitions are for shorter periods than 24 hours; 2. The protagonist is in control of his backwards leaps, while Groundhog Day's Bill Murray was helpless (giving About Time something in common with Click, a BIF in which Adam Sandler got a remote that let him rewind his life).

About Time resembles Love Actually in starring Bill Nighy (as the scene-repeating father of the scene-repeating protagonist) and The Time Traveller's Wife in starring Rachel McAdams as the love interest (played in Groundhog Day by Andie MacDowell, who was the love interest in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

To deter you from making comparisons with The Time Traveller's Wife and McAdams' other time-travelling film Midnight in Paris and her other repeated-experience film The Vow, Curtis has given her a daggy haircut. And to distract from comparisons with his earlier movies, he has given no role to Hugh Grant.

These tactics don't work. You are constantly reminded of other BIFs. Sometimes going to the cinema can't help being a groundhog day experience - and all the more fun for that.


Mix'n'match the concepts with the BIFs

Match the ideas with the Big Idea Flicks discussing them:

1. What if the world was going to end in a few days?

2. What if you could alter the past to affect the present?

3. What if there are alternative universes where the events we know happened a little differently?

4. What happens to human consciousness after death?

5. What if your experiences were illusions fed into your brain by an outside force?

a) Looper; b) What Dreams May Come; c) The Golden Compass; d) Back to the Future; e) Last Night; f) The Terminator; g) Mulholland Drive; h) Run Lola Run; I) The Lovely Bones; j) Sliding Doors; k) Beetlejuice; l) Donnie Darko; m) Defending Your Life; n) The Matrix; o) Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me; p) Truly Madly Deeply; q) The Butterfly Effect; r) Jacob's Ladder; s) Melancholia; t) Inception; u) Seeking A Friend for the End of the World; v) Total Recall; w) Vanilla Sky; x) Source Code; y) Existenz.

To check your answers, and suggest other films, go to