9. Edgar Wright Whips, Zooms And Tools Up
You've seen them all dozens of times; they might even be your favourite parts of his movies. Edgar Wright loves a good close-up and whip-pan, and that's more than obvious from a look at his brief but significant filmography: Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and The World's End all feature variations on the same few shots, and he even used them in his very first feature, a no-budget spaghetti western spoof called A Fistful Of Fingers. But then, if you're going to make a Sergio Leone knock-off, you have to love close-ups. Wright also owes a debt to Scorsese, Sam Raimi and James Cameron as he acknowledges in Dave Chen's excellent video essay
Edgar Wright And The Art Of Close-Ups. While he definitely inherited the techniques needed to produce the sequences, Wright may well have perfected "tooling up" sequences: they're used for comic effect in Shaun Of The Dead and Scott Pilgrim and to capture the spirit of a certain type of action movie in Hot Fuzz, and the director owes much of his films' fast paces and high energy to the brevity afforded him by the shots. Oh, and did we mention that Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play variations on exactly the same characters in 3/4 of Wright's major movies? Just sayin'.