Monday, April 23, 2007

Hot Fuzz


I learned two things when sitting down to write this post. 1. It is probably not a good idea to try find images while at work by doing a Google image search for "Hot Fuzz." 2. After catching up with the news, in the context of last week's events in Blacksburg, most of the Hot Fuzz promotional images seem kind of inappropriate. It seems like Hot Fuzz had a really unfortunate release date. Like Boondock Saints, a fun but violent movie that went completely unnoticed in theaters since it was released just after the Columbine incident, Hot Fuzz will probably suffer greatly as a movie filled with guns released just four days after the worst gun murders in American history.

I wouldn't recommend this movie by any means to anyone still feeling emotional about the whole Virginia Tech thing, and it's also on occasion extremely bloody (but fortunately it's very fake looking and obviously for laughs) but with that out of the way, Hot Fuzz is a whole lot of fun. Director/writer Edgar Wright, writer/star Simon Pegg, and star/goofball Nick Frost reunite from previous efforts Shaun of the Dead and TV series Spaced (which aired at some point on BBC America, but I've never seen it, though I hear good things). I'm not a fan of zombie movies in general, so many of the parody aspects were lost on me, but I still liked Shaun of the Dead quite a bit.

When I heard they would be taking on an action film next, I was pretty excited, and I was not at all disappointed with the result. The movie lovingly ridicules the action movie genre, with far less snark than most parody movies, making dozens of references to classic and not-so-classic action movies (and probably dozens more I didn't pick up on), finding plenty of room for crude humor (but in a way that breaks neither character nor the narrative) and cool actors (Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy (Shaun of the Dead, Pirates of the Caribbean), Martin Freeman (the original The Office, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), and almost impossible to notice cameos from Peter Jackson and Cate Blanchett). It's just a ton of fun from start to finish, and when it comes out on DVD, enough time will have passed that anyone who might like a somewhat crude, dark, action/comedy should check it out.

1 comment:

chiefbroad said...

Spaced is currently re-running on BBC America, and I am now seeing the series from the beginning. It is indeed pretty brilliant, and hilarious.

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