Friday, February 16, 2007
Review: Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz is the new film from the makers of Shaun of the Dead. This time out Simon Pegg plays a very serious big-city cop assigned to a sleepy English village where nothing ever happens. Hot Fuzz isn't as good as Shaun of the Dead. Bugger.
Now, every other movie geek website has raved over it, and most of the mainstream press have followed suit. There are half a dozen gags a minute, the plot, when it kicks in, actually works, there's not a dull or empty corner in the film and the performances are spot on and extremely lovable. All the things you could ask from the follow up to Shaun are there, so there's no question of this being a failure. The problem comes from Hot Fuzz being a much more ambitious film and that it, for all the good will in the world, doesn't achieve those higher goals.
You see: The plot sees the big city attitudes being shoved against a country village attitudes for its drama and its comedy. These are the poles of the conflict, between which the characters will move. In Shaun you had Pegg's slacker character slowly starting to take responsibility for his life and grow up, with a zombie invasion just happening to be the catalyst for change. The movement is clear and the resolution satisfying. The zombies fit perfectly into suburban London.
But in Hot Fuzz we also have Nick Frost's Constable Butterman who is obsessed with American buddy cop actioners like Point Break and Bad Boys 2 and idolises Pegg's character because he thinks his life is really like those movies. So now we have a distinction between American and English depictions of the law too. Then bodies start turning up, the victims of a horror-movie style boogeyman wearing a Grim Reaper style cloak, and the film turns into a slasher-style horror movie set in the tea-and-biscuits English countryside. Finally it all goes action movie as Pegg's character shoves on the sunglasses and loads up on guns to take out the bad guy.
How does becoming an American movie cliche resolve the big city vs village issue? It doesn't. What does playing with the horror genre have to do with Pegg's character development? Not much, to be honest. The ease with which Shaun married the genre-play with its character arcs is replaced with a slightly frantic mash-up.
There's enough stuff here for at least two films and the rushing between action movie, buddy cop movie, horror movie, whudunnit and an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, only with jokes, proves that maybe they should have made two or more films with the material.
The surprisingly large police force in the village is mostly comprised of one note characters. It's usually a good note, but the attempts to keep them all in play results in them popping up, giving their one joke, then popping off again. It gets repetitive and it doesn't make us give a shit about them when they have to make an important decision in the third act. Equally, giving time to these side characters gives us less time with the important ones.
Now, you know those two shots in Shaun when Pegg groggily walks out of his house to the corner shop to pick up a Coke and a Cornetto and then back again? Those shots give us a sense of place and of the characters behaving naturally within it. It settles the audience in and lets them feel that they know where they are, which in turn gives the moment when things start to change for the worse more impact. There is nothing like this in Hot Fuzz. So busy are the film-makers about packing things in that we have no time to settle in to the village - relying on that machine-gun style editing they used in Shaun (when he brushed his teeth and went to the loo) to move us along. You need the quiet bits to help the audience feel the noisy bits, especially as the film is supposed to be dealing with the difference between the quiet of village life and the noise of the city.
Another problem is that Pegg's character - the obsessed, by the rules cop - isn't actually funny. He's a serious character - a straight-man - yet he's not really the butt of too many jokes once they get to the village as the time is spent mocking the yokeley locals. His over-seriousness is his main character flaw, it is that which he must overcome and, as such, is a comedy vacuum for the first half of the film.
Equally there's no relatable, or 'normal' character here, with everyone being either being daft villager or obsessed cop. Such a character may not be essential for comedy but it bloody well helps, and Shaun had a great one. Good for Pegg to play a different character but, I'm afraid, bad for the movie.
Because when he does lighten up in the second half the film opens up. He's never less than likable when he's all serious, but when he gets drunk he's absolutely lovable.
And that seems like a good description of the movie. The more ambitious ideas in this film do not hold together, but when it just resorts to having fun, its hilarious. When they're diving through the air with two pistols a la John Woo or drop-kicking old ladies the film couldn't be more enjoyable. Equally, when they are just doing straight slasher scenes, the obvious delight they took in setting up the kills comes through clear as day. Maybe it doesn't all hook up thematically, but when the film-makers say 'fuck it, shoot-out!' it is impossible to resist the glee with which they throw themselves into it. For all its ambitions to be a real character piece or a deconstruction of genre (and for all my bitching about quoting movies), Hot Fuzz is at its best when doing cop movie cliches, only a bit silly.
I could nitpick further, or give spoiler filled descriptions of the bits I actually liked, but I shall leave it there. It is does not disgrace Shaun of the Dead, but it does not match it, despite all those involved having noticeably improved their craft. It is scuppered by an over-enthusiastic but slightly confused desire to shove a few too many of their favourite things on screen at the same time. It's hardly the worst cinematic crime, though and I should make this clear - this film is worth seeing just for one of the truly awesome, and awesomely bloody, kills. Everything else is gravy.
7 out of 10
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Labels: Hot Fuzz, Reviews, Shaun of the Dead
Continue reading Review: Hot FuzzWednesday, February 14, 2007
Quoting Movies
Having read enough blogs to know what they are for now, and in an attempt to actually write some content for the mighty The Fake Life, I've decided to bitch about little things that really annoy me. This time round: Quoting from movies.
Case 1: I met a bloke in a pub recently and he could quote Aliens. All of it. Including sound effects and computer read-outs. It took him over an hour.
In his defence, he was young, a student, and smoking marijuana, and maybe he did not know any better. Still - what a twat. It was obvious he thought this was quite the coolest thing in the world. To quote the whole of Aliens was his idea of an achievement.
"Are you really going to quote the whole of Aliens?" I asked him.
"I bet you can't!" He replied, with the savage wit of someone who can quote the whole of Aliens.
Still, he was young, and young people, particularly students, have the perspective and good taste of week-dead moles. But him being young only brings you to the tragic conclusion that he has probably spent most of his adolescent life watching Aliens - time that could have been spent sniffing glue, masturbating or, at least, watching Alien 3.
Case 2: An absolutely lovely girl I knew from university would speak almost entirely in quotes from the 80/90's British TV comedy shows she grew up with - Blackadder and The Mary Whitehouse Experience being particular favourites. Whatever the conversation was about - politics, food, sex - it would end up with: 'Like the beard! Gives me something to hang on to!' or 'that's like that bit when Robert Newman said that thing about (shitty Brit indie shoegazer band) Ride!'. This had the double effect of ruining the shows through endless, and usually badly timed, repetition and of absolutely killing the conversation. The quote adds nothing to the debate. It has no content, and leaves the other person doing all the heavy-lifting, essentially making the conversation one-sided, which is exhausting and, ultimately, boring. This girl I knew was absolutely lovely, but it was tough to get to know her because, if all she was was a string of quotes, then she was nothing much at all.
When called on why she just endlessly quoted old comedy programmes she replied with 'because they're so funny!'. They were funny, but you quoting them isn't and, as a result of your endless quoting, they aren't anymore. I had hoped she would grow out of it, or at least start quoting Spaced, but the last time I saw her she had fallen in with others who liked quoting those same old shows too. Oh well.
So why do people do it? It can be fun if you are around like-minded people, it can be a way of breaking the ice amongst strangers with shared cultural experiences, and it can be a useful shorthand for expressing a complex thought quickly. But these are not the normal uses of quotes we tend to come across, are they? Be honest.
Equally, when you are young, repeating things parrot-fashion is a useful learning tool for learning more complex forms of expression. When you are an adolescent latching on to stuff you find 'cool' can be useful for helping to define who you are in a confusing world. Being a teenager is often a process of trying on different personas until you are confident enough to be yourself. But what happens when you leave your teens/university and you keep on doing it? What is going on if, instead of quoting interesting, meaningful stuff (like 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!') you are just bleating out 'Game over, man! Game over!' every two minutes?
I believe various stages of functional autism is to blame for some of this but it is too easy to dismiss those that annoy us as being borderline mentally disabled.
The Aliens guy thought he 'knew' Aliens better than me, because he could quote it. Quite apart from the foolishness of cock-waving contests (especially with me), it's the idea that simply knowing the surface detail of a film is what is important that is the problem. You know those movie sites that point out the most ridiculously tiny continuity errors in movies? The same thing.
I believe that watching a film in order to memorise the lines means you aren't actually watching the film. Film is about the rhythm of the scene, the context of the dialogue, and the emotional space the characters speaking the lines are in. I would suggest just mouthing along to the words is to miss the whole point. You are simply not 'in' the movie. Equally, films that pander to these habits, shoving in obviously cool or overly purple dialogue into every scene, seem horribly fake and forced. Smokin' Aces is a good, recent example of this, but 80's action films that kill the bad guy with a variation of the 'fuck you, motherfucker' kiss-off line are probably the gold standard.
Or how about the idea that movies are to be used to prove superiority over someone. What about what the movie means? Or how it feels? Or how about using our emotional reactions to movies as a starting point for real communication with others who have had emotional reactions to that same film? I know this may sound a bit touchy-feely, but come on, these are supposed to be works of art exploring the nature of the human condition. Even Aliens is supposed to be about motherhood, dammit.
But limiting film discussion to quotes merely stunts this chance to develop our own reactions to things with noise and other peoples' words. It reduces discussion to regurgitation and communication to competition, and it bores me to tears.
Special ire goes out to those I have caught deliberately quoting lines of something they know no-one else has seen just to confuse those not in on the joke. Here we have a good example of the insecurity behind a lot of this quoting leading to utter obnoxiousness.
And, as a side point, this is not all limited to film-geek circles. Quoting the odd Shakespearian line is very different from declaiming entire soliloquies to anyone that will listen.
Nor is it restricted to dialogue. Take the technically amazing band who just reel off riffs and licks from their own favourite bands. These are beta-people. Followers. People who are using other peoples' words because they have none of their own. The point is brought out especially well in music as it is a very personal, emotional means of artistic expression, if they are just copying someone else's style they are using second hand emotions, and they sound hollow and fake in comparison. Take any 'new' sound - Grunge, Britpop, Emo, Post-punk or whatever you like - the first band to break it will sound exciting, as they are making the noise they really want, and were doing it before it was fashionable. Then listen to the second generation of bands, the ones that copied their sound from the radio, and the difference is huge. All scenes die out this way - the music simply gets worse.
Bringing it back to movies, take Tarantino, then take every crime movie after Tarantino. They are just poor copies, faded at best and completely missing the point at worst. Quoting movies is really no different.
The problem at the heart of this is that quoting movies is done because the people doing it simply don't have anything to say. Quoting a movie is not a conversation about movies. It clogs up the air with noise and stops any real conversation from happening.
And all of this brings us to the imminent release of Hot Fuzz. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg fill their work with quotes from other movies. Shaun of the Dead owes its very existence to George A Romero's Dead trilogy (I'm not counting Land of the Dead because Shaun was made before it was released and because it is shit [Ed. Note: We're all still waiting for you to explain that one, boyo.]). So what, then, distinguishes this movie from the likes of Scary Movie - the parody genre of movies that are the cinematic embodiment of this 'movie quoting' problem I have discussing?
That it is actually funny is one answer, but another is that they are using these quotes and references for an actual purpose - to move the story along, to express character or, you know, to tell a joke. In a phrase that's already popped up on on a couple of the movie websites - they speak fluent geek. The problem is the danger that they will turn, albeit accidentally, into those twats that use their geek references as a secret code - with the 'outsiders' being completely locked out of the experience - and with us lot who get the references being completely unaware that we are being obnoxious and completely baffled when these films are not embraced by everyone else.
Now I know there's no such thing as a real original idea and that all artists use those artists that came before to build on, but I still wonder whether Wright and Pegg, however good they get at 'speaking fluent geek', might be better off coming up with their own ideas?
With these questions in mind I'll be off to watch Hot Fuzz tonight and, probably, several more times before you American suckers get in sometime in April, so I will be happy to be proven wrong. Equally, I shall be trying to get as many non-geeks to watch Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead with me to see what their reactions really are. I'd be happy to have any stories you have of watching these films with those poor benighted fools who didn't grow up watching zombies eat Joe Pilato's intestines.
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Labels: Aliens, Bitching, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead
Continue reading Quoting MoviesSunday, January 28, 2007
1 (900) HOT-CHAT
The crazy and lovable bastards behind what could potentially be the best comedy of the year wanna chat your hot, fuzzy asses off tomorrow. Be there.
Chat LIVE with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost!
Log on at the Working Title site on Monday, January 29th at 10:00 AM US Pacific / 1:00 PM US Eastern / 18:00 PM GMT to join a live web chat with the team behind Hot Fuzz.
Early word is that Hot Fuzz is at least as good as Shaun of the Dead, which pretty much makes it Top Ten material automatically. I sure hope so. Luck Brits get it on February 16th (Andrew and Charlie, I hate you) while we lowly Americans must wait till April 13th.
And simply because it's awesome, check out the Hot Fuzz trailer yet again... in HD!
Note: Dial 1 (900) HOT-CHAT at your own discretion. The Fake Life will not be held responsible for whatever sexual atrocities you may or may not encounter on said calling service. You pervs you.
Source: Working TitleDiscuss this and other Fakery on our message boards! Continue reading 1 (900) HOT-CHAT
