Recent viewings

Hot Fuzz (2007). I didn't think I was going to like this movie. However, at the behest of a couple of Friends-o-Fiend, we went to see it, and I was pleasantly surprised.

This may be partly because the movie's promotional trailers, if one watches them absentmindedly, seem to be promoting a conventional cop/action flick. You know, the one where the cop who Does His Job Too Well gets shuffled into a new position because he's making life too difficult for his official superiors, and then Makes Good anyway because he's SuperCop. But instead, to my pleasant surprise, it's a rather clever, if monstrously over-the-top, satire of the genre, in which humorless SuperCop Nick Angel, after being transferred against his will to an improbably idyllic rural village.... ah, but why should I spoil the surprise by revealing the Dark Secrets which his dogged police work uncovers?

The movie starts slowly, but by the time it becomes clear what Angel is up against, the visual puns and allusions to classic action movies are flying almost as fast and furious as the bullets in a John Woo film, with scenes lifted from everything from spaghetti westerns to Point Break to Walker, Texas Ranger, and absurdly frenetic editing straight from the CSI playbook. The hyperviolence may be a bit much for some viewers, especially one or two scenes that literally have blood spurting across the screen by the bucketfull, but for those who can stomach absurdist violence and have even a passing familiarity with the action-movie genre, it's a very funny trip.