Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Hot Fuzz is chuffing excellent . I went and saw it this afternoon and I've still got a silly grin on my face. It takes the buddy-cop movie and twists it around nicely to fit into a parochial village setting, as supercop Nick Angel is sent to a small village just before a series of murders occur. It improves on the mighty Shaun of the Dead as it's less Spaced with zombies and tries to spread it's wings a bit further. Simon Pegg is great as Angel and Nick Frost shows excellent comic timing as his sweet bumbling sidekick PC Butterman, while the great and good of British cinema (Timothy Dalton, Billie Whitelaw, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy) play a variety of small village characters. It has loads of little jokes and sight gags, before the inevitable "fuck yeah!" high-octane climax. Like Shaun of the Dead it's a humorous film that's not directly parodying it's genre but playing it relatively straight.
The only unfortunate thing about going to see the film was that first I had to sit through an advert for Norbit which, if there is any justice in the world, will continue the long line of stinkers that Eddie Murphy has spent the last decade or so producing. He plays both a nerdy black man and his fiance and all of the comedy in the film looks like it's going to come from the fact that she's a sexually assertive woman who is also fat. < gasp! > Norbet has to work out how to get rid of the monster so to be with the thin and beautiful woman instead. You have to wonder why, when obesity levels in the US and UK are rising, these fat-phobic films get made, and what appear to be openly misogynistic ones too. Obviously the film makers are disconnected from reality but where do the viewers come from, people in denial, or is it a nation of fatties able to completely disconnect what is said on screen from what it says about them?
The only unfortunate thing about going to see the film was that first I had to sit through an advert for Norbit which, if there is any justice in the world, will continue the long line of stinkers that Eddie Murphy has spent the last decade or so producing. He plays both a nerdy black man and his fiance and all of the comedy in the film looks like it's going to come from the fact that she's a sexually assertive woman who is also fat. < gasp! > Norbet has to work out how to get rid of the monster so to be with the thin and beautiful woman instead. You have to wonder why, when obesity levels in the US and UK are rising, these fat-phobic films get made, and what appear to be openly misogynistic ones too. Obviously the film makers are disconnected from reality but where do the viewers come from, people in denial, or is it a nation of fatties able to completely disconnect what is said on screen from what it says about them?
Labels: actors, Eddie Murphy, fat, Hot Fuzz, movies, Nick Frost, Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg, Spaced
