It's so much fun to be proven right.
Recently, a good friend of mine served up props to me for being the first among our circle to realize that Jaime Pressley had incredible talent. I first noticed it way back when I saw her very first movie Poison Ivy: The New Seduction. Out of everyone in that misbegotten project, Ms. Press was the only one with even a hint of genuine talent, and was giving her all to the thankless lead role of Violet, a psychotic babe hell-bent on revenge for past wrongs.
The next glimmer of true talent came during an episode of the(thankfully) short-lived series Nightman, in which Jaime played a grown woman with the simplistic mind of a child. It might seem like no great feat, until you consider that it takes someone of unnatural intelligence to play a simple-minded person. People of limited mental capacity are easy to parody, and if an actor doesn't do their research and pull all the right tricks out of their hat, that's all their performance will amount to. Compare Rosie O'Donnell's hideously bad performance as a mentally slighted person with Dustin Hoffman's brilliant turn in Rain Man, and you see what I mean. Jaime Pressley falls into the Hoffman category of act-ing chops, and it's nice to have the foresight acknowledged.
So it was that a couple of years ago, I wandered into a screening of the now-cult classic Shaun of the Dead--billed as the first romzomcom (romantic zombie comedy) and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two slackers caught up in zombie armageddon in the middle of London. I was talking to a friend afterward, and remarked that the comedy timing of these two real-life friends on screen was so completely on the mark, that they could very well be the heirs to the legendary comic duo Abbott and Costello.
With the release in theaters(and now finally on DVD) of their smash followup Hot Fuzz, I am once again being proven right, and it's still a good feeling.
Hot Fuzz stars Pegg once again, this time as Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a London cop who is exceptional in every aspect of his job: urban pacification, riot control, defensive driving(and cycling!), use of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. Angel is so good, in fact, that he's making the other officers he works with look bad, and they're not too happy about it. It comes about that with the squad's blessing, Metro Chief Inspector Kenneth(Bill Nighy, another Shaun alumnus) banishes Angel to the countryside town of Sandford, which is the most quiet, least busy, least dangerous town in all of England.
Of course, being that this is a parody of action movies and cop buddy films, things don't stay quiet in Sandford. Shortly after being introduced around his new division--once again finding resentment from the small town officers, who feel Angel has arrived only to show them up--and being partnered with dim-witted PC Danny Butterman(Frost), bodies start piling up, all supposedly the result of "accidents".
Please allow me a small correction: to say that Hot Fuzz is a parody of cop films is like saying the Mona Lisa is just a pretty nice painting. Hot Fuzz is at once a send-up, a joke-within-a-joke(it pays attention to every single cop movie cliche, while simultaneously giving them the finger) and quite honestly, is one of the best comedies to come along within the last 5-10 years. And like the best movies, it pays strict adher-ence to its own internal logic, even if that logic is just slightly off its rock-er. When Angel thinks he's uncovered the real villain behind all the wickedness(supermarket owner Simon Skinner, played by still-dashing former 007 Timothy Dalton), the reasoning behind why fits; it just happ-ens to be wrong. The real reason is absolutely outrageous, but it still
holds up. Brilliant.
Hot Fuzz is one of those rare movies that you don't want to just tell people about...you feel a need to pass it on. I'm not one to loan out my DVDs unless I've known someone for 10 years or more, but only a couple days after buying my copy, I loaned it out to someone because I felt they needed to see it. It's just that kind of movie.
When Shaun of the Dead was released on DVD, the extras on the disc were insightful and entertaining peeks into the behind-the-scenes of both production and the story itself. They were also just downright funny in their own right. The duo of Pegg and co-writer/director Edgar Wright have delivered a whole truckload more extras this time around, and all are well worth it--especially the Fuzz Facts you can play along with the movie; a type of subtitle which instead of dialogue, displays info on little known facts about the shooting of the film(including the real meaning behind the town of Sandford's name). There is also a very amusing compilation of Wright, Pegg and Frost's U.S. press tour for Hot Fuzz's initial theatrical release, which proves these guys are genuine funnymen in keen possession of the standard wry British wit.
With the release in theaters(and now finally on DVD) of their smash followup Hot Fuzz, I am once again being proven right, and it's still a good feeling.
Hot Fuzz stars Pegg once again, this time as Sergeant Nicholas Angel, a London cop who is exceptional in every aspect of his job: urban pacification, riot control, defensive driving(and cycling!), use of weapons and hand-to-hand combat. Angel is so good, in fact, that he's making the other officers he works with look bad, and they're not too happy about it. It comes about that with the squad's blessing, Metro Chief Inspector Kenneth(Bill Nighy, another Shaun alumnus) banishes Angel to the countryside town of Sandford, which is the most quiet, least busy, least dangerous town in all of England.
Of course, being that this is a parody of action movies and cop buddy films, things don't stay quiet in Sandford. Shortly after being introduced around his new division--once again finding resentment from the small town officers, who feel Angel has arrived only to show them up--and being partnered with dim-witted PC Danny Butterman(Frost), bodies start piling up, all supposedly the result of "accidents".
Please allow me a small correction: to say that Hot Fuzz is a parody of cop films is like saying the Mona Lisa is just a pretty nice painting. Hot Fuzz is at once a send-up, a joke-within-a-joke(it pays attention to every single cop movie cliche, while simultaneously giving them the finger) and quite honestly, is one of the best comedies to come along within the last 5-10 years. And like the best movies, it pays strict adher-ence to its own internal logic, even if that logic is just slightly off its rock-er. When Angel thinks he's uncovered the real villain behind all the wickedness(supermarket owner Simon Skinner, played by still-dashing former 007 Timothy Dalton), the reasoning behind why fits; it just happ-ens to be wrong. The real reason is absolutely outrageous, but it still
holds up. Brilliant.
Hot Fuzz is one of those rare movies that you don't want to just tell people about...you feel a need to pass it on. I'm not one to loan out my DVDs unless I've known someone for 10 years or more, but only a couple days after buying my copy, I loaned it out to someone because I felt they needed to see it. It's just that kind of movie.
When Shaun of the Dead was released on DVD, the extras on the disc were insightful and entertaining peeks into the behind-the-scenes of both production and the story itself. They were also just downright funny in their own right. The duo of Pegg and co-writer/director Edgar Wright have delivered a whole truckload more extras this time around, and all are well worth it--especially the Fuzz Facts you can play along with the movie; a type of subtitle which instead of dialogue, displays info on little known facts about the shooting of the film(including the real meaning behind the town of Sandford's name). There is also a very amusing compilation of Wright, Pegg and Frost's U.S. press tour for Hot Fuzz's initial theatrical release, which proves these guys are genuine funnymen in keen possession of the standard wry British wit.
It is a testament to the fan base this trio is building, that when I walked into my local Best Buy at 2:00pm the day this was released, the large display rack was almost picked dry, as if by vultures. Hot Fuzz is highly recommended, so make certain you get your copy now--good budactcom films come around only once so often.
Official Archives of LanceReviews...
DVD Review: Hot Fuzz
Something satisfying to own, rather than giving cash to the Box Office Overlords...
