Word: fuzzed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Here's just the movie for the weekend after the Va. Tech killings: a gun-love comedy about a rural town where, by the end, nearly everyone has been mowed down in a tsunami of bullets. Watching Hot Fuzz at a big screening Thursday night, I laughed along with the audibly delighted crowd of film-industry folk. But I couldn't help wondering whether general audiences would find a bloodbath cop-movie parody an appropriate mechanism of escape from the recent headlines...
...Fuzz, written by the English team of Simon Pegg (the movie's star) and Edgar Wright (its director), who did the zombie comedy of manners Shaun of the Dead. That film was a Molotov cocktail of genres: an Anglo-American combustion of romantic Brit comedies like Notting Hill and the U.S. zombie genre so robustly exhumed in Night of the Living Dead. Or, as Wright and Pegg pitched it: "Richard Curtis shot through the head by George Romero...
...Then the wrongful death toll mounts, and Nick reluctantly takes on Danny as a junior partner in crime-solving (the snooty detectives call them "Crockett and Tubby"), and Hot Fuzz finally gets as agitated as the movies it's making loving fun of. By the end, Nick has morphed into a double Eastwood: the cop-Clint of Dirty Harry and the Western-Clint (in a three-way shootout) of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...
...Fuzz takes me back to the days of America's rampant Anglophilia - a three-decade stretch from Alec Guinness' Ealing comedies of the immediate postwar era through the rise of Peter Sellers, Beyond the Fringe and the Beatles (whom we saw as essentially a musical comedy team) and culminating in Monty Python's Flying Circus. A lot of American kids got a lot of their sense of humor from these inspired sources; and so, on the evidence, did Wright and Pegg. Shaun of the Dead was shot at Ealing, and takes its skewed vision of English community from the films...
...Fuzz may have no tropes as elegantly preposterous as the pair of 2-min. tracking shots in which Shaun walks to the local convenience store and back home again while managing to ignore the increasing evidence of zombie activity. But that genre demanded longer takes and a slower pulse; zombies are no sprinters. The new film has to be zazzier, even when nothing much is going on. Hut Fuzz gets many of its laughs the laying on of a Joel Silver hyped-up editing tempo and a macho drum-machine soundtrack to punctuate the interrogation of underage tipplers...