Word: shaun
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...Shaun (played the excellent actor Thomas Turgoose) is a solitary 12 year-old who, when not being teased about his oversized bell-bottoms, has taken to wandering by himself on a deserted beach ever since the death of his father in the Falklands War. He meets Woody - the friendly head of a local skinhead gang who take Shaun under their wing - and suddenly life starts looking up. Shaun collects friends and protectors, has fun smashing up derelict houses and even scores an older girlfriend...
...Inhabiting the movies-only aesthetic of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez (to whose Grindhouse double feature Wright contributed a funny mock-horror trailer), Wright and Pegg have topped Shaun of the Dead by trans(atlantic)planting a whole gaggle of genres: the English-village comedy, the Wicker Man strain of rural horror, any number of Brit police TV series and its main reference point, the Hollywood action film. But the thing to cherish - and I hope I won't scare you away with this - is how bloody English it is. By which I mean, bloody funny...
...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 made their more than a half-century before. Hot Fuzz has much the quirky vibe of Nick Park's stop-motion animated comedies of rural English life. Only this has so much...
...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...
...itemize the myriad Hollywood references in Hot Fuzz; the exegetes of Internet Movie Database have already done that. I'll just say that, to judge from the citations here, Wright and Pegg's favorite movie auteurs are ... themselves. The film teems with lines and situations from Shaun of the Dead. "What's the matter, Dann - never taken a shortcut before?" says Pegg to Frost before vaulting over some backyard fences; same as in the earlier film. Or, one guy: "You want anything at the shop?" Other guy: "Cornetto." Or, Frost (with inane bravado): "I'll drive." Also, on a quick...