Film review: Hot Fuzz

Spaced was one of the best sitcoms of the last 10 years. Shaun of the Dead was one of the best British films of the last 5 years (and the best rom-zom-com so far). What about Hot Fuzz?

Hot Fuzz is the best British action comedy in recent memory and certainly of this year. But that’s not a review, that’s a catchquote for a poster. Let us continue discussing the film.

Simon Pegg is Nick Angel, a supremely dedicated and talented policeman working in London. However, he is TOO good, and his superiors (played fleetingly by Martin Freeman, Steve Coogan and Bill Nighy) decide that he’s showing them up and cart him off to the peaceful and picturesque village of Sandford. There, he has to put up with people losing their swans and looking after the village fete. He is partnered with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), an oafish chap who only became a policeman to be with his dad, the Inspector (Jim Broadbent). Things are quiet, but the high rate of ‘unfortunate’ and grisly accidents leads Angel to believe that there is something hiding underneath the quiet exterior of Sandford …

The plot description sets up the essence of the film – what would it be like if you had a big action movie, such as Bad Boys 2, in the middle of a West Country village? It is this that is the film’s strength and weakness. Something like this has never been done before, and this is a success at what it aims to do: the juxtaposition of the over-the-top explosions and quippery of a Bruckheimer flick with the gentle Englishness of the police force with no guns (normally), both homaging and parodying the rules of the genre with some sharp comedy from the team that brought us Shaun of the Dead. However, that is all it is; there is none of the depth or resonance of Shaun, the satirical subtext that makes it linger long after the film is over and makes you want to watch it again. Hot Fuzz is an enjoyable way to spend two hours, especially in the cinema, but you aren’t left with anything more. The credits and an interview suggest why: Pegg said that it was Edgar Wright’s idea, and Wright’s name is the first in the writing credits. Wright is a visually exciting young director, who had the (admittedly) good idea of having a film that was ‘Miss Marple directed by Tony Scott’. It allows him to show off his talents, take the piss out of US action comedies and then have his cake and eat it by also doing his own version, all the while delivering a fun-packed and British cinema experience. But he doesn’t provide the organic quality that made Shaun the better film.

Despite the negative words in the last paragraph, Hot Fuzz is a fun piece of entertainment. Wright directs the action scenes well (although he seems to overuse the fast cut trick that he used in Spaced and Shaun, so that it becomes wearing rather than cute in the former) and it is a blast to see John Woo action in the English countryside. The film perhaps takes a long time to get to the guns-blazing conclusion, but you are kept entertained by the celluloid magic of Pegg and Frost. Their innate chemistry just sparkles on screen, especially as Pegg has to essentially play the straight man for most of the time (which is a bizarre concept for one of our warmest and funniest comedic actors of the moment). Frost runs away with the comedy (‘She got fingered up the duck pond’) and Pegg lets him.

There are so many other good actors filling the film that it’s impossible to single any of them out for special praise. Olivia Colman (from Peep Show), Kevin Eldon (from many things, like Jam or Big Train), Bill Bailey, Julia Deakin (Marsha from Spaced), Adam Buxton (from The Adam’N’Joe Show, who has the most spectacular death seen in a British comedy), not to mention the wealth of British actors in the film: Timothy Dalton is great as the misdirection Bad Guy, and Stuart Wilson and Edward Woodward and Paddy Considine and Paul Freeman and the aforementioned Broadbent. It is so bizarre, in a good way, to see a film with so many familiar faces even in small roles.

As a film fan, you can play spot the reference in this film as much as any episode of Spaced. Apart from directly copying two bits from Bad Boys 2 and Point Break (both of which had to shown within the film to fully explain them to the audience), there are asides to Chinatown and The Omen and Men in Black and The Matrix and The Shining and … well, you get the point. I hope they do a similar homage-o-meter from the Spaced DVD when this DVD comes out.

In the end, though, this is still just an action comedy, albeit a thoroughly good one, able to stand with some of the better the genre has to offer, such as The Rock or Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. An entertaining film but devoid of that something extra that makes a film truly great. Still, that’s not too bad, is it?

Rating: DAVE

Book review: Fortress of Soiltude

Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem is the story of Dylan Ebdus, the son of an artist (who constantly works on a hand-painted film that no one will ever see, but supplements his income by painting covers to sci-fi books he doesn’t even read) and a free-spirited woman who leaves them when he was young after forcing them to live in Brooklyn and go to public school (comprehensive) like she did. The first two-thirds of the book is the story of Dylan’s youth in Brooklyn – his life (in the 1970s) in the neighbourhood, how he befriends Mingus Rude, son of the famous soul singer Barrett Rude Junior, how he survives being one of three white kids at school. During this time, he is given a ring that provides the wearer with the power of flight, which leads to he and Mingus trying to fight crime. Later, he goes to a better school after doing well at his exams, hooking up with other clever white kids and seeing less of Mingus. The book turns when Mingus goes to jail for manslaughter for killing his grandfather, a former preacher who had gone to jail himself, who was threatening Mingus’ father (who had succumbed to doing nothing more than cocaine and falling asleep), and Dylan goes off to college. In the last third of the book, the narration changes from third-person description to first-person retelling, as Dylan related how he was dropped from his college, went to Berkeley, then became a music journalist, leading him to pitching a film about the Prisonnaires to Dreamworks. During this time, he sees his father awarded at a convention for his artwork, and visits Mingus in jail for the first time, where he considers springing him through the use of the ring.

The book is written very lyrically, the knowledge and research is so exact as to make everything more real, and the characters are very three dimensional. The details and the authenticity makes the book come alive, even though it is mostly about a young boy growing up in Brooklyn. As with life, it doesn’t necessarily translate into gripping reading, and the book ends without any real resolution or reason. The odd the change in narrator two-thirds of way into book is quite disruptive; the first part feels very autobiographical (with distancing effect of third-person narrative allowing clarity and depth) but then feels bit more pretentious with the first-person narrative.

(In educating myself about the author and the novel, I learnt a new word that describes the book: bildungsroman – ‘novel of education’ or ‘novel of formation’ is a novel that traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character from (usually) childhood to maturity. The German language has a word for everything, doesn’t it?)

I kept reading the book as I felt an empathy with a lot of the aspects it was recounting (I was lightly bullied at school, but nothing compared with Dylan; the comic book references: ‘You said you would read X-Men as long as Chris Claremont wrote it.’; the soul music and birth of rap). However, although I cared about lead character (mostly when he was a child), I didn’t have the overwhelming urge to pick the book up and read it, as it seemed to go on forever (which is the only way to capture a life).

It comes back to the literature versus a story arguement for me; I didn’t have a passion to wade through the prose to discover what is unfolding, compared to the overwhelming urge to find out the outcome of, say, the Thursday Next stories or the His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s a dense read, with small print and lots of pages, but it’s not about the amount of text; I loved reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and that was 1000 pages of dense, Victorian-style prose. I felt that, however eloquently Lethem captured the sense of reality of Dylan’s existence on the page (which he does – he is an excellent writer with a talent for description and an elegant turn of phrase), I wasn’t reading a story that DEMANDED telling, a story that HAD to be told to other people. I can only conclude that I prefer the story-related directness of genre books (I am currently reading Charlie Huston’s Already Dead and I am having a whale of a time) to the exploration of human existence and emotions. My loss, I guess.

Theatre review: Pinter's People

Harold Pinter is a former Nobel Laureate and revered institution of the theatre. I have never seen one of his plays. All I really know about him is from references in comedy (specifically a Stephen Fry reference to ‘Pinteresque pauses’ and the Derek and Clive sketch about two critics discussing Pinter using swearing in his plays). Therefore, the opportunity to sample his wares via a selection of sketches and monologues performed by a quartet of top comedy actors, including the wonderful Bill Bailey (discussing it with the Guardian here), seemed too good to resist.

Pinter’s People is a collection of 14 rarely seen sketches and, after watching it, I can understand why. The reviews haven’t been particularly kind, although the critics seem to hold the actors and the directors to account rather than the material. I found the opposite. If it weren’t for seasoned comedy actors wringing humour out of situations that wasn’t in the words, there would have been very little to bring merriment.

The majority of sketches seem to have an idea as the source of comedy rather than the actual sketch itself. Other sketches seem to be merely conversations that Pinter has overheard and thought were amusing and decided to write up as a black comedy sketch, but failed to show why he thought they were funny in the finished product. Two sketches brought some satisfaction. ‘That’s Your Trouble’ had some delightful bits of comedy in the interplay between Bailey and Kevin Eldon, and ‘Night’ was a wonderful scene between Bailey and Geraldine McNulty as an elderly couple trying to recall how their relationship begun, before remembering that they are still together for a reason, in a beautifully touching ending.

For some reason, the sketch ‘Victoria Station’, between Bailey as a mini cab controller and Eldon as a driver, got huge laughs, despite it being evident from early on that Eldon’s character has done something deeply unpleasant. People were still laughing at the end even when it is obvious that he has kidnapped a woman. The final sketch, ‘Last To Go’, was the very definition of the phrase ‘Pinteresque pauses’, as Bailey’s food vendor and Eldon’s newspaper seller have a ridiculously protracted conversation about nothing whatsoever. If it hadn’t been for Bailey doing his trademark facial tics in the pauses, it would have felt interminable.

Sometimes, when watching theatre, I wonder if I’m missing something because I haven’t studied drama at university to understand it. This was one of those occasions. I was glad that the reviews didn’t like the show, even though I didn’t want it to be bad, but it at least confirmed that I am not a complete idiot. This episode also suggested that I should avoid Pinter plays in the future, no matter how highly esteemed his work is held.

New web page, new manifesto

Hello. I’m Clandestine Critic. You may remember me from previous blog posts, such as ‘Sabbatical’ and ‘Goodbyee’. I like to post my thoughts for a time, stop, start again, stop and then make references The Simpsons.

I’m back.

I hope.

I’ve been away. I needed some time away to think about what I wanted to do with this blog, and why I started it in the first place. During that time, I didn’t stop writing about my interactions with pop culture; I just didn’t blog about it.

What I discovered during my time away was that I wanted to keep blogging, AKA sharing my opinions with the world, but that I shouldn’t be doing it in the form in which I started.

Before I started this blog, I had maintained various, now defunct, blogs that were different sorts of writing, from link blogging to diary-style pieces to reviews. However, upon discovering the wonderful comic blogosphere, I became inspired to start this blog with its emphasis on comic books, with some films thrown in for good measure, because of the amazing feeling of camaraderie and the sharing of a passion I witnessed, and I thought I could add to in some way.

Almost from the beginning, the feeling from writing this was great. I didn’t receive huge numbers of visitors – that wasn’t the goal – but people did read my blog and commented, and the folks who did were a friendly bunch, constructive and complimentary. The honeymoon period.

The problem came when I realised that I didn’t know exactly what was the manifesto of this blog. I didn’t have a specific direction or angle. This led to a lack of focus and drive, leading to times when I stopped blogging because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to do be a comic book blog, when that really wasn’t what I should have been trying to accomplish.

This is not to say I don’t want to write about comic books; I still enjoy reading and writing about the stories I have read. But it is not the sole focus of my blogging desires, and there are plenty of entertaining comic book blogs written by better writers than I for your consumption.

Another problem was in the writing. As a writer, I make a good editor. One of the reasons for blogging was to improve my writing. I’m not sure if I was succeeding, but I couldn’t tell any more. I hope to spend more time on my writing, to ensure some quality to what is posted here.

Another aspect that concerned me was the nature of my reviewing. (I’ve always liked the name Clandestine Critic, but I am in no definition a critic in the truest sense of the word. My aim is to review, but I’ve got used to the name now …) If you peruse the archives, you will notice a lot of justifying and rationalising of my opinions, apologising for what I thought. This doesn’t make for fun reading. I realised what I was doing when I read this item by the Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, particularly these comments:

That is because Searle is a real critic. He wrote, in Dr Johnson's phrase, "not dogmatically but deliberately". He did not shrink from forthright judgments, did not hedge them with nervy, apologetic statements to the effect that this was only his opinion. Well, of course it was, but there is no "only" about it. Opinions are fun and stimulating; opinions ignite counter-opinions and thought - but only if expressed in undiluted form. They have no force, no interest and no value if their holder starts timidly anticipating objection.

It seemed to strike a chord with me, particularly the ‘nervy, apologetic statements’. He is right; the thoughts in this blog are all my own opinion, obviously, and I shouldn’t be afraid of expressing them. Otherwise, what is the point of the blog? My writing should be deliberate but not dogmatic.

What has all this reflection led to? I have decided that I should stop trying to be a comic book blog, and start trying to be a blog that reflects me – talking about all my pop culture passions: comic books, cinema, comedy, books, theatre, museums, all aspects of my life in a reviewing manner but with strength of my convictions.

The next step was to give myself a boot up the behind to ensure that I would give the new direction the chance it deserved. So, when Blogger offered the option of custom domain hosting, I decided to go for it. I bought my own domain name – voila, the new URL:

www.clandestinecritic.co.uk

(Those who might be reading this via the original address should be automatically redirected to this URL by the powers of the internet)

I’d like to say welcome to the new (hopefully improved) Clandestine Critic. Please stick around. Have a read. Let me know what you think of the new direction. Even if the comic books are not the primary focus anymore. You won’t find me as part of the new comic weblog update, as I don’t feel I belong there, but I’ll be here, trying to maintain a regular schedule of posts – I think three a week to start – while I develop some confidence and some content.

Let clandestine criticism commence. Again.