In This Section
TV Guide Spotlight
Also on TVGuide.com
|
« Ask FlickChick
DVD Tuesday: Hot Fuzz, a Crime Spoof with Real Thrills!
Hot Fuzz courtesy Universal
DVD Tuesday: Hot Fuzz pokes pitch-perfect fun at the excesses of Hollywood cop pictures while simultaneously delivering real action. How cool is that?
This week's DVD Tuesday pick isn't profound or obscure or controversial: I just loved it.
Hot Fuzz does for American-style buddy-cop pictures what Shaun of the Dead (2004) did for zombie movies: Writer-director Edgar Wright and cowriter Simon Pegg take every cliché, every stock character, every narrative contrivance and give it a sly half twist. The result is so close to the real thing, a careless channel surfer could go right by without realizing it wasn't, while being completely, utterly hilarious — even more so on a second viewing.
Pegg plays London supercop Nicholas Angel, whose compulsive overachieving has cost him his girlfriend and his job: The girlfriend because she's sick of competing with the job and the job because everyone else is sick of competing with Angel and coming up short. So to keep peace in the ranks, Angel's superiors ship him off to quiet, ye olde Sanford, where the overzealous Angel busies himself busting locals for driving under the influence — including his soon-to-be partner PC Danny Butterman (Shaun of the Dead alum Nick Frost) — and meeting the zealous neighborhood watch whose primary concern is making sure no one messes with the town's brilliant flower beds.
Mistakenly calling in reinforcements to disarm an inert WWII-era bomb in a local codger's shed destroys whatever credibility he may have had, so when Angel detects a pattern in the increasingly bizarre and bloody accidents that keep felling upstanding Sanford citizens, fellow cops and civilians alike pooh-pooh it. But — in a nod to hundreds of bucolic English mysteries in which nastiness lurks beneath the small-town cobblestones — there's something going on and Angel won't stop until he finds out what it is.
What it is is a doozy, and before the rip-roaring showdown in a child-sized replica of Sanford, Angel has come riding back into town like Clint Eastwood, ready to right a punishing world of wrongs. And rest assured, that runaway swan the chief keeps badgering Angel and Butterman to round up and return to its pond plays a very special part in the film's ludicrously bloody conclusion.
Funny though Airplane! was, it spawned a school of broad, gross and incoherent movies that barely bother to find an overarching conceit on which to hang their witless jibes at popular movies, trends and whatever else they can sling a bodily function joke at. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are something else entirely: Wright and Pegg pitch their films to people who, like them, know and love their targets. Sure, they may get exasperated with the dumber George Romero-style zombie pictures, or lose patience with the insane excesses of, say, Michael Bay — that's where the poking fun comes in. The Scary Movie films drip contempt, but Hot Fuzz is made by fans for fans… fans who can take a joke.
Things to consider:
Favorite movie parodies? Which ones and why? Parodies you really hate?
The line between a smart spoof and the real thing can be very thin and that's part of the thrill — I think immediately of An American Werewolf in London, which has its laughs and rips them to shreds, too. Thoughts?
The appeal of genre movies is that they're all the same only different. Is there a genre you really love (for me it's horror), and what does it take for a movie in that genre to lose you?
Send your movie questions to FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!
Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!
Previously in DVD Tuesday:
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http://community.tvguide.com/thread.jspa?threadID=800073953#comments">Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also: This week's new DVD releases
|
TVGuide Links:
|
|
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 4:49 PM
|
|
It's not horror but one of my favorite parody movies is Wet Hot American Summer by the same people behind the new film The Ten. It's a parody of all those cheesy 80s camp movies that you'd see on USA Up All Night. It starts off as your usual camp movie and then just begins to get more and more bizarre and off the wall with it's humor.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 5:59 PM
|
So many genres... so little time.
I guess horror and sci-fi are my top favorites. And the "mystery" or "caper" flicks. I always love those.
But I also love Beastmaster/Conan/Hercules (think Lou Ferrigno vs. dude in bear suit)/Jason and the Argonauts movies... should those all get lumped in with "Sword and Sandal". Is is that a sub-genre of the Adventure genre... it all gets very confusing.
Could "Jungle Adventure" be a theme? I am a sucker for Tarzan/Hatari/Allan Quatermain type stuff.
Jeez, just about the only genre I can think of that I don't like is gangster flicks!
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 6:03 PM
|
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if you don't like Hot Fuzz, you have no soul and don't deserve to watch movies.
Does This Is Spinal Tap meet your definition of a parody film? If so, that's one of my favorites. I'm not sure I would put Spinal Tap or Hot Fuzz in the same category as Scary Movie though, mostly because they are GOOD movies that succeed on their own as original works, not just a string of hamfisted references to other movies. Note to the makers of Scary Movie, Epic Movie, Date Movie, et al: a reference to another movie does not constitute a joke in and of itself.
I don't have one favorite genre, though I like a lot of "genre" movies, TV shows, comic books, etc. They often have more freedom to explore huge, mythic themes and philosophies than more down to earth, realistic fare. They are literally fantastic, and are often more about our inner lives than our outer lives.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 6:52 PM
|
Regarding parody, nothing beats Airplane. Top Secret had some real good stuff too. My other favorites include The Naked Gun ("Hey Look! It's Enrico Pallazzo!") and Hardware Wars ("Martyr!").
I also like Mel's High Anxiety, Young Franken-shteen, Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs.
As for horror, the first Scary Movie is really, really good. But I also have a soft spot for the kinda dreary Student Bodies.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 7:03 PM
|
I have the DVD of Hot Fuzz to watch over the next couple of days. I am really looking forward to it and even more so after reading your review.
As far as parodies, I'm a big fan of Christopher Guests stuff. It more parodies people than a genre - unless the genre would be documentaries. I still think Best in Show is my favorite. Because I did a lot of community theatre I got a big kick out of Waiting for Guffman.
Bit of trivia: When Jamie Lee Curtis saw a promo for This is Spinal Tap in Rolling Stone with Christopher's picture, she gave his agent her phone number. That was in 1984 or something like that. They're now married with two children, of course.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 11:20 PM
|
|
I recently finished the second season of Extras, and I just loved the parodies the guest actors did of themselves! Any (older) fan of Harry Potter has got to see the episode with Daniel Radcliffe! I'm guessing that it is the episode they submitted to earn the Emmy nomination. Kate Winslet from season one was also a riot!--but be warned, the episodes are a little racy-not for kids!
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 7:57 AM
|
Do Vampires and Werewolves/Shapeshifters count as a genre? If so those are my favorite. I watch the good, the bad, the indifferent and the horrible. I have never found a movie that would turn me off a genre, although it might turn me off of a particular actor or director.
I have to admit that I love smartly done parodies, in fact I'm very excited that Hot Fuzz is out on DVD, probably will watch it this weekend with my mom. We love action movies, the more explosions the better. However, it seems that there is a dearth of "smartly done" parodies out there, in fact for most of them you have to go back to the 80's.
I have a hard time finding comedies that I like now-a-days. I don't think I've lost my sense of humor, but I don't find bodily function jokes funny, and it seems hard to find comedies that don't rely on those "jokes" anymore.
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 9:30 AM
|
I don't know if it qualifies as a parody, but I really liked "Evil Dead 2." The director, Sam Raimi, has admitted in interviews he was heavily influenced by the Three Stooges in making it and it shows....
It manages to be hilarious and disturbing at the same time. He pulled off the same hat trick with "Army of Darkness," only with a bigger budget and more effects...
I thought "Shaun of the Dead" had the same attitude when it came out which is why I liked it too.
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 12:23 PM
|
My favourite parody film has to Jake Speed - a riff on all those "men's adventure" novel series [The Executioner, Lone Wolf and such - but not The Destroyer - that one's also a parody].
Jake [as played by writer/director Wayne Crawford] is the ultimate boy scout, and John Hurt's villain is so far over the top that the two make a great protagonist/antagonist pairing.
Toss in Karen Kopins as the disbelieving sister of the damsel in distress who hires Jake [then insists on accompanying him] and a diabolically clever score from Mark Snow and the result is a howling good time [and for all the right reasons!].
I also really enjoy a number of titles mentioned above [This Is Spinal Tap, Shaun of the Dead, and your DVD pick for the week, Hot Fuzz- which I actually enjoyed more than Shaun, for some reason].
Another terrific parody/satire is Love At First Bite - the all-time best vampire movie parody [made all the better for having tanning champ George Hamilton play the vampire = gotta love that!].
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 3:23 PM
|
If you're gonna mention "Love at First Bite" then we've got to include "Young Frankenstein" too..
It did a good job of sending up all those old horror movies and even threw in a few snappy dance numbers!
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 4:12 PM
|
|
|
