Hello, Hello, I'm Johnny Cash

Each Day, A Film
January 25th 2012 (Retrospective)

In some ways I dream of the time when the (Retrospective) will disappear, but given my current rate of return and dispersal, it's probably going to be a little while.

Let's get Edgar Wright out of the way, though, with Hot Fuzz.



This is kind of an odd one for me, because part of me loves it, and part of me doesn't, which makes for an interesting combination.

It's like I love it, and I hate it.

If only there were some easy way of describing that relationship.

This is just me talking, and it's just my opinion - shared, most likely, by nobody else - but if Shaun of the Dead was accidental perfection, Hot Fuzz, in retrospect, feels like a studied attempt at recreating perfection and improving on it.

Look at it this way; the Pegg / Frost / Wright trio make funny, beaufiful things. But they made them without worrying about people seeing them as such; Spaced was cult-ish comedy, but it worked - for the most part - just as much for people who got the references as people who didn't. Likewise Shaun of the Dead; if you knew all the zombie film references, good for you, but the central chemistry was such that even if you didn't it was an enjoyable buddy rom-com that just happened to have the living dead involved.

Hot Fuzz, by contrast, is brilliant, and I'd watch it again and enjoy it again, but every now and then it's like a fifty-gag pileup happening at the same time as a dramatic whirlpool brings in as many of Britain's famous actors to one place at one time. Seriously, the amount of British is occasionally cloying even for me as, well, a British person. It works, because all the actors know exactly what they're doing and how to work out where they fit in the hierarchy, but...

... If it's a sign that I'm getting old that it feels a bit much, then I'm getting a bit old. It's like someone stuck the pages of the Who's Who of drama - Edward Woodward, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton - to the pages of late 1990s/early 2000s comedians - Joe Buxton, Steve Coogan, Martin Freeman - and kind of threw all the results together.

At the time, I prosleytised the film, selling it to all and sundry that I knew, and some of them - who I wouldn't have normally expected it of them - went and saw it, and enjoyed it, and I felt a little vindicated, which is a word that comes up a little too often in this series, but run with it.

Now, looking back, and rewatching, I kind of wonder how they made it work; but that's a discussion for another time.