Hot Fuzz Warms My Loins

I love Hot Fuzz. Hot Fuzz is the best movie I have seen in months. It is one of those rare, nigh-perfect films you rarely get the pleasure to see.

Not even being forced to watch an airplane-edited version on a tiny screen cocked at an obscene viewing angle thanks to a 2nd-placed wrestler reclining in the seat in front of me could diminish my enjoyment of such a film.

(There should be a picture of the Sandford Police Department logo here but I can't figure out how to work the Blogger photo import feature because, well, my father is a radiologist and his sperm was exposed to an inadvisable amount of radiation over the years. Do I have to paint a picture? If the picture ever appears below this tangent, it's all down to Neon and says nothing about my hypertextual acumen)

For those not indoctrinated into the Brotherhood of Wright and Pegg - Hot Fuzz is the latest creation from writer/director Edgar Wright and writer/actor Simon Pegg since their last film, Sean of the Dead. I first came upon their work in the form of a British TV show called Spaced. It is quite possibly the finest show to ever appear on any TV anywhere, and Wright directed every episode. Before that they worked on a sketch comedy show, Asylum. You don't care.

Hot Fuzz takes London's top cop and throws him into the middle of the countryside; his excellence is making his fellow Metropolitan Policemen look bad. But despite the new serene environs in the village of Sandford, country life proves no dawdle for this hardened ... blah de blah. The plot's not hugely important, it simply serves as a vehicle for satire. It's the blended-together send-up of most every buddy-cop movie you've ever seen, one which highlights the ridiculous idiocy of the genre whilst somehow avoiding it. Although Hot Fuzz makes fun of movies from Point Break to Lethal Weapon to Bad Boys (even discussing the films as it mocks/worships them), I believe it to be a superior film to any of those which it ridicules.

Immediately after watching it on the airplane, I wrote in my journal, "This satire of cop flicks is in itself an homage - but how can it dutifully recycle so much filthy garbage without picking up a whiff? Maybe there's something about proper scrutiny of a subject which requires distance - distance enough to cross that fine line between sheep shit and sheer brilliance. All right, so it's not that fine a line. Point being, you can't see your own eye without looking in a mirror. You exist, while your reflection is a two-dimensional facsimile; flat, inert, lifeless. Somehow, in reflecting on the films from which it derives, Hot Fuzz reveals their paper-thin patheticity through its own multidimensional brilliance."

Wright and Penn must be celebrated for knowing EXACTLY the sort of thing an audience wants to see, and even how they want to see it. We've all seen spikes on the tops of buildings. We've all wondered what would happen if that spike broke off and landed perfectly, point first, on top of someone's head. We get to see this happen with not just a spike but a spire of stone off a church tower, straight and deep into a reporter's chest. And he staggers before he falls. Brilliant. I'd call that the best, or at least most gratifying, moment in the film if there wasn't a bit involving a flying kick directly into an old woman's head.

That kick comes at the film's crucial moment: the part where Pegg's super-cop character, as if acknowledging the type of film he's in, finally succumbs to the devil-may-care, details-be-damned, Hollywoodized notion of coppery. Instead of rules and regulations he turns to sunglasses, violence, over-the-top gunplay and one-liners, just as the film turns from an indictment of buddy-cop films and all their erroneous depictions to a straight-up, balls-out Bruckheimer/Bay/Donner-esque action extravaganza.

How does it do it? Let's go back to the journal:

"Strangely, after over an hour of highlighting the ridiculous, unrealistic or just plain stupid aspects of the genre, Hot Fuzz dives right into the thick of it (it being 'bullshit', or 'cheesiness' if you're British). Hot Fuzz is the shit that rises to the top. How does it beat the originals at their own game? By shitting cheese better than any of them. Or rather, by out-shitting their cheese. Or its cheese is shittier. Or riper."

"I think it's time for my medication."