Monthly Archives: June 2007

Hot Fuzz

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mv5bmjewmzy2ntgxm15bml5banbnxkftztcwmtg3mdm0mq-_v1_sy999_cr00672999_al_Here’s what I liked about Shaun of the Dead. It was made by people who completely understood the zombie movie genre. They were talented writers, which was also a necessary component, but what made it great was the deep knowledge and respect behind the talent. So when the time came for them to make a semi-parodic action movie, it was unsurprising that I’d want to see it too. A little surprising how long I waited, but these things happen.

Hot Fuzz is exactly what I expected it to be, but then it’s even more than that, too. It’s a parody of action movies, yes. But the characters within the movie, one and all, act and react as though it’s a serious movie with rational underpinnings. So that’s already a good point by itself; most parody movies are simply silly. This is an okay thing, but being serious and still very funny at the same time? The achievement is impressiver, is what I’m trying to say here. Award-winning supercop Shaun (he probably had a different name in Hot Fuzz?) is forcibly transferred to a tiny country village with almost no crime because the London police force just looks bad, next to him. The problem is, nowhere this perfect really exists; and Shaun being the cop he is, sure enough he and his new partner start to uncover the horrible secret behind the postcard perfection. And once uncovered, any good cop is simply obligated to enforce the law, no matter how much violence ensues.

And that, right there, is the secret of the film’s success. Every action movie since Die Hard has had one primary goal in mind. Push the limits. Give audiences more and louder: explosions, car chases, gun fights, blood. More! Cram in as much as possible! But make it believable. There are limits past which people will roll their eyes and make fun. Except, this being a parody, there are no such limits. So it was possible to go over the top, and then laugh derisively and go over the top of that, because it’s a parody and the people will forgive it. This is the movie Jerry Bruckheimer wishes he were allowed to make. Just wait and see if he doesn’t take it as the green light anyhow, and next summer we see the new actioniest movie of all time. I called it here.

The Walking Dead: Miles Behind Us

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51jw7ILYCsLI was right. It was totally worth going back and reading this again.

As Miles Behind Us opens, police officer and post-apocalyptic hero Rick Grimes is forced to lead his companions out of their camp on the outskirts of Atlanta and onto the open road; tragedy has recently proven that they are not safe without defensible walls. What follows is several vignettes of their search for some place of safety in an increasingly hostile world. Because, inevitably, the zombies are rapidly being supplanted as the most dangerous thing on the horizon. After all, humanity has yet to die out.

Thematically, the story is focused on reaction. Every decision the survivors make is a reactive one, and with at most one exception each of these decisions ends badly. On the personal level, every character is finally reacting to the new circumstances. Some people are becoming very hard, very fast. Some are getting lost in despair. Some are grasping blindly for love. Some are waist-deep in denial, without even a clue that they’ll eventually drown. And some, even in a world so changed as to be unrecognizable by any reasonable standard, still have secrets too terrible to be released.

On the whole, good book. The art was less good than I remembered (due apparently to a change in artist, so fair enough); the lines are not as clean anymore, which kind of works from a world-gone-bad perspective, but I still kind of prefer to have an easy time telling people apart and following the action. The people, especially, were my biggest problem. Only upon the reread did I really know who everyone was for sure. Mostly though, regardless of the art and despite the goodness otherwise, it was obviously a transition book. We know that some of these people will live to see a brighter day (or at least, we assume we do), but this wasn’t about watching them struggle to succeed so much as about watching all of the terrible things that will happen until they get back on the right track. Necessary, but ultimately (I predict) forgettable in the grand arc of the tale.