For those into film, I mean really into film. Like the ones who know the significance of the 1992 Sundance film festival, the importance of Pauline Kael's work and the inspiration behind the opening scene in Robert Altman's "The Player" will understand and appreciate Hot Fuzz for what is truly is. For me, Its changed the way I look at film. My 15 years of serious film viewing is now divided into two basic time periods. Before Hot Fuzz (BHF) and After Hot Fuzz (AHF). The AHF is the new era of film watching, for my eyes have been opened. Its my equivalent of the french new wave for cinephiles in the 60's. However, I can't expect movie gentiles to understand.
Most will pan it as a buddy cop comedy. Some will cite it has a who-done-it horror. And many will lump it off as simply being English high-brow pulp. Nowadays, film previews edit the life out of films. They steal away the film's soul and market it according to the ideal demographic. Take Judd Apatow's latest crude and rude meditation on male misanthropes, "Knocked Up." Previews beat out the meat and air-up the fluff. Its packaged like a harmless chick flick, but anyone who's seen it knows its nothing of the like. "Hot Fuzz" is also a victim of the soul-stealing, plot twisting manipulations of main stream film trailers. The previews display it with Reno-911-like buffoonery and muck it up as slapstick. Hot Fuzz is not slapstick. Hot Fuzz is groundbreaking.
Hot Fuzz follows the trail blazing effort of its director’s debut film, “Shaun of the Dead” by, again, creating a new genre. “Shaun of the Dead,” a parody of 70's zombie films also adds to and furthers the zombie genre. It laughs-at and applauds in the same breath. Its both pointing a joking finger and offering a warm congratulatory handshake. It is the parody tribute.
Director Edgar Wright handles this new hybrid genre with love and adoration. Its like he's saying, “Yeah, those films are good, but they could be better and here’s how. Oh yes, and here is also what is lacking.” Wright isn’t the next Mel Brooks and certainly wouldn’t make one of those awful Date Movie/ Epic Movie spoofs. In a lot of ways he’s a film pioneer. His two films that are responsible for this new genre are so terribly refined and so masterly edited that they in no way feel like mock-ups or tear-downs. And even though they target certain cliches and genres, they feel new and fresh.
Hot Fuzz, like Shaun of the Dead is ‘parody-tributing’ a particular genre: the buddy cop action flick. Another uncanny element to Wrights masterful film making is his subtle/in-your-face humor. Wright knows that most viewers who watch his films are already going to know all about the films he’s parody-tributing; so telling the viewer the exact films he’s commenting on would be cheap and unneeded, right. Wrong. Wright tells us the exact films he’s parody-tributing. And, he tells us with excess, so much so, that he even shows clips from the very scenes he’s going to later reinvent. Now that’s balls. The whole charade plays as a silly/serious gag and runs as an underlying theme to the film. The idea is that movie cops, and all the impossible situations they end up in, embed themselves in the fantasies of normal cops. These small city officers tap into their movie-cop-archive to reach their potential. Without the fictional, fake, over-the-top super-police images the real cops would never risk their mortality to achieve super-cop heroic feats. This theme also acts as social commentary to our media-obsessed nation.
Hot Fuzz plays out on several levels. Its high-body-count action thrust is balanced by its satirical wit and political cynicism. It’s Rambo meets Monty Python on steroids. Go see it.
