mellicious | Sunday at the movies (Reply)

We went to see Hot Fuzz this afternoon, which happily for us (if somewhat inexplicably) showed up at our movie theater this weekend. (Almost everything else showing on the eleven screens was one of the Big 3: Spiderman, Shrek, & PotC, on several screens each.) We liked Hot Fuzz quite a lot , although we thought it was a tiny bit too long - it was about 2 hours even and would have been better for being 10 minutes or so shorter. The screenwriters (who did double duty as the director and the star) had obviously watched every cop movie of all time, in preparation for this, and they manage to send up a really large number of them at one time or another. We finally gave up on figuring out what bits had to do with which movie - although two that it called out in particular were Point Break (which I've seen - once, years ago) and Bad Boys II, which I've never seen at all. in between all of that, they manage to fit in a murder mystery that you do come to care about, and enough character development that you do come to like the characters, too.

That's as coherent as I can get right now, in my Ambien-induced haze. Before I pass out, I will say that we also watched the Disney Around the World in 80 Days, that came out a couple of years ago, and we liked it too. Putting Jackie Chan into it was something of a stroke of genius, really - it liivens things up quite a lot. I didn't much like what I've seen of the old David Niven version - it seemed very stuffy, and what I've read of the original book seems a bit stuffy too. So throwing in Jackie Chan doesn't espcially seem like all that blasphemous.