Hot Fuzz and Cheesecake

I think I have a problem with food. I guess the popular term is binging. Two days ago, I ate nothing and exercised like crazy. Gotta be careful about that, I am plagued by nosebleeds when I do stuff like that. As soon as I jump in the shower, the blood flows like the Hudson River. Then yesterday I ate nothing until 7:00 pm when I had a footlong double stacker BBQ rib patty at a well-known sandwich franchise. Today, still looking fit from all the training, I went out and bought a cheesecake. A little perspective on the above photo - it's only 4 inches across, and it was good. It wasn't the brick cheesecake that so many restaurants are guilty of serving, rather it was lighter than I expected. I deserved it I guess, after the day I've had. I was hit with a huge trigger today. My new recruiter is a bit thick. When I first visited her, she had me sign a lot of paperwork. A few weeks later, she called and told me that I hadn't signed the paperwork. I asked her to check again, because I knew that I had because I remember putting the wrong date on the forms. She called back and said that indeed, she had located the missing paperwork but that she had more paperwork for me to fill out. I shlepped across town to sign the papers, and when I get there she acts like she's never met me before and the paperwork turns out to be the exact forms that she said she had found afterall. What could I do? I signed the papers and held my tongue. I will say though,that this type of document management makes a global recruiting firm like Robert Half look very, very bad. Not on the surface of course, but something like that is only indicative of larger, more serious problems.

To make shlepping across town more worthwhile, I loaded some photos onto a disc and popped by a print shop to get some prints made up for my luddite friends who don't have computers. By the bye, when is Blogger going to get it's video feature out of beta? My kid is gonna be like 7 or 8 you know, the ugly stage, by the time that happens and then there won't be any videos worth watching.

Anyway, I'm used to triggers hitting my inebriated brain when I'm in the theatre, but I got hit by a huge one today at the print shop while I was quite sober. I'm going to go on record as saying that Asian girls with freckles drive me crazy. The clerk in the shop looked exactly like an ex-girlfriend except that she had freckles and a better hair stylist, oh and a nicer bum. I was dumbfounded, floating between the past and present. I didn't know what to say when she told me that the disc only showed 4 prints when in fact I had loaded several more. I didn't know how to answer when she asked me what size prints I wanted. As the queue grew longer, she grew more impatient. I just told her to do the standard prints and that I would be back tomorrow to collect the photos. I couldn't see straight at that point, and I stumbled up the escalator holding my ticket stubs, she made me order the prints in separate orders, in a ball and shoved them in my front pocket.

I got to the outside of the mall and waded through a crowd of punks handing out flyers. The only thing that shocked me back to the present was the memory that I had seen my ex-girlfriend at the grocery store a few years ago, and that she could not possibly be the same person in the photo shop. Besides, the clerk wore a name tag that was simply not my ex-girlfriend's name. What made all of this more embarrassing from a personal point of view is the fact that I'm married now, and I probably shouldn't be looking at other women. Who knows what kinds of things are in my head? I don't. Because of a curious incident in the hospital nursery when I was born, my brain hides a whole lot of not-necessarily-fucked-up shit in there and then brings it all back like a flood when I least expect it. For legal reasons, I can't exactly say that I was dropped on my head but something similar did take place. Sweating, and suffering from cotton mouth, I grabbed a bottled water from a street-teamer and decided, perhaps wrongly that I needed more sugar. I walked home and waited for traffic to die down and then made my way to the cheesecake shop. I'll be better prepared when I pick up my photos tomorrow.

Hot Fuzz is a movie that I have been looking very much forward to, and I regret not seeing it in first run. When I was in Japan, I would ask for it every time we went to the video store:

"Nani ga? Hatto Fudge? No, we don't have. Sorry, my English is not so good. Edward Wright? So sorry, no listings for that actor. Director? Still nothing. Ahhhh, Furosto? Yes, we have Nick Furosto but not that movie".

"Edgar! E-D-G-A-R you silly bastard". Of course the real reason they couldn't find it was because it didn't exist on DVD yet.

I got to watch it tonight, and it stars the abovementioned Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Timothy Dalton. There are guest spots by Bill Nighy and an amazingly well disguised Rafe Spall both of Shaun of the Dead. I had thought that this would be one of those films where you see all the funny bits in the adverts, but it wasn't. There were plenty of other funny bits thrown in. There were promos for Balls of Fury starring Chistopher Walken, Patton Oswalt and James Hong, the crusty old Chinese guy you see in so many movies playing the role of the wise master. He was in one of those Revenge of the Nerds films playing pretty much the same role as the one I saw in the Balls of Fury promo. As I watched the trailer, I thought "This is just another Dodgeball, but with ping pong". That was enough reason for me. I'll have to watch it at some point. The second trailer was for Rush Hour 3 starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Chan was on David Letterman last week and he was quite candid about the fact that he doesn't like making the Rush Hour films. Okay, when the lead bad mouths the film, should anyone go see it? Interesting question. Somebody will.

As the film opens, we see a very gaunt Simon Pegg in the role of Nick Angel, the Metropolitan police officer who is married to the job. At this point, I am struck by Angel's resemblance to my former supervisor at the brokerage. How things change! I won't say that we're friends, but we get along a lot better now that we don't work together. Angel is promoted to sergeant and is transferred against his wishes to the country where he is partnered with Danny Butterman, played by Nick Frost. The villagers are very conscious of the fact that they have won the Best Village Award several times and they have no intention of giving it up. At first, it seems that nothing happens in this little town, but Angel is not convinced. Something is always going on. Despite assurances from the squad, Angel discovers that all the accidents in the town might be related. He investigates a little further and determines that the grocer played by Timothy Dalton has killed several people to stop competition coming to the village. Rafe Spall plays one of two slacker investigators who spend the entire film making jokes at Angel's and Butterman's expense. Oh yeah, Butterman's dad, played by Jim Broadbent is the police chief of the village. Throughout the film, there are numerous references to Point Break and Bad Boys 2, two films I have never seen but I did catch a dubbed version of Bad Boys in Japan. Angel's theory about the murders is dismissed. After being attacked in his hotel room, Angel gets on the right track, and discovers that the accidents were actually murders carried out by a group of people, and that they had the blessing of the police chief. Angel is taken out of town by Danny Butterman and is encouraged to go back to London. Angel gets a bee in his bonnet and goes back to the village and clears out the evidence locker, which looks more like Enzo's gun armoury. He decides to take on the Neighbourhood Association, the real killers, on his own. You would think it ends there, after he tears apart the Association. That is why I have to say that the movie was humourous, but then gets really stupid for a bit and then gets funny again overall. There are three false endings to the killers and the fourth one finally puts a rest to it all.

There is a lot about this movie that the writers put in there for their own satisfaction, and that probably stopped the film from being better. For instance, when Angel first arrives in the town, he meets the Neighbourhood Association members at various locations. When he comes back to the town at the end of the film, he meets the members at the same locations. This type of in-joke is only for the benefit of the writers, and actually makes a mess of the shootout. Contrived. The music that plays in Skinner's car as he drives past the accident scenes might be funny once, but twice? Come on Edgar. I also did not like the latex dummies used for the decapitation scenes and the explosion. Very cheap. A cop would never believe that these castings were real, and so I had a hard time believing that a fake cop could act as though they were real.

There are a lot of bits in this film which are nods to other films, perhaps suggesting that Edgar Wright does nothing original, or that he's just a big geek. Many scenes in the film were done in the town where Wright went to school. I don't know what you call that, but I found that to be really soft. Kind of a 'Look at me, everyone! This is where I went to school. See this person? He's my acting teacher'. Geez, if Wright wanted so much attention, why didn't he become an actor?

The things I found most interesting about this film were all the things that the set dressors had to deal with, and the stuff done in post. All the CCTV footage had to be added in later, and a lot of the sound effects were very original. Set dressors are very creative people. Maybe they have some guidance from the script, but a lot of what makes the final cut is based on their own ideas. I was also quite impressed by Robert Rodriguez who wrote some of the score for this film, and only got a thankyou in the credits. Oops, nosebleed.