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For the Greater Good
Apr. 21st, 2007 05:25 pmThat's a recurring line in a movie i saw today, Hot Fuzzstarring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. Simon also brought us Spaced (tv series), Shaun of the Dead and numerous other tv series and appearances. Simon plays Nicholas Angel, a top rated London Met cop who is exiled to a small Hertfordshire village because he makes his peers look bad, that's how good he is! He thinks, eats, lives and dreams his job to the detriment of his relationships and friends. Landing in a small town where the worst crimes are an escaped goose or a man who was trimming someone else's hedgerow is the nearest thing to hell for poor Nicholas. His new partner, the Chief's hapless son Danny, dreams of being an action cop like the ones in his vast video library but nothing ever happens in Sanford. Until..... an awful lot of people are found dead of seeming accidents, violent and horrible accidents. Nicholas senses there's more to this but his chief keeps putting him off but that's not the end of it. Just when Nicholas is about to give up, he is attacked and the game is on. During the course of the movie, he learns there's more to life than the job but he learns where the balance lies. He's always going to be good at his job but he will learn when to leave it behind. Danny turns out to be a pretty fair police officer himself in the end.
But this movie is a comedy, not an action/horror movie even though there's lots of the first and bloody splashes of the second. It's played more as cartoon violence though it can be a bit graphic. This isn't a movie for children, the violence and the language will be enough for most parents to keep the kids away. There are a lot of funny scenes, some of it black humour, some of it just absurd and some of it is pure classic Simon Pegg. He's a great straight man and Nick Frost is the perfect sidekick. The rest of the officers in the Sanford Police station were all individual "characters" from the lone female officer who's always making suggestive comments to the bored desk clerk "no one tells me nothin'!", to the older cop with an accent so thick you can't understand him. There are the two smart ass detectives who greatly resent the Londoner and give him grief at every turn. And then there's the civilian from the Neighbourhood Watch, anally reviewing all his video monitors and moaning about a busker of a "living statue". The villagers are no different. The newspaper reporter is looking for tabloid headlines but he can't spell. The pub owners seem pretty jovial, and the supermarket manager, played with utter glee by Timothy Dalton, is superbly slick and arrogant. Marvellous! It's worth seeing just for all the secondary characters! The action editing is a bit hard to follow but i think it's meant to be based on the hot police action movies. I liked this movie a lot.
After the movie, i walked around playing with my camera. I actually wore the batteries right out but that's partly because i was back and forth into the menus and in and out of the zoom etc. That tends to wear on the power quickly. I now have to wait for the battery to recharge to get the pictures out of the camera because i think i tossed out the card reader i used to have. It didn't work with the sony card anymore and it may or may not have worked with the SD card slot, but i won't know now.
The sun is out, the sky is cloudless and blue. I walked across by Citadel Hill, passed the construction site of the new high school which looks enormous, over to where the skate park is by the Commons and then down along the Commons to where i could catch a bus home. From the bus, i walked along the lake by my house and here i am with slightly sore feet and a bit of windburn on my cheeks but i really enjoyed the fresh air. I'll go through my pics later and maybe tomorrow post the better ones. It was all experimentation anyway, various settings, zooms, effects. All were hand held, even the digital zoom shots and nearly all had the image stabilizer on.
ETA: Photos are Here No retouching, as is from the camera. No cropping though i think a couple will be later on. I think when i'm out on a sunny day, i may prefer slightly underexposing photos. The ones taken at the lake are part of a series of exposure bracketing and the under exposed ones are the ones i like better.
But this movie is a comedy, not an action/horror movie even though there's lots of the first and bloody splashes of the second. It's played more as cartoon violence though it can be a bit graphic. This isn't a movie for children, the violence and the language will be enough for most parents to keep the kids away. There are a lot of funny scenes, some of it black humour, some of it just absurd and some of it is pure classic Simon Pegg. He's a great straight man and Nick Frost is the perfect sidekick. The rest of the officers in the Sanford Police station were all individual "characters" from the lone female officer who's always making suggestive comments to the bored desk clerk "no one tells me nothin'!", to the older cop with an accent so thick you can't understand him. There are the two smart ass detectives who greatly resent the Londoner and give him grief at every turn. And then there's the civilian from the Neighbourhood Watch, anally reviewing all his video monitors and moaning about a busker of a "living statue". The villagers are no different. The newspaper reporter is looking for tabloid headlines but he can't spell. The pub owners seem pretty jovial, and the supermarket manager, played with utter glee by Timothy Dalton, is superbly slick and arrogant. Marvellous! It's worth seeing just for all the secondary characters! The action editing is a bit hard to follow but i think it's meant to be based on the hot police action movies. I liked this movie a lot.
After the movie, i walked around playing with my camera. I actually wore the batteries right out but that's partly because i was back and forth into the menus and in and out of the zoom etc. That tends to wear on the power quickly. I now have to wait for the battery to recharge to get the pictures out of the camera because i think i tossed out the card reader i used to have. It didn't work with the sony card anymore and it may or may not have worked with the SD card slot, but i won't know now.
The sun is out, the sky is cloudless and blue. I walked across by Citadel Hill, passed the construction site of the new high school which looks enormous, over to where the skate park is by the Commons and then down along the Commons to where i could catch a bus home. From the bus, i walked along the lake by my house and here i am with slightly sore feet and a bit of windburn on my cheeks but i really enjoyed the fresh air. I'll go through my pics later and maybe tomorrow post the better ones. It was all experimentation anyway, various settings, zooms, effects. All were hand held, even the digital zoom shots and nearly all had the image stabilizer on.
ETA: Photos are Here No retouching, as is from the camera. No cropping though i think a couple will be later on. I think when i'm out on a sunny day, i may prefer slightly underexposing photos. The ones taken at the lake are part of a series of exposure bracketing and the under exposed ones are the ones i like better.
