Hot Fuzz

If you've never heard of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, chances are you're not a twenty-to-thirty something geek. The pair - along with writer/director Edgar Frost - are the current wunderkids of cult British comedy. Their style of playing straight for the biggest laughs began with the TV sketch show Big Train (which this reviewer is still trying to track down on DVD), continued with the freaky-geeky sitcom Spaced, and reached international fame with rom-com-zom Shaun of the Dead, a loving parody of zombie films, told from the point of view of your average, ordinary computer nerd just trying to get to the safety of his local pub.

The trio's follow up is Hot Fuzz, another loving tribute, this time to small-town English murder-mysteries (ala Agatha Christie), but more particularly to Hollywood cop buddy films, such as Point Break and Bad Boys (heavily and hysterically referenced in the film). Pegg plays Nicholas Angel, a brilliant and highly-trained young police constable sent packing from London because his skills are showing up the rest of the squad. All of a sudden he finds himself a sergeant in the middle of Sandford, the kind of quiet little village favoured by Tidy Town judges worldwide. In fact, Sandford is facing its annual Tidy Town evaluation when weird and gruesome accidents begin happening. It's up to Angel - and his new partner Danny Butterman (Frost) - to work out whether the accidents are just that - unlucky accidents - or something far more suspicious.

The premise of something sinister lurking behind the quaint village facade is hardly new, but it's the Shaun of the Dead formula of mixing absurdity with straight delivery, topped with a healthy measure of OTT violence that brings life and great laughs to the concept. Pegg and Frost are decent actors too, and they're buoyed by a who's who of British character actors - cameos by Bill Nighy and Steve Coogan, a wonderfully sad-eyed Jim Broadbent as the local police chief who wants a quiet life, and Timothy Dalton as a fantastically smarmy local businessman who always seems to be a step ahead of the police.

Central to the film is the relationship between the honest, upright superstar Angel, and the tubby, Cornetto-chomping Danny, who yearns for big-city action but experiences it only through his enormous collection of crap Hollywood blockbusters. Danny is the son of Broadbent's police chief Frank Butterman, so his story arc becomes more interesting as he learns some painful truths about the town, and is forced to make the required "tough choice".

The film is quite horrendously violent, with the "accidental" deaths coming about in increasingly brutal ways. After what could be legitimately called a slow beginning, the film's final 45 minutes is an orgy of violence in the best cinematic tradition. But for those on the squeamish side, it always remains video-game violence - realistic, but not real. There's plenty of blood, but the victims always get up again. It's a parody after all, and the constant references to famous action film sequences and jokes about the genre keep you laughing even when cringing. My only complaint would be the film's ending does suffer from a spot of the Peter Jacksons - in that it seems to have several endings. But again, they're parodying the genre, so it's hard to tell if that's a fault in the editing room or was planned all along.

Pegg, Frost and Wright say they try to make films that they themselves would want to watch. It's a simple theory, but it's amazing how often it seems to be forgotten in Hollywood. Let's hope Britain realises what geniuses they have in the trio, and prevent them being lured away by the bright lights of Tinseltown. It won't be to everyone's taste, but if you're a comedy fan, Hot Fuzz is a joy.

Note! Cate Blanchett actually has an uncredited cameo role in Hot Fuzz, which just proves how similar Australian and British comic sensibilities are. See if you can spot her!

The Heartbreak Kid

Gawd, what is it with female teachers fancying their male students? What on earth can possibly be attractive about a 17-year-old boy - apart from those things that perhaps, a 15-year-old girl might find intriguing? It certainly confuses me - having seen Notes on a Scandal and now the Brisbane Arts Theatre's production of The Heartbreak Kid ( the first show of their 2007 "Early Week" series), I'm still none the wiser. However, I can say this is a decent production, and worth a look if you like Australian plays. Richard Barrett's cultural coming-of-age story is probably best known as the Australian film starring Claudia Karvan and Alex Dimitriades. Having never seen the film, nor the TV spin-off show Heartbreak High, or even a previous production of the play, I'm in no position to provide comparisons - which could be fortunate or unfortunate, depending on where you're coming from.

The Heartbreak Kid tells the story of Nicky (Keil Gailer), a 17-year-old boy of Greek heritage, who develops a crush on his new teacher, Christine "Papa" Papadoupolis (Belle Reid) at an inner-Sydney high school. Papa is only young herself (22 or 23), and seems to appreciate Nicky's fine form, especially when he's playing soccer. But as a teacher, any kind of relationship is obviously out-of-bounds, so Papa has to cope with tutoring classes of unwilling students for their HSCs, all the while fending off Nicky's puppy dog advances and her own feelings. That's really about all of the plot I can tell you; not because I'd be giving the rest away, but because there really isn't that much else to talk about - there's no real subplot despite some promising starts with Nicky's parents having a lotto win and a subsequent fight he has with his friend Steve (Nick Trenthan) and cousin Con (a show-stealing Shayne Grieve), which never gets fully resolved.

Director Kat Kiorgaard has obviously relished the play's 80s setting. The costuming and soundtrack in particular are excellent, although I got the feeling that perhaps a little bit too much attention had been paid to the musical choices. The device of linking a song's lyrics to the scene just played was clever to begin with, but as the drama escalated, I felt it undermined some of the on-stage tension, particularly when some of the songs made the audience laugh. The play certainly had its light and humourous moments, but sometimes it felt like a comedy with bits of drama thrown in, rather than the other way around, which I believe was probably what the playwright intended. This was exacerbated by the stirling efforts of the supporting cast, who - though hilarious and well-acted - really were just comic relief. Only Daren King as Graham, Papa's concerned fellow teacher, brought any kind of gravitas to his role.

For the most part the pacing was consistent, although a scene in the first half where the boys get ready for a night out while listening to some hard rock went on for a bit too long, as did the subsequent scene in the nightclub. The set - fitting in as Early Week shows must with the Main House stage set-up - was very well used, and the lighting appropriate.

Without a doubt the best scenes were the moments between Papa and Nicky, as the young teacher struggles with her feelings and responsibilities, and the teenager puts on all the bravado his hormonally-supercharged body can muster. These are nice dramatic pieces - Reid and Gailer should be congratulated (although as one audience member told me afterwards: "They need to keep their volume up!").

The play aims to tackle the struggle immigrant Australian families face to "fit in" with the rest, and while there are cursory nods to this (Nicky and Con's attempt to get a school soccer team going, Papa has parents who want her to get married and have babies ASAP), they're never explored to the depth that might give greater understanding to the reasons why Nicky and Papa are attracted to each other. I believe the film goes into this in more detail; which would make sense, with film obviously having the luxury of time and space that theatre lacks.

Overall though, this is a well-told tale of misplaced feelings of love - even if I personally have no idea how such feelings could exist in the first place!

Production seen: Sunday 18 March
Running until 3rd April.
www.artstheatre.com.au

Scoop

I am the first to admit I am a Woody Allen novice. I was born after Manhattan and Annie Hall, often regarded as his masterpieces. Fair enough, they very well may be – it’s just I haven’t seen them. Nor have I seen Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanours, Husbands and Wives, nor any other films in his bulging back catalogue. The guy’s obviously prolific. But there’s an old adage that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

The first Woody Allen movie I sat the whole way through was last year’s Match Point, and that’s two hours of my life I sent packing straight to hell to rot forever. I abhorred the movie – I thought it was pretentious, badly-written, poorly-acted, full of plot holes and weak characters, and extremely sexist in its portrayal of women. Others hailed it as his return to form. Again, fair enough, given his output in the late 90s, perhaps it was. All I can judge is his latest efforts.

Scoop is Allen’s follow-up to Match Point, and like that film, it’s set in England. However, this one’s a comedy – although I declared Match Point to be laughable it was technically a dramatic thriller. Scarlett Johannsen (I’ll get to this perky pin-up later) plays Sandra Persky, a New York journalism student studying in London. She gets the scoop of a lifetime when the spirit of recently deceased investigative reporter Joe Strombel appears to her while she’s being “disappeared” as part of a magic show. She then enlists the help of the magician Sid Waterman to help her find out whether well-connected politician-to-be Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman) is in fact a serial killer.

From the start this film is full of plot holes and terminally unfunny moments. The gag of the dead reporter sneaking off Death’s boat as it crosses the River Styx is cute, but it’s not enough to sustain the gag, especially once Strombel starts appearing wherever he likes, only to state half-way through the film that ‘Oh no! This is finally it!” when his usefulness as a plot device was obviously finished. Sandra’s burgeoning romance with the aristocratic Lyman is Mills & Boon unrealistic – she jumps in front of him wearing a swimsuit in all the right places and then bang, he’s falling for her. Sandra has all the verbal diarrehoea of Allen’s magician character (which is just Allen really). That helps to establish a bond between the two - especially after she starts telling Lyman he’s her father – but after a while is simply annoying. The movie tries to twist and turn to make its story make sense and have some sort of dramatic climax, but the timeline is all wrong, there’s a half-resolution three-quarters through the film and it just doesn’t stack up.

As for Hugh Jackman – why, dear God, why? It says something about the film when Hugh’s performance in the outrageously camp Van Helsing is more entertaining that this. He’s not terribly bad, he’s just given nothing to work with except a few well-cut suits and an accent that could melt butter. And melt butter it does, as Sandra, pretending to be someone else named Jade, falls further in love with the man she’s supposed to be spying on, who could in fact be a serial murderer. I honestly don’t get what everyone else seems to see in Scarlett Johannsen. Sure, she’s a looker, and harks back to the glamourous days of the 40s and 50s when full-lipped, full-hipped women could be movie stars. She was promising in Lost in Translation, boring in Match Point, absolutely woeful in The Black Dahlia, and little more than cute here in Scoop. There are worse actors out there, but I just don’t think we should be hailing her as the next Cate Blanchett just yet.

I began this review by stating my novice status in the world of Woody Allen. There are probably rules somewhere that state you can’t be a movie buff without having seen at least five of his “masterpiece” films. But all I can judge are the two movies of his I have seen, and I’m afraid they don’t leave me with much desire to go track down his other work. But if you do want to watch a Woody Allen comedy, may I suggest hiring out one of his older efforts, as at least you might get to see him firing on all channels, instead of the hit and miss affair that is Scoop.