The Distancer: Thursday, December 3, 2020
DAY 266: Hot Fuzz
Happy Friday Eve! (Or most likely just “Friday” given how late I’m sending this out tonight…)
It’s a good thing Apple Podcasts doesn’t do a Wrapped like Spotify because mine would be something like “Sad Loser Actually Listened To Every Episode of The Daily.” Recently, I’ve gotten really into Grant Wahl’s new podcast “American Prodigy: Freddy Adu.” It’s one of the first major pieces of media that Adu, the soccer phenom tipped to be his sport’s equivalent of LeBron James at just age 14, has participated in — and it’s a really interesting reflection. I don’t even follow the sport regularly and still find it a worthwhile listen, especially as Wahl examines his own role in perpetuating an ultimately unsustainable hype cycle.
Anyways, back to COVID — The New York Times put together an interesting tool that might be worth playing around with as an expectation-setting exercise. They can help you estimate and visualize where you’d be in line to get the vaccine.
If you are fortunate like I am to be towards the back of the line, it’s worth reading this harrowing personal essay from BuzzFeed reporter Nidhi Prakash who’s suffering from “long COVID.” This sounds awful:
“The best way I can describe how I am now, at the end of this strange, horrible year, is that I wake up most days feeling like I drank a six-pack of beer the night before. Washing the dishes, doing my laundry, or walking a few blocks leaves me in need of a sit-down. It’s a sort of gritty feeling in my body, a woolly feeling in my brain. My breathing is up and down; when I'm tired, I forget words midsentence. I need at least 10 hours of sleep most nights. And if I push too hard, it’s not just laborious — it’s actually painful, from my lungs to my head to the stinging in my eyes.”
Now, what you came for…
DAY 266: Hot Fuzz (available on HBO Max)
I’d been a little iffy on Edgar Wright as a brand-name director for years … that is, until I saw his latest film, Baby Driver, which was so good that it inspired me to go back and revisit his entire filmography. I’d given Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End second chances before but never returned to Hot Fuzz, his 2007 crime caper. Wow, was I missing out!
Hot Fuzz is smart, stylish and subversive – all the things that mark Wright’s best cinema. He can successfully play with genre like few other working directors, and this re-teaming of Wright with comedic muses Simon Pegg and Nick Frost makes his most seamless blend.
The adventure starts as a fish-out-of-water comedy when the impressively efficient London Metro Police officer Nicholas Angel (Pegg) gets transferred to the sleepy country town Sandford. He’s used to his presence being necessary to enforce the law in the big city. Here, Angel finds that the police have made themselves largely ornamental. (Imagine!) There’s a strong amount of social trust in the community, and the existing police officers take a hands-off approach to handling any misbehaviors and misdemeanors they observe. Not Angel, though, who takes thwarting underage pub drinking as seriously as foiling a terrorist plot.
But lurking under the blissfully bucolic façade is a cabal that threatens the townspeople by exploiting their trust and naïveté. They’re certainly lucky to have Angel around for this, although he’s hamstrung by the provincial local police chief (Jim Broadbent) and his aloof son Danny Butterman (Frost) … who just so happens to be Angel’s partner. Danny’s chief preparation for the job, aside from his lineage, is watching lots of ’90s action movies. As it turns out, that proves most helpful for combating the menace facing Sandford.
Wright pulls off the tricky task of paying homage to a number of influential films (Bad Boys, Point Break) while humorously sending them up and one-upping their antics. His comedy goes far beyond the lazy Scary Movie spoof; Wright works into the nature of his narrative how people interact with film and how it tints their view of the world to hilarious ends. Furthermore, he’s not just cribbing an incident or a feel from the genre and calling it a take on them. He’s mimicking their aesthetic with loud, smashing cuts and big pyrotechnics — just appropriately adjusted for the real world.
P.S. — Today’s recommendation courtesy of a 2017 blog post.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall