"Hot Fuzz"

This is the new film by those Shaun of teh Dead people. In this one Simon Pegg is a tough, over-achieving cop from the city who is sent to a quiet town in the country because he is so good that he makes the other cops look bad. But all is not so quiet as it seems in the quiet rustic haven etc. etc. So the story unfolds, partly as a rural murder mystery thing but also as a kind of macho bullshit cop story. As with Shaun of the Dead, part of the fun comes from the pastiching of genre conventions and part from the film-makers generally chortlesome approach to stuff. In terms of the former, I especially liked the way the film has the same kind of barely sublimated homo-eroticism as many of those big-ass cop films. The aping of big action film in-your-face foley work was fun too.

There has been a lot of discourse around how the big shoot out at the end has to reproduce Jerry Bruckheimer style on a fraction of the budget. That it does so so convincingly makes you wonder what Mr Bruckheimer does with his huge budgets.