Hot Fuzz is the new British comedy film starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, last seen together in Shaun of the Dead. I was particularly interested in seeing Hot Fuzz because it was filmed on location in Wells, very near to where I work in Somerset. I like to play the spot the location game when watching British films, as well as playing:
The spot Bill Nighy and Jim Broadbent game
How long before Bill Nighy turns up on screen in a British comedy? In Hot Fuzz it’s exactly four minutes. A little longer for Jim to make an appearance, but he’s there within half an hour.
The spot the obviously themed soundtrack game
Wells is doubling for a fictional country village, with the usual fetes and village greens. The soundtrack includes Village Green Preservation Society and Village Green by The Kinks. Hmmm, not very original.
The quickly decide on the type of plot we’re in for game
Hot Fuzz explores the fish out of water scenario. An outstanding London policeman is promoted to Sergeant but relocated to work in the country. There he must adjust to the quieter pace of life and the eccentric ways of the locals. In many ways it is similar to the TV series Life on Mars, with the strange country life being just as alien to the hero as being stuck in 1973.
My games aside, I enjoyed Hot Fuzz very much until about half an hour from the end when the film decides to dance through as many film genres as it can. It’s a very funny comedy, but it just goes mad. There’s horror suddenly thrown into the mix, with violent murders taking place, and for a moment I thought it was going to descend into either The Wicker Man (there’s even a cameo from Edward Woodward) or The Hills Have Eyes. Eventually it settles for being a buddy-buddy cop film with cartoon gun battles. Not bad, but I would have preferred more of the gentle comedy and more use made of the excellent supporting cast who include Paddy Considine, Kenneth Cranham and Billie Whitelaw.
Apparently the team who brought us Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are working on a third film already. They haven’t revealed what genre they’ll be tackling, although I’ll still be playing my games when I go to see it.
‘It’s a book,’ I said. ‘It’s a book what you are writing.’ I made the old goloss very coarse. ‘I have always had the strongest admiration for them as can write books.’ Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name – A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – and I said: ‘That’s a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?’ Then I read the malenky bit out loud in a sort of a very high type preaching glooss: ‘- The attempt to impose upon man, a creaure of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen – ‘ Dim made the old lip-music at that and I had to smeck myself. Then I started to tear up the sheets and scatter the bits over the floor…
Alex is fifteen. He lives with his parents, goes to school and has a fondness for Beethoven. He’s also the leader of a violent gang, partaking in mugging, housebreaking and assault. A Clockwork Orange is set in an unnamed city in the future (probably London, but also possibly East European) where Alex and his Droogs prowl the streets, drink milk spiked with drugs and talk in their own unique slang. Alex’s thuggish exploits are thankfully shortlived; he is arrested, sent to prison and eventually subjected to some revolutionary, and extreme, techniques to cure his evil and make him good. Drugged and physically restrained, he is forced to watch violent films which make any form of physical violence sickening to him. Two years after his arrest he is released back into society as an apparent model citizen. He is promptly beaten up by two of his old associates (now policemen), set upon by various former victims and attempts suicide. Whilst in hospital he discovers that the curing techniques have been reversed, and leaves ‘cured again’ to form another street gang. His heart isn’t in it this time however as, now aged 18, he feels he has grown out of it all.
I’ve rewritten this post several times as I’ve tried to make sense of A Clockwork Orange. I still haven’t – the novel is entertaining, disturbing and thought provoking as Anthony Burgess intended, but it’s also repetitive, unconvincing and tiresome. My problem was that I didn’t care what happened to Alex, and I failed to respond to the danger to society he posed, or that posed by his own tormentors. Reading it I kept thinking of Malcolm McDowell and Stanley Kubrick. The film, although not one of the director’s best, does outshine the book.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film version provoked some apparent copycat behaviour of the violence in the novel and this prompted the director to withdraw the film from circulation. It didn’t resurface in the UK until after his death in 1999. Until then, I had only seen A Clockwork Orange on a very well worn VHS sometime in the 1980s. Going to see the film in London when it was reissued, I was so excited that I accidently bought four tickets instead of two (excited as a Kubrick obsessive rather than a Burgess fan I confess). I also recall a group of teenage boys hanging around outside, plotting ways to bunk into the cinema in the spirit of Alex and his Droogs. I can’t remember whether they made it inside or not.
Ultimately, both book and film have been too overshadowed by controversy to deliver a punch any more; ironically a controversy that Kubrick sought to avoid. Going to see the film all those years ago was a disappointment because I’d heard so much and expected so much, now I’ve finally got round to reading the book I have the same deflated feeling – only more so. Crime and punishment in a futuristic although strangely familiar future? I’m sticking with Orwell.
The Great Unfinished
Monday March 12, 2007
in books |
Yet another book survey has named the UK’s most put-downable books. Here’s the list of the most unfinished fiction:
- Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis De Bernieres
- Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
- The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
- War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Personally, I can’t see a problem with Vernon God Little. It’s overrated I grant you, but I still like it and it’s a slim volume and not that hard to get through. Similarly, if you have a problem with finishing Harry Potter maybe it’s time to go back to junior school rather than sit around completing surveys?
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is – whether you hail it as a great work of fiction or not – still remarkably lightweight. Who are these people? Probably the ones who waited around for the film versions. In the case of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin it serves them right.
Cloud Atlas I realise may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I did finish it, although Ulysses and War and Peace still remain on my unfinished pile. I’ve never attempted The Satanic Verses (after abandoning Midnight’s Children) and, although I still haven’t read it, The God of Small Things is the book I pick up most in second hand bookshops and go “hmmm…” before putting it back again.
Perhaps it’s something to do with recommendations, whether from the media or from friends. DBC Pierre’s Booker success may have influenced some people to buy it. It did me. And Corelli is more obviously a personal recommendation, so there must be a lot of offended friends out there, after hearing that their favourite book was abandoned. For the record, here’s five books that I urged friends to read, who didn’t like them and made me sad:
- Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
- London Fields by Martin Amis
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D.Salinger
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (bringing us full circle)
You know who you are!
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