It's been hard finding things to write for this site this summer, since there hasn't been much going on on TV. When I first started doing this I did occasional movie reviews of whatever it was I had just caught on cable, but I felt completely out of touch doing so, particularly with Mr. Variety there in the next office over. Here's the thing about me and movies: I don't go to them. They cost money, and I don't have enough to spread around. To me the choice between paying ten bucks to see something I can buy on DVD later for eight or going to see a couple of live bands or a baseball game is no choice at all. I guess this exposes me as less than a true movie lover. You know what, fine, I admit it. I like TV better than movies. Film is a visual medium and I am profoundly nearsighted and also by disposition far more likely to fall in love with pure language than pure cinema. On television the writers call the shots and the directors are hired hands working a job; movies are the other way around. This seems intuitively wrong to me, kind of like how some people think football is better than baseball. But whatever. There's room enough for all of us in the world, TV junkies and film buffs alike, and it's not like I hate movies. I'm going back to writing reviews of the stuff I rent from the Redbox machine at the local McDonald's and so what if the rest of you all saw these movies eight months ago.

I think Hot Fuzz is one of those movies I am going to get myself in trouble recommending to people, like Wet Hot American Summer (I think it's among the funniest movies ever made but I can totally see how its wavelength can fail to synch up with certain people) or Blade: Trinity (OK, for that one I have absolutely no defense). Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the same actor/writer and writer/director team that made the much-loved Shaun of the Dead, are absolutely committed parodists. For the first three-quarters of Fuzz, the pair is so determined to nail every detail of the classic mannered British detective story that for those of us who didn't absolutely adore Gosford Park things might just get dull enough to give up on the boys. Only the over-the-top gore of the various murder scenes, and the somewhat hackneyed device of using lock-and-load-type smash zooms and quick cuts to overdramatize routine activities, are there to suggest that things are being played any way other than straight. But I would argue that every moment of Hot Fuzz's very, very long buildup is necessary.

I think it's mostly a problem of expectations. Here in the States the film was promoted as an action spoof, which it is -- eventually -- first and as the followup to Shaun second. In the UK, Wright, Pegg, and costar Nick Frost are all bigger stars and they had a huge cast of British leading lights joining them. Critics and moviegoers who went to Hot Fuzz only expecting "the new Edgar Wright movie" probably had a much better time than those who thought they were in for something in the vein of The Naked Gun, as the American trailers rather clumsily suggested. For film buffs and Anglophiles in particular, Hot Fuzz is a real treat and an improvement on Shaun of the Dead, which was one of those movies where the high concept was so great your memory tended to gloss over the fact that a lot of the jokes weren't as funny as they could have been and the acting past the central Pegg/Frost duo was kind of crappy.

There is a long outstanding tradition of these British Isles "whimsical village" movies, where a bunch of wizened character actors live in a picturesque little community and comment knowingly on the activities of the younger and fitter leads. My mother is a big fan of this particular cinematic genre, so I've seen quite a few in my day. For some reason at the theater, at least, English or Irish accents are required; the American version of the whimsical village movie is Deliverance. But "Gilmore Girls" pulled it off on TV, for what it's worth. Anyway, if you've seen enough of these movies, and really one is enough since they're all essentially the same, then you know at the end the locals always come together to save the day for the heroes. I can't even begin to explain how cathartic it is when Hot Fuzz finally gets to the point, after almost two hours of diligent trenchwork, where all of the quirky, folky local color starts whipping out automatic weaponry and trying very earnestly to kill Pegg and Frost. Naturally the trailers tried to take all of the air out of this punchline by selling Hot Fuzz as if all there was to it was old ladies with machine guns. A random old lady with a machine gun is kind of funny, but Billie Whitelaw with a machine gun is hysterical, particularly if for most of the running time of the film she's behaved exactly as you would expect a Billie Whitelaw character in a whimsical British village movie to act.

What Wright does here is meticulously set up all of the beats for one kind of film and then substitute the payoffs of a buddy cop/action revenge flick at the very close. It's a lot cleverer and a lot harder than it sounds. We actually form bonds with all of the local color, against our better judgement, and in no small part due to the fact that they're all played by people such as Jim Broadbent and Timothy Dalton. While Shaun had a lot of trouble sustaining its comedy, the last twenty minutes of Hot Fuzz, even being as it is the same joke over and over again, is punishingly hilarious because Pegg/Wright have done their due diligence making you recognize and care about each one of the delightful batty old people who turn around and start emptying clips of ammunition at the camera. Besides, it's not as if the epic introduction isn't funny at all. It is, within the tradition and pacing requirements of the genre being parodied. And as an added bonus for a brief and giddy spell between the main body of the film and the bullet-soaked conclusion there's a drop-dead hysterical salute to classic English horror that's so knowingly daft and completely out of left field that I had to rewind the movie in the middle of watching it for the first time in order to fully savor and appreciate the willful weirdness of it all.

Most of the time with so-called "cult" movies the party line can be trusted; the sort of people who go to see these sorts of things have largely unified tastes, which I guess is the very definition of a cult. But with Hot Fuzz, at least in this country, the prevailing wisdom is wrong. It's not a letdown after Shaun of the Dead -- it's way, way better -- and it's certainly funny enough. The trouble is that certain lowest-common-denominator trends in filmmaking have become so widespread that we as viewers have practically lost the ability to appreciate movies that don't fit within a few minutes into an easily recognizable genre slot. When was the last time you saw a comedy that was as funny or funnier in the last 20 minutes as in the first?