Common Sense

With emphasis on the bloody!

Space Monkey and I decided to see a Wednesday movie to prepare for the 1st Annual Nate’s Day of Impromptu Cinema! Or, Nate’s DIC for short. Originally I was going to have a really impromptu film festival this Saturday, but I want some more people than just me and him there, so I’m moving it to Cinco de Mayo weekend.

The idea here is to simply watch many of the films we missed at After Dark Film’s Horrorfest last fall. Time Warner MOD has the whole collection as $3.95 double features. What could be more fun that watching that shit in HD while snacking on some popcorn and drinking some beer?

I’m going to be sending out E-vites to people, including my Myspace friends, so if you’re not already a friend, add me and get the details.

The new owners of the Texas Theater are definitely going to get an invite. Long story short, an old, one-screen theater that was shut down a very long time ago in McGregor has been purchased by new owners and is being renovated and reopened. That’s something I’ve dreamed about since junior high school: A place that would show some classic movies right in my very own town. It doesn’t hurt that it is across the street from my beloved Texas Tea & Coffee, either.

To put in perspective how long this theater has been closed, there is still a separate door that leads directly to the balcony and signs above one of the bathrooms that says “COLORED.”

I had the good fortune to be visiting the McGregor Chamber of Commerce one day when I was in high school and I got to go on a little tour of the inside with the previous owner, Mrs. Margaret Smith. She was left the theater by her late husband and she had decided to close it because, well, she hated the place. She was left in charge of it while he was off fighting WW II and she got tired of throwing drunk soldiers out of the place. McGregor used to be a party town for the soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Hood.

I’d only every glimpsed the inside of the place through the windows and got that eerie feeling you get when you see something truly frozen in time. There were still wax-paper cups from the 60s sitting behind the concession stand, still a 1940s style phone sitting on the manager’s desk. Going up the steps to the balcony, I could almost see the ghosts of the people who had been there before me. A whole group of society call “negroes” that were forced to stay separate from the rest of the community to the point they even had to go in another door.

The floor of the balcony creaked with each step, seemingly ready to collapse if I breathed too hard. The big screen had large tears in it and the heavy curtains that I’m sure had once looked a rich maroon were now faded and covered in a thick layer of dust.

I’m glad that this theater will live again. The ghosts of the past will still be there, ready to teach a new generation what it really should mean when you say “Let’s go to the movies.”

Hopefully I will be able to see movies like Hot Fuzz in this new theater, alongside classic cinema. And by classic, I mean Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and The Car.

Fuzz takes a while to build to its real action sequences that parody… no wait, parody isn’t the right word here. Not when parodies of other movies have been so dumbed down to the level of Scary Movie 4 where its just sight gags and a hodge-podge of references to dated material. This movie is more like a clever satire of the buddy cop/action movie genre. It turns a cheeky eye towards its material, while at the same time venerating it. Really only the guys who pulled off Shaun of the Dead could do something this intelligent.

By now you’ve read a million reviews of what happens in the movie, so I’m not going go into that. I will say I like how Simon Pegg’s Sgt. Nick Angel uncovers the “facts” about the murders in Sandford. It turns out he’s wrong entirely about the motive for killing in the bucolic little town. It’s all just about winning ‘Town of the Year’ again. Red herrings like that make the movie a lot more fun.

What really sets this movie off is the gratuitous violence. I mean, how can you have a satire/homage to action movies without at least a few decapitations? And the gun fights, I literally felt the need to go shoot a gun after watching this movie, and I’ve never fired a gun in my life. But I totally have to now.

It’s just an orgy of good ol’ fashioned American movie violence seen through the clever eye of British comedians. I give it 4 out of 5 Point Break DVD cases.

Jolly good fun. Bring the kids and desensitize them to gun shots and exploding heads now, while they’re still young and impressionable.