Real life and blogging

The ironic thing about keeping a blog is that the more stuff there is actually happening in one's life, the less time there is left to write about it. And so it is with me at the moment. I am teaching three writing courses in different places and am busy working on three different pieces of writing (more of those in a later posting).

I've also had the pleasure of visiting several readers' groups recently as part of the Writers2Readers project. The project has taken me to various venues around the East Midlands (including a room above a bar where the lighting was low, the heating was high and my audience did extremely well to stay awake - thank you all for that:-)

But please keep looking in on the blog, as new entries will be following soon.

Hot Fuzz

What happens when a pumped-up urban uber-cop is relocated to a sleepy rural village with a zero crime rate? The answer is the distinctly British crime comedy, Hot Fuzz. No other country could have given birth to a movie like this. Will audiences in any other country understand it? Do the producers even care? They’ve made a movie that is true to itself and its origins and been rewarded with a huge domestic commercial success.

I’m lucky enough to be able to go to the movies in the early afternoon on weekdays when the theatres are largely empty. Viewing Hot Fuzz with me in the Leicester Odeon were two elderly couples. Unlike me, they didn’t seem to notice that low notes were causing the speaker system to rattle like a china shop in a small earthquake. To be fair the manager eventually offered me a couple of free tickets in compensation, but only after I’d talker my way past a couple his rather defensive staff members.

Notwithstanding the situation, I found plenty of laugh-out loud moments and was grinning through a good part of the rest of the movie. The slapstick nature of a lot of the gags did make it hard to get emotionally involved with the story and two hours was starting to feel like a long haul on the jokes alone. But who knows, given a working speaker system and a load of people around me laughing, I might not have noticed. The editing is certainly tight through out. I only wish that during the final fight sequence in the model village, one of the characters had said, ‘This town ain’t big enough for the both of us.’