The Temple of the Mighty Bague

I don’t know where to start. I really don’t. I think I need to make an assumption, really. If you watched Shaun of the Dead and thought that (a) it was really stupid and (b)  that that was a bad thing, then you’re not going to enjoy Hot Fuzz. It’s another ACEBEST stupid-fest by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the team who brought us SotD (obviously) and Spaced. And it’s just, well, daft. My wife and I sat in the cinema barely able to breathe for laughing. The trouble is, we didn’t see a lot of evidence of similar behaviour anywhere else around us.

Anyway - basically, Simon Pegg is a top London police officer who gets sent off to the quietest village in the country because his arrest record is making everyone else look bad. Unfortunately, all in the village is not as it seems, and once the body-count starts to rise, Officer Angel (Pegg) decides to do things his way. Hilarity, obviously, would have ensued at this point if it hadn’t already ensued from the first second of the film.

Bits to look out for: the journalists demise, description of the missing swan, underaged drinking, you’ve got a moustache, have you ever jumped through the air shooting two guns while going “aaargh!”, point blank.

Ace movie, but you have to understand that something being stupid isn’t a bad thing.

Why is it that the trinity of Danny Elfman, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp can do no wrong? Yet again, this is another triumph of cinema backed with a particularly beautiful soundtrack. The only downside is that Christopher Lee doesn’t get to sing, but we can’t have everything

Right. So, the film is what - 90 minutes? 90 minutes of crawling about. In the dark. In tiny cramped spaces. While being pursued by hideous flesh-eating Gollum look-a-likies.

I’m traumatised. I feel absolutely exhausted and drained. What an amazingly ACE movie!

“That movie was brilliant.” Coming from Tristan, that’s high praise indeed. Normally a question like ‘did you enjoy that’ will illicit a response of ‘yeah’, if you’re lucky. Unprompted praise is a rare thing indeed.

Then again, Appleseed is pretty special. Not the best Manga in the world, but certainly a damn sight better than most western efforts. At one point, it even produced a gasp of excitement from his nibs, an unprecedented event.

Essentially, Appleseed is techpunk at its most obvious. There’s not a lot of subtlety there, but there’s certainly a lot of explosions, giant mechs, martial arts, gun battles and tears. The holo-recording sequence alone puts it way ahead of the field in the emotion stakes.

It looks like our oldest boy is going to enjoy manga - and the good news is, there’s a helluva lot of it out there.

Mehh.