Sunday
Friday evening, mom, Sunshine, and I headed out to the Courthouse Theater to see Hot Fuzz* (this successfully funny, eye-poppingly black comedy can't quite decide between horror and action spoof, with each successive tidbit borrowing from the cohesion. Nonetheless, working better as a straight movie than parody, it maintains human charm and wicked narrative even while feeling its falsest. The audience, including me, broke occasionally into applause). We came home in the pouring rain, ready for an early day on Saturday. By early I mean "before noon." Some time ago, mom ran across this painting, which struck enough of a chord for her to still be talking about it while we were casting about for things to do Saturday. The linked version of the painting hangs in the National Gallery of Art,* so we spent the day there. I was alarmed at first: we discovered half the eastern wing of the main floor closed for renovation. This includes the eighteenth and nineteenth century Spanish and French galleries, plus the American and British stuff. This, of course, included the painting my mother wanted to see; as well as this one, my favorite John Singer Sargent (which I call Woman Watching TV), and this, my favorite by James McNeill Whistler. All my other favorites were there were I'd left them: this and this by Paul Gauguin, this by Claude Monet, this by Edgar Degas, this by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and, of course, this odalisque by Auguste Renoir. I was still lamenting the renovation when Sunshine pointed out that a selection of art from the closed area was on display in the special collections rooms on the ground floor. Sunshine reads signs. All my whining worked: everything we'd wanted to see had been culled out to be displayed in this highlight. [Cavin]
this had happened to Mr. Cavin by 11:56:00 AM
Then, a 3 sided conversation ensued...
Ah yes, Woman with a Parasol by Monet. One of my favorite paintings ever.
I saw Hot Fuzz as well and thought that a little editing would have made it much funnier. It wasn't the horror elements that made it drag for me, it was all the buddy movie bonding bits. I also thought that editing the murders in such a way that they were still possibly accidents would have made the story a little more interesting and made the suspenseful parts more suspenseful while opening up more comic possibilities. Still, when it was funny, it was damn funny, and I can't think of anything funnier I've seen this year.
That sort of fits what I was saying. I think that it’s fair to assume that there are people who would respond to the buddy movie stuff more than the horror, and feel that the time spent otherwise was wasted. It is hard to do two things at once without borrowing back and forth against the balance. Balance being good. Hot Fuzz turned out unbalanced. As it is, while I really appreciated all of the spoof stuff, I’m with you: it would have been better to take this in the direction of a straight movie since the plot was interesting all by itself. Still, I laughed and laughed. The comic duo here is one of the most successful I’ve seen in a long while.
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