A couple of additional items from yesterday:
- The joke with which I began my sermon involved a woman getting cosmetic surgery. G, the parish worker (and female) said to me afterwards, “Why couldn’t you use a man in your joke?” I thought about it and realised that the original joke had included not only face lifts and tummy tucks but also a boob-job. As it wouldn’t have been easy to describe a boob-job in a very Anglo-Catholic church pulpit, I left it out. However, I didn’t think to change the sex of the person in the joke. Gives one pause for thought.
- We watched a DVD of a movie called Hot Fuzz last night. It’s basically a cop shoot-em-up movie set in rural England rather than gritty LA or realistic Manhattan. HWMBO liked it, but I found myself only smiling most of the time, with only two or three laugh-out-loud moments. I think I must be turning into an Old Fart. Perhaps I’ve decided that the effort required to laugh out loud cannot be wasted on mere chuckle moments. And, anyway, while UK police officers are now sometimes armed, the amount of shooting they have to do is very limited. So realism wasn’t even attempted.
Today’s gripe is tourists. HWMBO gets very annoyed when I complain about them, but I can do so here in the certain knowledge that he can’t stop me. In the neighbourhood of Victoria Station and Coach Station, there are many people with pet suitcases behind them. For some reason, when out of their native habitat (which could be Lower Slobbovia, judging from their behaviour) they are unable to distinguish when they are in the middle of the pavement, anxiously scanning their maps or trying to screw up the courage to ask a passerby (often me, sad to say) where Buckingham Palace is–this while standing on Buckingham Palace Road. They are oblivious to the pedestrians trying to pass them by on one side or the other. Now, it only takes a smidgen of grey matter to realise that moving to one side of the pavement means that people won’t have to view you as an obstacle, only as a relatively harmless figure of fun. This smidgen seems to have passed them by.
The rant is over, go in peace.
Hot Fuzz was a hilarious movie! Check out Shaun of the Dead (same people), maybe you’ll like that more.
I was born in Enfield, and lived in London (well, Stockwell, or St. Ockwells as we used to call it) for many years. When going to the West End or any other tourist neighborhood, I often sported a lapel badge which read “I am NOT a tourist – I live here!”. So I think I can understand your angst!
So realism wasn’t even attempted.
No, realism wouldn’t have been appropriate. This was parody in the same vein as Shaun of the Dead.
OK, I’ll check it out. Thanks for the tip. I remember when it came out here.
Well, parody has to have some relationship to reality to be funny. Armed police here are a rarity and shoot-em-ups even rarer (except in Manchester). So the OTT stuff went beyond parody, I think.
But one person’s parody is another person’s bloodbath, I guess.
I *loved* Hot Fuzz, which I managed to see in a theatre, with a friend, who has a writer friend who had turned him on to Shaun of the Dead (which I have yet to watch).
It *is* a parody, but not of reality, but of those “buddy”-type shoot-em-up cop comedies. So it’s realism twice removed. (I didn’t think I’d like it, because I’ve never been one for the type of supercop & sidekick type movies, but I was wrong.) I was totally taken by the intelligence of the thing, and the absurdity, and the humanity….
I guess that I’m just getting old and no longer have any interest in things of this nature. Maybe Shaun of the Dead will be funnier to me. But on the other hand, I think I may be turning into an old curmudgeon who only occasionally chuckles.