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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
The place of silliness in motion pictures is a matter of the utmost seriousness. If I were called upon to defend it, I would present three exhibits: "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925), directed by Sergei Eisenstein; "The Untouchables" (1987), directed by Brian De Palma; and "Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult" (1994), which was hardly directed at all. What links the trio, of course, is a flight of steps. In Eisenstein's movie, the Odessa Steps form a harrowing (and bumpy) backdrop to the massacre of innocents, summarized in the descent of a baby carriage and a mother's horror. De Palma mimics this, drawing out to inordinate length what his Russian forebear spliced into jagged montage. The "Naked Gun" effort simply spoofs it, with Leslie Nielsen pausing on the steps, still firing his gun, to pick up a dropped quarter. What we honestly require here is the first and third attempts: the visual assault and brute political fervor of one, the unbridled horseplay of the other. What we can do without is the De Palma--the spectacle of a style admiring itself, unable to turn away.
I thought of Nielsen, the ringmaster of dumbness, when watching "Hot Fuzz." This movie comes from the team behind "Shaun of the Dead," and displays the same impassiveness in the face of outrageous events. As before, the star is Simon Pegg and the director is Edgar Wright; together, they co-wrote...
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