Watched Hot Fuzz with beautiful Brown Eyes last night. Damn, these Brits are too funny.  The writing, filming, and subtle sound effects are perfection. Much bigger budget than Shaun of the Dead, and they don’t waste it. But don’t overlook what they have to say about the American fascination with gunplay at the end, and just how warped it is.
God I love the Brits.  Looking forward to going back. Nothing quite like having a Midwestern accent as one bicycles through the Cotswolds. They’re always amused by it in the pubs.
100% in agreement with you on this. I laughed almost as much as I did at Borat!
Borat. Does it reveal Americans for what they are, or was it filmed so that the Brits could go on fantasizing that we’re all such imbeciles? A little bit of both, I suspect. Hilarious either way.
i agree with you on both Hot Fuzz and Borat… Hot Fuzz pokes gentle fun at the whole buddy-movie/gunplay genre, but you can tell the writers/actors all love the genre too. and i loved Shaun of the Dead — one of my favorite movies of that year. Borat… while there are some genuinely amusing moments, most of it just feeding into the prejudices and stereotypes of Brits towards Americans. i went to Oxford University for a term and found there was a lot of mixed feelings about Americans and their culture.
Well to be fair to the Brits, there are those among us who are just as vulgar, ignorant and materialistic as they claim. Too many among us in fact. But there are those among them who are little different.
Which culture is more sophisticated? British culture, of course (which is in part due to its age, but also due to their aristocratic foundation having been built, cruelly, upon the backs of labor and the colonies). In which culture would I rather dwell? Well here most of the time, but maybe the Cotswolds once a year.