I saw Hot Fuzz this weekend and rather enjoyed it. It is an homage and mainly a spoof of action movies. A perfect cop from London is transferred to a small village after showing up his fellow officers; then he is forced to work with some bumbling idiots and solve mysterious murders. Sounds stupid to me, but it was hysterical! I am a fan of the first movie, Shaun of the Dead, by the Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright crew, which followed a couple of friends trying to escape zombies in Britain. I have never been interested in zombie movies, but a movie that makes fun of them (while paying tribute to them) is all right with me. Pegg and Wright are two of the best comedy writers in the film industry. Hot Fuzz is only open in select cities, but it still managed to pull in at number six in the Box Office this weekend (according to early reports).
Disturbia was number one again, however, it only pulled in $13.5 million. $13.5 million is a lot of money and could buy me a lot of Marc Jacobs bags, but in Box Office terms, this is pocket change. This causes me to wonder how utterly stupid studio owners are. They are constantly talking about how poor turn out is for movies these days, yet they are charging us a year's salary just to gain entrance. But as viewers diminish, prices go up. So for the same price that Angelina Jolie spent on her last foreign kid, you can get a Coke, a small popcorn, and a ticket to see Blades of Glory.
The biggest puzzle to me is why studios just don't use common sense. If I have a choice of paying $11 to go see the ridiculous looking In the Land of Women or renting it for $4 when it comes out on DVD, I'm going to choose the latter. Now studios churn out DVDs like Catholics pop out kids, so what does it hurt me to wait three months? I will inevitably rent every Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and Snakes on a Plane that comes out, simply to complain about how terrible they were. This pastime of mine was a little bit harder to achieve several years ago when we had to wait close to a year or more for a film to hit Wal-Mart. But now, crap like Because I Said So is released on February 2, does shitty at the Box Office, and is released on DVD by May 8. It infuriates me to find that I paid $11 to see a movie, only for it to be on DVD a week later.
Week after week, I read articles pondering, "Where have all the movie patrons gone?" This makes me want to drive to Los Angeles, break into Universal, and smack the studio head in the face with my Rainbow flip-flop. But instead, I will sit back and watch as they begin to release movies on iTunes. Now you only have to wait a month to buy Vacancy for the fraction of the ticket price and watch it on your iPod on the subway. Glorious!