Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

Went to the movies last night to watch Hot Fuzz, and I laughed my ass off!! It was everything I’d hoped for. Just enough similarities to Shaun of the dead to keep me laughing but enough differences to make it totally original. Comedy mixed with action mixed with over the top gore!

I don’t think there was a single character that wasn’t perfectly cast. Pegg, although skinny played the action hero exceptionally well and you got the feeling that Nick Frost was playing himself more than PC Danny Butterman, albeit in a more simple, geeky capacity. Other small roles were also cast superbly with Steve Coogan as the Inspector and Bill Nighy as the Cheif Inspector not to mention Bill Bailey playing a set of identical twins and David Threlfall (Frank Gallagher from Shameless) playing a rather camp amature thespian who meets a rather gruesome end with his mistress.

The story went from a little odd-ball to totally ridiculous about half way through but never once did I think this was a bad thing. I was too busy laughing.

Some characters represented relevant social matters and proceded to satirise the crap out of them. The most notable of these is Danny Butterman who’s action movie soaked brain has a totally warped idea of what police work actually is. Another of these is the way that busy-bodied old people have an overwhelming fear of “hoodies” even though they say or do nothing and the way they express severe annoyance at the most un-annoying things, in this case, a human statue in the town square. As a matter of fact, this phenomenon is an underlying theme throughout the entire film.

If you haven’t already seen it… Go, now!

On the way back from the cinema we had the radio on and there was a documentary about Scientology and what it’s all about. It was well interesting and really made me realise how truely ridiculous this “religion” actually is. From what I can make out it seems to be based on the teachings of one L. Ron Hubbard who made his name as a science fiction writer in the United States.

A lot of the specifics of the faith are highly secretive and this appears to be because in order to progress through the teachings in scientology you MUST pay, and the price tag is a little bit steep to say the least. One source form the Church of Scientology claimed that the average Scientologist paid £800 a year to be a member and even more to progress through the various levels of Scientologist.

Although scientologists will deny that there is belief in alien emperors and spacecraft, it would appear that the higher you get in the ranks the more out there the stories become. One such story was quoted from L Ron Hubbard himself and said that 75 million years ago a space lord called Zuton or Zenon or something had an overpopulation problem so he got a load of his followers to board space-planes that looked just like DC10s with jet engines and sent them off to earth where he gathered them around volcanoes, showed them confusing movies for 36 days and then blew them up with Hydrogen bombs. After this he collected all their souls and glued them together and that is what we are all coated in, like an aura.

When I heard that I was totally blown away! It would be funny if people didn’t actually follow it. It sounded like the story you’d get on a Piss take supermarket tabloid…crazy shit.

Some proper cloak and dagger stuff goes on around it too, like there have been cases where people have left the church and have been under survalance and have had their phones tapped and stuff. People who even spoke wrongly of the church of scientology have been slandered as “hate campaigners” The radio show gave the example of one woman who got written about in a Scientology magazine and it took her 6 years to bring the case to court and litterally days before the trial, the church settled and paid her the $50,000 or whatever she demanded in damages.

It’s a conspiracy nut’s wet dream!!