GROW YOUR OWN - brave, bleak British comedy

GROW YOUR OWN is a brilliantly well-observed black comedy. Directed by Richard Laxton and shot by David Luther, it has the same bleak look as LIFE AND LYRICS and is unafraid to show the grimier aspects of contemporary British life. Writers Frank Cottrell Boyce (24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, A COCK AND BULL STORY) and Carl Hunter have penned a subtle tragi-comic script about an issue that haunts contemporary Britain: immigration. Neatly, they set movie in an allotment - that most British of inventions. The locals initially object to the "invasion" of their land by asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa and China. So, when a mobile phone company offers them five grand if they sacrifice a plot to a phone mast, they are only too happy to secretly ear-mark one of the immigrant's patches for the concrete rollers.

The writers use this issue to explore knee-jerk reactions to immigration and the difficulties faced by both sides as they get used to each other. There is more than a smattering of laugh-out loud humour, but this is always under-cut by the serious subject matter. To that end, it helps that the movie has an ensemble cast that has the range to play both comedy and serious drama, not least Omid Djalili, Eddie Marsan and Olivia Colman. Best of all, there aren't any Hollywood endings although my one criticism is that the film-makers can't resist an opportunity to stoke up the angst. This is especially evident in Benedict Wong's portrayal of a Chinese immigrant. By the end, the emotional manipulation starts to grate, and throws off the previously finely balanced black comedy. Nonetheless, this movie is definitely worth checking out.

GROW YOUR OWN is on release in the UK.

A COCK AND BULL STORY - Nobody likes a smarty-pants

A COCK AND BULL STORY is an odd sort of film. Far cleverer than the average cinematic fare, and in parts, hysterically funny. And yet you leave the cinema not entirely sure what you have been witness to....

The movie is an attempt to bring the supposedly unfilmable novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" to life. The novel was written by a village priest, Lawrence Sterne, in the eighteenth century and - remarkably for the time - played fast and loose with narrative structure, as well as dealing with bawdy subject matter. To quote the film, Tristram Shandy was a post-modern book written years before there was anything modern to be "post" about. The novel tells the story of Tristram's parents and uncle, various escapades encountered by each. So much happens, so baggy and chaotic is life, that it is only in the final volume that Tristram finally gets round to being born! In bringing the novel to the screen, the director, Michael Winterbottom, has opted against a straightforward adaptation. Rather he has made a film about making a film about Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom argues that this is truer to the spirit of the novel, while getting over the tricky fact that in a novel of 500 pages, so little happens that you can barely get a half-hour script out of it.

The film-within-a-film structure is a nice idea, and we get some very funny scenes parodying actors' over-weening egos and libidos, but this stuff was done with more wit in David Mamet's superb flick STATE AND MAIN. Moreover, much of the humour depends on the audience knowing who the lead actor, Steve Coogan, is. I imagine the jokes at Coogan's expense will be utterly lost on an international audience. And once again, hasn't this stuff been done better in Ricky Gervais' EXTRAS?

But all this would be excused if the film were genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny. After all, when you've hired the likes of Stephen Fry, Shirley Henderson, Rob Brydon, Dylan Moran and Steve Coogan, expectations are high. The film is very, very patchy. There are sequences that sort of meander and exist and seem to serve no purpose at all. And just when you just about give up on the thing, there is flash of side-splitting, pant-wetting funniness. Seriously, I left the cinema knowing I had a cult classic on my hands. It's all there - basically boring long-winded Britflick interspersed with one-liners so funny, so instantly memorable that the audience was already quoting it on the way out of the cinema. This film is a WITHNAIL AND I for the new millenium, and will no doubt be quoted ad nauseam in student unions for the next fifty years.

A COCK AND BULL STORY was shown at the London Film Festival in November 2005, but goes on release in the UK on the 20th January 2006. The film goes on limited release in the US on the 27th January. There are no scheduled European release dates.