London Film Fest 2011 Day 9 - WILD BILL

Jimmy and Dean fending for themselves in a Newham council flat.

There are those of us of a certain age who have grown up with Dexter Fletcher. As kids we watched him as the cute wanna be tough guy "Babyface" in Alan Parker's delightful BUGSY MALONE. As teens we watched him in the TV show "Press Gang" playing a cool American wannabe journo.  In our errant twenties we watched him plan a heist in Guy Ritchie's superb caper flick, LOCK STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS, and more recently, we've seen him cover up for Robert De Niro's cross-dressing pirate in Matthew Vaughn's STARDUST.  This familiarity bought Dexter Fletcher a great deal of goodwill from the London Film Fest Audience who watched his debut directorial effort.  And the good news is that the film is really worth watching, despite a somewhat predictable plot once the initial set-up is in place.  

WILD BILL is set in the same London of Guy Ritchie's flicks - the East London of drug-dealers, hard-men and hard-ups in council houses.  But it has far more heart, far more subtlety, and is far better observed.  In other words, you gain a whole lot of authenticity and insight, while losing none of the comedy. In fact, one of the great comedic charms of the film is realising that Fletcher has discovered the new "babyface" -  a young kid called Sammy Williams who plays Jimmy - a little kid with an hilariously foul mouth, but also a lot of vulnerability.

As the movie opens we meet Dean (Will Poulter) and Jimmy living alone in a filthy council flat, with Dean taking on the grim responsibility of a father and the age of just fifteen. Their mother has abandoned them and their father, "Wild Bill", a violent drug pusher and addict, has been in prison for eight years. Bill emerges a reformed man - he wants a clean break in Scotland - but isn't reformed enough to want to take care of his kids.  Problem is, he has to stick around long enough to fool social services, so that Dean and Jimmy aren't put into Care.  What follows is a predictable family reconciliation, complete with a "tart with a heart" character, and an aggressive local mafiosi threatening Bill's conditions of parole.  

From left to right, Sammy Williams (Jimmy); Will Poulter (Dean);
 Charlie Creed-Miles (Bill); and Dexter Fletcher (Writer-Director)
introduce WILD BILL at the London Film Festival

But the film is elevated above its narrative clichés thanks to its genuinely sympathetic characters, the whip-smart dialogue and the fact that Fletcher doesn't flinch from poking holes in the Guy-Ritchie-style myths of East End hard-men.  Many a time we see a guy giving it all that, but turning and running at a key point, and the annoying Ali-D style white boy, Pill (Iwan Rheon) gets a verbal slapping too. I also love the fact that where ROCKNROLLA (a film I still liked) made heavy work of contrasting the poverty of the East End with the redevelopment of Stratford, Fletcher shows the same contrast with much more subtlety. It's enough to show the view of the new Olympic village from the balconies of crumbling social housing - it speaks powerfully enough of the issues facing British society - without being crass or simplistic.  

In front of the camera, I'm full of admiration for Charlie Creed-Miles who has to portray a nasty selfish character at the start of the film but also make his road to responsibility seem credible, and to Sammy Williams who steals every scene he's in.  Behind the camera, George Richmond's lensing use the Arri Alexa is crisp, and the sound-track is superb.  Overall, this is an assured debut directorial effort from Fletcher, deftly balancing raucous humour and pathos - and I can't wait to see what he does next.

WILD BILL played London 2011.

iPad Round-Up 5 - MADE IN DAGHENHAM

History is written in broad brush-strokes, with the industrial revolution depicted as a battle between capital and workers.  But as an early scene in MADE IN DAGENHAM shows, by the late 1960s - a period we can now see as the dying breath of the British union movement - both capital and workers had settled into cosy set-pieces and horse-trading with white men on either side.   In this film those roles are played by Kenneth Cranham as the Union boss and Rupert Graves as the Ford boss. They are meeting to discuss equal pay for women, and both presume that the women's token representative, played by Sally Hawkins, should simply shut up and let the men decide what's what. That calcified system was ultimately dismantled by a woman - Margaret Thatcher - but she only got the political mandate to do so after the country had been brought to its knees in the mid-70s.  This movie takes place earlier, but still gives us three women bucking the system.  The first - our heroine - is Sally Hawkins' Rita - is a machinist working in Ford's Dagenham factory. She finds empathy from her boss's trophy wife/domestic slave, Lisa (Rosamund Pike) and support from Miranda Richardson's brilliantly spiky Barbara Castle. 

The film is a very easy watch, glorying in its period costumes and kitschy interiors, and rarely showing the true  hardships of a strike. It's all rather day-glo and, worst of all words, "feel-good". Still, insofar as it does make you feel good while teaching you something about the fight for equal pay (a fight still not yet won), that can't really be a bad thing, can it? That said, one might have hoped for a movie painted in less broad strokes and with less of a simplistic moral stance.

MADE IN DAGENHAM played Toronto 2010 and opened in Norway, the UK, Finland, Israel, the USA and Italy last year. It opened earlier this year in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, Singapore, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Mexico, Denmark and Turkey. It is available to rent and own.

ANUVAHOOD

ANUVAHOOD is a beautifully observed, wickedly funny satire on British "yoot" culture, as depicted in flicks like KIDULTHOOD. Writer-director and lead actor Adam Deacon takes us into the council estates of contemporary London, and gives us the unforgettable character of Kenneth - a nice boy from a nice family who thinks its cool to pretend to be a gangster-rapper from Baltimore. All talk and no action, the boy spends the first hour of the film talking in a nonsensical patois that's more Ali G than The Wire, hanging out with his mates, having zero luck with the ladies and getting picked on by the camp bully, Tyson. Just as you start crying out for something to actually happen, the movie lurches towards the semi-serious, with Kenneth selling drugs to save his family from the bailiffs. The movie doesn't really survive this abrupt tonal shift, although the skits shown during the credits help to restore the day-glo comic-style comedy of the first hour. 

The film is well put-together - very assured for a directorial debut, and I very much liked the cinematography from DP Felix Wiedemann. In particular, in the goofy early scenes, hardly any dialogue is shown in two-shoots - rather we flip back between PoV shots in a cartoon-ish manner.  Adam Deacon, Femi Oyeniran and Jazzie Zonzolo are incredibly funny as the useless teens, although I found Richie Campbell as Tyrone too broad. There are choice cameos from Paul Kaye; Levi "Reggae Reggae" Roots; the self-parodying Aisleyne of sometime Big Brother fame; and Linda Robson. But best of all, we get a very tongue-in-cheek turn from Richard Blackwood as "Laimbsury's" manager, Russell. I loved the irony of Russell telling "K" that his music career won't go anywhere, as well as later references to Ashley Walter's flick 4.3.2.1. 

Overall, ANUVAHOOD is definitely funny enough to justify a cinema ticket, and while I didn't buy in to the tonal shift in the third act, there's something cheering about the fact that British teen flicks are established enough that they warrant their own spoof. Not to mention the ultimate message that it's better to just be yourself than to aspire to be some dickhead pot dealer. 

ANUVAHOOD is on release in the UK.

Preview - BOOGIE WOOGIE

BOOGIE WOOGIE is a highly enjoyable, acerbic satire on the contemporary art world, directed by debutant Duncan Ward and based on the novel by Danny Moynihan. Both are art-world insiders and the film has the feel of authentic anecdotes on speed.

The film has a large cast and many sub-plots, but these all coalesce around the gallery of Art Linson - a Jay Jopling like art-dealer who stands at the centre of the London art scene. Art is played in trademark oleaginous, sinister mode by Danny Huston, who needs to seriously worry about typecasting. Three main stories whir around Art. First, his main clients - art collectors Jean and Maclestone (Gillian Anderson and Stellan Skarsgard) are fucking a young artist and a gallery assistant (Amanda Seyfried) respectively, and are engaged in a bitter battle over who gets the art. Second, naive Dewey (Alan Cumming) is trying to promote his best friend, video artist Elaine (Jaime Winston) who ditches him for Art's assistant Beth (Heather Graham). Finally, ageing collector Alfred Rhinegold (Christopher Lee) is being manipulated by his wife (Joanna Lumley) and her butler (the ever brilliant Simon McBurney) to sell a valuable painting, at a price manipulated by art dealer Art Linson.

In short, the majority of characters are self-involved, sexually promiscuous, and care more about jockeying for money and fame than about art itself. Only a few - Alfred Rhinegold and Dewey - have a genuine passion for the work - and they basically get screwed over for their pains. It's not that the art world is indifferent to their pain, but that characters like Beth and Elaine will actually exploit it. After all, in the era of reality TV and constant self-exposure, pain is just another means to create a sensation.

The movie moves quickly; finely balances humour and disgust; assuredly handles its large cast; and is sharply photographed by John Mathieson (HANNIBAL, GLADIATOR). Art aficionados will appreciate the fact that the art was curated by Damien Hurst. I presume that when this finally gets released, it will be very limited. But this flick is definitely worth seeking out.

Additional tags: Joanna Lumley, Christopher Lee, Alan Cumming, Duncan Ward, Danny Moynihan.

BOOGIE WOOGIE played Edinburgh 2009 and will be released in the UK and US in April 2010. It is, rather improbably, currently being shown on British Airways long-haul flights.

DONKEY PUNCH - disappointingly not about energy market manipulation, but sexually motivated blunt-force trauma

So DONKEY PUNCH isn't about Enron traders fucking up the California energy markets. It IS about a bunch of drunk British teenagers having sex on a yacht in the Med. Writer-director Oliver Blackburn nicely captures the hedonism and carelessness involved in the life-style and takes a wonderfully long time amping up the tension. Half an hour into the film the titular act takes place, but even then it takes a while for all hell to break loose. Okay, a girl has died in unfortunate circumstances, but the kids try to make the best of it, until they start working out the legal consequences of the act, fraternal loyalties interfere, and the girls get a clue. By the end of the film, it's all gone truly Pete Tong. But one or two truly gruesome scenes aside, I was surprised at how restrained the movie was. I was also pleasantly surprised that the internal logic of the film seemed to hold to the end. So, to my great surprise, I can warmly recommend this film to fans of the bad-things-happen-on-lonely-sailboats genre of movies.

DONKEY PUNCH is on release in the UK.

KIDULTHOOD - flawed but fascinating

One of the things I love about living in Central London is the sheer social and racial diversity of the place. It's not that you *can* meet people from all walks of life, but that you *have* to. It is pretty hard to live in an isolated camelot when next to every wide avenue skirted with townhouses you have a hard-as-nails council estate. This is apparently what drove a young British actor, Noel Clarke, to write the script for KIDULTHOOD - a new low budget British movie. Clarke grew up in the council estates bordering the streets of NOTTING HILL - the underside of the fantasy London made famous in the saccharine luvvie-fest movies of Richard Curtis. He claims that he was tired of seeing his home depicted on screen in a manner that was so far removed from the reality as to be laughable.

I applaud the intent of the script-writer, and clearly a lot of care has been taken to re-create the language, behaviour and environment of the council estates. The movie is at its best when we simply sit back and observe the kids interacting with each other. There is a bravura opening segment where we see the kids flirt, punch and fuck each other in the school playground, followed by a disturbing scene of brutal bullying in a classroom.

The movie is fascinating as a social document but I feel it is less successful as a straightforward drama. The decision to collapse all the (melo-)dramatic events into a single day undercuts the movie's authenticity. It just seems a little too neat that all the plot strands should culminate in a particular party. Having said that, KIDULTHOOD really is a gripping movie and the minutes flew by. And I have to say that any director/editor who can create such a slick, fresh visual look on such a low budget has to be admired, not to mention the outstanding sound-track featuring British urban sounds. This is definitely a movie to check out.

KIDULTHOOD is on limited release in the UK. No global release dates at present. I suspect you'll have to wait for DVD for this one, but it really is worth a look.