SILVER HAZE*****

Dutch writer-director Sasha Polak's SILVER HAZE a lightly fictionalised depiction of actor Vicky Knight's life story.  As a young child, Franky (Vicky's on-screen avatar) was badly burned in a fire in her uncle's pub, and still holds her father's new wife Jane responsible. This film picks Franky up as a young woman who is filled with anger and resentment.  She lives in a chaotic crowded family home in an economically-deprived part of East London. The threat of verbal or physical violence is always just under the surface and Franky gives as good as she gets.  

The narrative is propelled by Franky's relationship with Florence (Esme Creed-Miles), a privileged but troubled girl who now lives with her grandmother Alice in Southend. It begins as a liberation, allowing Franky to discover she is gay, and allowing her to create a found family with the wonderfully supportive Alice, and Florence's younger brother Jack.

I really admire this film for its delicate balance between laugh-out-loud family banter - genuine menace in a scene of a London bus - and joyous emotional release.  Sacha Polak handles the shifts in tone and mood so beautifully that you emerge from a film that deals with epically profound topics feeling uplifted. I also admire how brave the film is. Not just Vicky Knight having the body confidence to be naked on screen, and to show her unique beauty, but her real-life siblings playing her on-screen family and revisiting a traumatic experience. In a sub-plot, Franky's sister explores converting to Islam, and her need for that is treated with respect but also good humour. That feels brave in the current climate.  Finally, I am grateful to any film that lets me spend time with the charismatic Angela Bruce.  As Alice, she is no pushover, but radiates warmth. A tricky balance to pull off.

Behind the lens, Polak's largely Dutch crew create some memorable visuals of Southend, and a beautiful soundtrack, on what must have been a low budget. It just cheers my soul that unique, brave, entertaining and moving films like this can still be made and released. I really hope it finds the audience it deserves.

SILVER HAZE has a running time of 102 minutes. It played Berlin and London 2023, and will play BFI Flare 2024. It will be released in the UK on March 29th.

THE STREET - BFI London Film Festival 2019

THE STREET is a fascinating but half-examined documentary about the gentrification of East London, and the impact this has on the local low-income community. The word "community" is a deeply charged one here. Many of the interviewees who live or work on Hoxton Street clearly see their community as being "English" - Caucasian, multi-generational East-end residents. They don't hold with "poncy" foreign food or vendors who "can't speak English properly". This is transparently racist. Later in the documentary, we are given half an explanation of why this strength of feeling might exist: with social housing in such short supply, and homelessness on the rise, being held back in a queue for housing because a newly arrived immigrant family has taken in causes "strong feelings".

The good news is that the director, Zed Nelson, does not blame immigrants - indeed at many points he shows them to be contributing to the local economy and actively helping the community by organising soup kitchens. Rather, he gives us three villains of the piece - the Conservative government's austerity policies that cut welfare and increased homelessness; the property developers converting derelict existing buildings into luxury flats; and the seemingly oblivious Nathan-Barley-esque invading trust-fund hipsters. I have no problem with Nelson focusing on these groups, although the picture is more complex, as his own documentary shows. It turns out that the art gallery previously shown as pretentious employed a dynamic young British-African woman called Khadija who died tragically in the Grenfell fire. At her memorial service we see a new kind of community gather, no less heartfelt or valid than the old Hoxton community.

My only issue with this doc was its reluctant to call out LOCAL and therefore Labour Party politicians for allowing rampant re-development. As much as it might be easy for progressive film-makers to finger a Tory government, it's the local government that determines local planning consents and negotiates the proportion of any new development that is social and affordable housing. The dirty secret that isn't brought to light is that the left-wing council in Hackney WANTS gentrification because it increases the tax base and reduces the welfare bill.

THE STREET has a running time of 94 minutes.  It is playing at the BFI London Film Festival 2019 and does not yet have a commercial release date.

LEGEND

2015 was the year of Krays films and the one I anticipated was LEGEND, starring as it did Tom Hardy and both Ronnie and Reggie, beloved 1960s East End gangsters who infiltrated the highest levels of English society until they finally got banged up.  But I'm sad to say that the movie is boring to the point of switching off, bar a few good set pieces.  Unlike most critics I don't think it's the fault of Hardy.  Some have called his portrayal of Ronnie - a heavily doped up, heavy drinking, violent paranoid schizophrenic - too broad.  On the contrary, from the books I've read and documentaries I've watched, Hardy seems to get Ronnie just right. He loved his brother. He loved being a gangster. He loved the protection his aristo lover gave him.  But he was very very sick and almost impossible to control. I think there's no doubt that Reggie would have had a long and successful career as a criminal if it weren't for his brother running around with impossibly ambitious American schemes and generally running successful ventures into the ground.  And then, of course, there were the murders. That Hardy also manages to portray Reggie is a testament to his skill at essaying a subtler but still menacing character who was unfailingly loyal to his brother, even at the expense of his tragically doomed wife Frances.

ELEPHANT DAYS - BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Day Six

ELEPHANT DAYS is a documentary made by British indie band The Maccabees, about the recording of their fourth album "Marks to prove it" in a studio in Elephant and Castle - a famously desolate area just south of the river in Central London.  Evidently, the band feel a great affection for this area - as many parts of London with a rich and varied cultural heritage but after years of failed attempts at redevelopment now finally at risk of redevelopment.  Turning the camera on the local residents preserves a slice of life that I fear will come to an end once the council estates are knocked down and the rents go up. How long will the iconic Arments pie and mash shop last?  Will BB concrete church survive?  Directors James Caddick and James Cronin elegantly weave these quirky personal stories with the Maccabees haunting music and just like Frederick Wiseman's IN JACKSON HEIGHTS (also playing at the festival), this lends the film an elegiac feel. Both films are an important social document and fascinating purely on that level.  The only part of the film I found grating - and its ironic because without them it wouldn't have been made - are The Maccabees themselves - with their posh accents, and earnest attempts to build a community garden. Because like it or not, it's when the hipsters move in that gentrification happens. And so now that Shoreditch has become more expensive than Chelsea, the artists have moved south to Peckham and New Cross and Deptford and the price rises won't be far behind.

ELEPHANT DAYS has a running time of 83 minutes.  At the moment there are still tickets available for two out of the three screenings. 

THE KRAYS: KILL ORDER

THE KRAYS: KILL ORDER is a lo-fi but insightful and balanced documentary fronted by Bernard O'Mahoney, who was a Kray associate.  His presentation style may be stilted - he sounds like he's reading off a script as he awkwardly faces the camera - but you can't fault the access he has to the Krays associates and the way in which he inter-cuts differing views of controversial events.

The documentary takes a linear approach. It tells us about the twins growing up in East London, their vicious energy channelled into boxing.  Dodging the law and national service, making a name for themselves as running protection, the moving onto more general villainy. Intimidating Peter Rachman, getting a West End club, going inside, and the dangerous psychosis that undermined their criminal enterprise.  There's Ronnie's homosexual affair with a Lord and his deep paranoid schizophrenia.  There's Reggie's marriage to the tragic Frances Shea and accusations of who may have murdered her. And finally, the murders. 

A good example of the approach of the film is to the suicide of Reggie's wife.  We get glamour girl Maureen Flanagan defending Ronnie of charges of murdering Francis, because he would never had betrayed his brother like that. Than self-appointed Kray consigliere Toby Von Judge accusing Violet Kray of having killed Frances.  O'Mahoney is well aware of the legends and myths surrounding the Krays - and of their own role in creating them.  He knows he can't answer what really happened. But in showing the various reactions  - thinking the worst and most twisted - thinking the best - he can show the impact that the Krays have had on popular culture.  The staunch defenders of the East End lads who loved their mother, to those willing to thing of them as sexual deviants and serial killers. It's all there. And like I said, even if Kray aficionados don't learn anything new in this documentary, the new interviews are certainly worth watching.

THE KRAYS: KILL ORDER has a running time of 88  minutes and is available on demand this weekend and on DVD on September 16th. It is rated 15 for strong language and references to violence.

AMY

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

AMY is the controversial new documentary about the hyper-talented North London jazz and soul singer Amy Winehouse, who died at the age of 27 in 2010 from complications due to long-term bulimia, drug and alcohol abuse. The director, Asif Kapadia, opens the story with Amy as a 16 year old goofing around with her close friends on video, clearly talented, and quickly signed up by manager Nick Shyamsky.  She's evidently steeped in the jazz tradition and wants to make great music rather than achieve a fame that she knows she'll find hard to handle.  She's soon signed to Island Records, brings out her debut album "Frank" and uses the money to first move into a small flat and then into her house in Camden.  The freedom allows her pot smoking to morph into heavier drug use, and she's still bulimic but she's still not on crack cocaine or heroine when her manager and friend, Nick, tries to intervene. This is the first of two pivotal moments in the documentary - the moment where maybe early intervention might have led to the start of recovery because the paparazzi glare, and Blake Fielder-Civil, hadn't yet appeared.  But Amy wants her dad, Mitch, to make a decision, and he says she doesn't have to go, much to Nick's horror, and echoed in the lyrics of "Rehab".  This feels like an early chance foregone, and sets us up to explore Amy's trauma at her father leaving her mother when Amy was 9, and being an absent figure who's approval she still craved.

TRANCE

Oh dear. Danny Boyle - the man who made cynical, fearful Brits realise that the Olympics might not be a completely embarrassing omni-shambles, and managed to turn a sinister tale of child exploitation into a Bollywood song-and-dance feelgood Oscar-winner, has fallen on his face with this pretentious new psychological thriller, TRANCE.  Comparisons with Boyle's impressively tense first feature, SHALLOW GRAVE, do his latest movie no favors. Where GRAVE had emotional stakes, memorable characters and a style that served its substance, TRANCE is all fur coat and no knickers (quite literally so, in a crucial plot twist.)

James McAvoy plays Simon, the unreliable superficially likeable hero of the heist - a gambling addict that does an inside job on his auction house, nicking a priceless painting but getting koshed on the head by his accomplice Franck (Vincent Cassel) in the process. Suffering from amnesia, the gang take him to a hypnotherapist - Rosario Dawson's Elizabeth - hoping to get him to remember what he did with the painting. In the process, we see Elizabeth emerge as a femme fatale, Franck reveal his vulnerable side, and Simon reveal his inner nastiness. It's all very slick, very twisty and, because all three characters look rather nasty for much of the runtime, rather alienating.

The problem with the film is that by the time you realise that there are real emotional stakes, and that the people that you think are rock-hard and manipulative are actually acting out of hurt and self-preservation, you simply don't care. And just as you're not caring, you start to think back to all the little scenes of the film that make no sense.  And that you want to go home and look up the IMDB message boards to figure it out.  Good films aren't about solving the puzzle.  The puzzle is just the MacGuffin upon which we hang the emotional drama.  And if we're too busy working out which bits ape THE MATRIX, or INCEPTION or MEMENTO or ETERNAL SUNSHINE, and which bits just don't work at all, or whether they really got away with turning pubic styling into a major clue, then as a director, you've failed to grab my interest in a way that is meaningful. 

TRANCE is currently on release in the UK, Ireland, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Russia, Brazil, the  USA, the Netherlands and Canada. It opens on April 18th in Kuwait, Lebanon, Estonia and Lithuania; on April 25th in Portugal, Macedonia and Serbia; on May 1st in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; on May 3rd in Mexico; on May 9th in France, Argentina and Romania; on May 16th in Greece; on June 6th in Hungary, Poland and Sweden; on June 13th in Croatia, the Netherlands and Turkey; on August 8th in Germany; and on September 12th in Italy.

TRANCE is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 101 minutes.

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH is a risibly poor attempt at a Michael-Mann style cop thriller from British writer-director Eran Creevy.  Abandoning the social-realist style that gave his first film, SHIFTY, such authenticity and weight, Creevy creates a film that he believes is a hommage, but which reads as cheap pastiche - all slick surfaces, piss-poor Norf London accents, cliche-ridden dialogue and surreal unintentional humour.  The slightly built James McAvoy is woefully miscast as gifted but cynical cop, Max Lewinsky, still suffering from a gunshot wound inflicted by criminal mastermind Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong).  Years later, Lewinsky is paired with an admiring and ambitious cop called Sarah (Andrea Riseborough) and is once again brought into conflict with Sternwood when his teenage son is shot, and he comes back from hiding in Iceland.  The plot, such as it is, plays as a conspiracy thriller in which politicians and senior policeman are implicated.  The only problem is that for the cine-literate, as soon as you introduce a wily campaign manager (Natasha Little) and any senior character played by David Morrissey, we can figure out the entire plot from minute 15 of the film.  This  kills any potential suspense or engagement with the characters. The fact that they speak in pat dialogue in predictable tab A into slot B scenes doesn't help either.  Still, the slick look and feel of the movie is kind of interesting, and you can just about keep entertained until the movie totally jumps the shark in its final act. There's a scene involving gunmen and  grandmother that had the audience laughing out loud at the surreal combination - laughing at rather than with. No movie can survive that. 

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH will be released in the UK and Ireland on March 15th; in the USA on March 27th; in Portugal on April 4th; in the Netherlands and Russia on April 18th; in Japan on May 8th and in Australia and Belgium on May 9th. 

The Best of 2012 - DOCS

I watched 139 films in 2012 and despite the grinches and naysayers, I thought this was a great year for film.  So much so that I refuse to indulge in a trite Top 10 list, or grinch my way through a Bottom 10 of the year.  Instead, here's a list of all the films that moved me, impressed me, surprised me or made me laugh, split by category. It's a list that reflects my own tastes - often puerile, anti-hippie-vegetarian, politicised and eccentric.  It's far from comprehensive - I watch very little horror, even less action and due to an ankle injury mid-year, missed a lot of summer blockbusters. But it sums up my year in movies and I hope gives you a few left-field suggestions for DVDs and Festival screenings turned mainstream releases in 2013.

To begin, it felt like 2012 was a great year for DOCUMENTARIES. In March, I watched two superb docs during the Sundance London Festival.  Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern's film of LCD Soundsystem's valedictory concert at Madison Square Garden, SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS, introduced me to the best band of the decade about a decade after everyone else caught on (doh!) and led to a month of round the clock listening.  Sometimes it feels like I'm Losing My Edge is the soundtrack to my professional life.  The Kids Are (indeed) Coming Up From Behind. More closely related to my dayjob as a greedy capitalist bastard, Lauren Greenfield's THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES was a surprisingly touching look at the excesses of the credit-fuelled property boom and subsequent bust - a microcosmic counterpart to the superlative MARGIN CALL.  Back at the multiplex I cried like a baby during Kevin MacDonald's MARLEY, in memory of a rejected man who became a legendary musician and spread love, perhaps all too freely for his children's taste.

This was also an exceptionally strong year for docs at the London Film Festival.  Shola Lynch's FREE ANGELA AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS reaffirmed my admiration for Angela Davis and the principled articulate protests of the 1960s and 1970s, in sharp contrast to the amorphous, inarticulate Occupy movement of today. Alex Gibney produced a similarly hard-hitting documentary looking at the Catholic Church's tragic mishandling of child sex abuse, by working out from the original US court case.  MEA MAXIMA CULPA was a necessarily painful watch for those who, like me, still consider themselves members of the Church, but given the recent allegations about Jimmy Saville at the BBC, raises important questions about all institutional cover-ups.  FREE ANGELA and MEA MAXIMA CULPA touched subjects close to my heart, but it was a testament to just how well put together Nick Ryan's THE SUMMIT was that I was fascinated by his K2 mountaineering disaster doc.  It doesn't yet have a UK or US release date which is a crying shame.

My final three documentary picks are about larger than life eccentric geniuses who defined their eras and fundamentally changed their art.  The first is Charlie and Lucy Paul's portrait of Gonzo artist, Ralph Steadman, FOR NO GOOD REASON.  The film-makers show Steadman drawing, and capture an in-depth with Johnny Depp that examines his famous relationship with, and resentment of, Hunter S Thompson.  A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY is a fantastically innovative animated biography of Monty Python's Flying Circus member Graham Chapman - openly homosexual when that was still a crime, but a closeted alcoholic. Bill Jones' doc is as irreverent and witty and surreal as a Python deserves.

But hands down the most balls-out insane doc about the most balls-out insane man is the aptly titled BEWARE OF MR BAKER.  Poor Jay Bulger spent years chronicling the angry drummer's tirades, vitriol and bile, while also reminding us just how revolutionary a man he was, principally with the legendary supergroup Cream.  Ginger Baker is also the only man who has threatened to smash a broken bottle over the head of the man who shot his doc on stage at the London Film Fest.  He also inspired the character Animal on The Muppet Show.  Legend come to life. Watch it.

THE SUMMIT, FREE ANGELA & ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS, NO GOOD REASON do not yet have a commercial release date.  A LIAR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY went on limited release in the US in November and goes on release in the UK in February.  MEA MAXIMA CULPA  and BEWARE OF MR BAKER went on limited release in the US in November. MARLEY went on global release in summer 2012 and is available to rent and own. THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES THE HITS went on release in the US, Canada and the UK earlier this year and is available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 4 - GINGER & ROSA

2009 was a great year for British literature, with Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and A.S.Byatt's The Children's Book duking it out for the Booker. The latter book was deeply concerned with how the sexual liberation of the Edwardian bohemians impacted their children. One of the key themes of the novel is to contrast the earnest liberal politics of the Bohemians with the lack of regard for their actual children. They want to make the world a better place, regardless of whether their children are fed and cared for, or hurt by their affairs. Byatt makes the point that artists and intellectuals can be both admirable for their work but a nightmare to live with. Strict principles can often be a convenient fig leaf for selfishness.

Sally Potter's new film, GINGER & ROSA makes much the same point, drawing on a much smaller canvas, but with greater intensity. It's about how a father's radical conception of personal freedom damages his doting teenage daughter. Roland sees Ginger's tears but cannot stop the actions that cause the pain, equating personal sexual freedom, and setting aside bourgeois morality, with his opposition to armed conflict. It's a pompous but not indefensible position, but the the same could be said for so much that happens around the girl. Her gay godfathers genuinely care for her, but their tales of radicalism fuel her wallowing deaths possibility of a nuclear holocaust. Similarly, their friend Bella praises Ginger's activism but denies whipping her up. It's no wonder the poor girl is sad and confused, desperately trying to please and not complain.

Alice Englert and Elle Fanning,
Rosa & Ginger respectively.

And what of Ginger's best friend Rosa? Although the focus of the film is not on her, she's an equally tragic figure. Where Ginger suffers from a surfeit of concerned but misguided adults, Rosa has a distracted mother and an absentee father. No wonder she latches onto Roland as an impressive father figure - a composite man to take care of her and shepherd her into adulthood.

GINGER & ROSA seems to me to be a perfect film - tightly scripted, beautifully acted and photographed, evoking in minute detail the spirit and design of early 60s London, but also hinting at wider themes of revolt and parenting. I love that in place of the Swinging Sixties cliché we get a drab, grimy post-war world and an uneasy conflict between radicalism and 50s suburbia. Particular praise has to go to Elle Fanning (Ginger) who carries so much of the emotional burden of the film, but also Christine Hendricks in a smaller but equally intense role as her mother. Alessandro Nivola as Roland, her father, brings just the right balance of sleaze and headstrong idealism. But ultimately, the triumph of this picture is Sally Potter's, in bringing a new perspective to 60s London, and doing so with such formal control and intensity. If there is any justice, this film, and particularly Fanning and Hendricks' performances, will be recognised come awards season.

GINGER & ROSA played Toronto and London 2012. It opens in the UK on October 19th. The running time is 89 minutes.

iPad Round-Up 4 - ATTACK THE BLOCK

ATTACK THE BLOCK is the tightly written, brilliantly observed, laugh-out-loud hilarious directorial debut of British TV comedian, Joe Cornish.  The concept is brilliant - what would happen if aliens didn't invade LA or New York, but a South London council estate? Suddenly all the anti-social behaviour that the Daily Mail readers like to pillory looks like basic survival skills, and the essential paedophobia of modern British society is turned on its head. The muggers, dope dealers and bad-boys are shown to be lost kids with mad skills who save the day.

What I love about this film is that while it's making a serious social point - all the more serious after this summer's riots - it wears its learning lightly.  It gets the whole Castigat Ridendo Mores point I was making in my review of THE CONSPIRATOR.  It never forgets to make us laugh - it has characters we believe in and care about - and it immerses us in the messy details of modern life on a London estate.  And it goes to show that you can make a great movie that's just 90 minutes long.  

Kudos to Joe Cornish for the genuinely funny, intelligent script. But also real kudos for pulling off some cool sci-fi effects on a low-budget, and for assembling a mostly unknown cast of kids for the film.  Once again, young Sammy Williams (WILD BILL) steals every scene he's in, but there are no weak links here.  A must-see movie, and likely to become a cult favourite on DVD.  Moreover, one of the few films that exploits its SHAUN OF THE DEAD connections, that deserves to do so.

ATTACK THE BLOCK played SXSW 2011 and was released this summer in the UK, Ireland, Indonesia, Malaysia, Belgium, France, Iceland, the Netherlands, the USA, Turkey, Kuwait, Germany, Singapore and Israel. It is currently on release in Sweden. It is available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 12 - LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA

LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA is about a real British musician called Lawrence - no sirname - who had a glimmer of success in the underground rock scene in the late 80s and early 90s but never really troubled the charts and has since faded yet further into obscurity. Living on the poverty-line, a recovering addict, scrabbling for a gig, and yet still convinced he has that one great record - Lawrence is a tragicomic figure. It's quite astonishing to see how far a man can fall - and yet still have a complete sense of self, and a righteous indignation about the fame the world owes him. The result is that Paul Kelly's documentary is at once terrifyingly specific - rooted as it is in Lawrence's particular personality - but also a cliché. The intimacy and access afforded to the director, and an editorial style that focuses on an unwitting punchline, gives the movie flashes of SPINAL TAP humour. We like Lawrence, but we also laugh at him. 

The problem is that the movie has little to offer other than the innate charm and comically monstrous ego of Lawrence - and that begins to bore after a while. I also felt that the movie, which assumes the audience already knows and loves Lawrence, lacked context and objectivity. I would have loved to have seen people other than Lawrence describe why his bands - Felt and Denim - were significant (or otherwise). I also wonder whether a non-British audience will understand the significance of Lawrence claiming that he was never a success because John Peel didn't like his music. Without context, will they know the importance of the BBC Radio 1 DJ in championing new bands? And I would have liked Paul Kelly to press Lawrence on his years of addiction, rather than just coolly presenting it as fact. Because in a sense, where this documentary could have been really great - could have had an impact beyond hagiography - would've been in presenting Lawrence as a warning to all young aspirant musicians who want it all, never get it, and whose frustrations leads them into a downward spiral. Sadly, Kelly chooses to play it for laughs - albeit fond rather than nasty - instead.

LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA has no release date.

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.

London Film Fest 2010 Day 6 - ANOTHER YEAR

Mike Leigh returns to the Festival with a typical Mike Leigh product: heightened social realism mixing comedy and tragedy - finely observed, and improvised by the actors he often works with. The resulting film is a quality product if less memorable than, say, HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, and less scarring than SECRETS AND LIES.

The movie is set around a couple called Tom and Jerry (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) - solidly middle-class, nice, cheerful, and happily married. They have a 30 year old son called Joe (Oliver Maltman) who through the course of the year finds a cheerful Poppy-lite girlfriend called Katie (Karina Fernandez). They all get on really well. This stands in sharp contrast with the people who surround them and who are, by turns, taken under their wing. As the movie opens we see Jerry, a counsellor, deal with a depressed woman called Janet (a cameo from Imelda Staunton). And then, the person who really anchors the work is Lesley Manville, playing a lonely middle-aged woman called Mary, who consoles herself by drinking too much and constructing an unrealistic fantasy that Joe will ask her out. Finally, we meet Tom's elder brother Ronnie (David Bradley), recently bereaved, living numb in a grey house.

As we pass through the year, we see that Tom and Jerry are kind and sociable and create a lot of fun around them. They are constantly telling people to sit down and have a cup of tea and asking them if they are okay. But, in essence, the people who surround them aren't okay - they are miserable - miserable and pretending, badly, not to be. This is best shown by a superb little end-scene for the character Jack, played by Phil Davis. His wife is ill. Jerry asks if he's okay and he says "Well we try not to let it get us down", but then looks to the ground forlorn.  So, how far is the friendship of Terry and June enabling that delusion, by blithely making cups of tea - and how far is it making it worse by presenting these poor folk with an image of smug domestic bliss? To that end, I found ANOTHER YEAR problematic, but I think I was meant to. I also found it, despite the laughs, a profoundly depressing, if well-made, film.

Additional tags: Michele Austin, Karina Fernandez, Martin Savage, David Bradley, Oliver Maltman, Gary Yershon

ANOTHER YEAR played Cannes and Toronto 2010 and opens in the UK on November 5th. It opens in the Netherlands on November 11th; in France on December 22nd; in the US on December 31st and in Germany on January 27th 2011.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - SHIFTY

SHIFTY is the impressive debut feature from British writer-director, Eran Creevey. It portrays 24 hours in the life of a second generation Pakistani boy nick-named Shifty (Riz Ahmed, THE ROAD TO GUANTANEMO), who has evolved from being a good schoolkid selling a bit of weed on the side into a hard core crack dealer. Shifty is on the edge of a knife - his elder brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra, EASTENDERS) and his best mate Chris (Daniel Mays, ATONEMENT), recently returned from Manchester, are trying to pull Shifty back from a life of crime. But Shifty is being set-up by his dealer Glen (Jason Flemyng).

The movie was shot for under £100,000 in just 18 days and captures the grim reality of suburban drug use in sludge colours and lower middle-class homes. This isn't London as Compton wannabe KIDULTHOOD style. Rather, you see drug use messing with real families. The movie is emotionally tense and builds suspense toward a dramatic conclusion. It feels authentic and while it makes some perceptive points about the cultural ironies of a being a second-gen Muslim immigrant, it wears its social critique lightly. SHIFTY is just superb guerilla film-making.

SHIFTY played London 2008 and opened in the UK in April 2009. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

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.

SHERLOCK HOLMES - solid blockbuster fun, but what's with Adler?

I have read much of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, but was never as taken with it, qua detective fiction, as I was with Agatha Christie. The reason being that Conan Doyle did not play fair. His Victorian detective always solved crimes by means of arcane knowledge that only he could possess - the taste of a particular type of wax used by just one candle-manufacturer in Brittany. As a consequence, the clever reader cannot solve a Conan Doyle mystery in the same way that he can use pure logic and close observation to solve an Agatha Christie novel. So, I read Conan Doyle, as most schoolchildren do, for that sense of Britain at the height of imperial glory but also at the depths of urban degradation - and for that wonderfully subversive idea that Holmes was a bit of a bastard, possibly homo-erotically attached to his sidekick Dr Watson, and addicted to cocaine.

I would suggest that Guy Ritchie's new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes also works best as a mood piece, interspersed by some rather spectacular stunts. His London is out of Tim Burton's SWEENEY TODD - all smoke-filled narrow streets and filthy docks contrasted with the opulent luxury of parliament, Mayfair hotels, and quasi-Masonic lodges. The production design is simply marvellous and makes good use of what is left of Victorian Britain in Manchester and London (from what I could tell). Ritchie also finally finds a suitable object for his obsession with posh chaps bruising with the chavs. He amps up Holmes' boxing, drug-taking and general down-and-dirtiness. Holmes is happy chatting with the local bobby, Clarkie, or with a grimy looking trawlerman. He is altogether more uncomfortable dining in a genteel restaurant.

As an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works well too. Ritchie gives us some marvellous stunts that truly make use of the Thames. There are three action set-pieces: one sees a ship slipped off its moorings during a fight between Holmes and a French giant; the second sees Watson set off a string of explosions at a riverside factory; and the final act confrontation between Holmes and his adversary, Lord Blackwood, takes places atop an as-yet-unfinished Tower Bridge. I would have happily paid the price of admission just to see the imagined Victorian vista from the top of that bridge.

Even better than as a mood piece and as an action film, SHERLOCK HOLMES works best as a "bromance" in the manner of all the best action/detective flicks. Robert Downey Junior and Jude Law, as Holmes and Watson respectively, utterly convinced me of their fondness for each other. With such a high-stakes and frankly ludicrous plot swirling about them, it was the credibility of their relationship that anchored the film. I loved their bickering; Holmes' resentment of Watson's new fiancée; and their genuine affection. We truly believe that, as in the books, Watson has brought Holmes back to the edges of respectable society. We also believe, in the first of a few annoying retcons, that Holmes keeps Watson's addiction to gambling in check. When all the explosions were over, I loved the scenes between these two, and I'll be watching the next film for those.

So all in all, I had a rather good time with SHERLOCK HOLMES as a beautifully rendered, action blockbuster, centred around a charismatic relationship between Holmes and Watson. Sure the plot was insane - Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) wants to use black magic to rule the world! But it does at least do that typical Holmes thing where something that seems supernatural can be explained with good old fashioned science. I know that Ritchie has exaggerated Holmes' bruiser antics in the manner of his Mockney flicks, but hey, what's life without a little indulgence? And, it finally looks like Ritchie has found a good excuse to use his slo-mo fight scene style!

That is not to say that there isn't a problem with this film. And that problem is the retconned introduction of Irene Adler - a love interest for Holmes. Anyone with any knowledge of the books will know that this is just plain wrong. But, producers aiming for a target demographic of horny teenage boys will have their way so it looks like we're saddled with her. Ritchie just doesn't do female characters. He doesn't know how to create a well-rounded, interesting woman on screen. And Rachel McAdams' Irene Adler is a victim of this. The concept of the character, nowhere in the books, is a good one - to have a criminal mastermind who has gotten under Holmes' skin. But for a woman to have married as many times as Adler and to have been up to as much crime, she would need to be older - nearer to Holmes' age. I would have loved to see Helen McCrory in this role. But more to the point, Adler was utterly redundant in this flick, except as a nod to the teenage male audience, and in helping to set up the second film. I mean, seriously, imagine a film without Adler. It would've been twenty minutes shorter and the better for it. So for the sequel, I'm hoping that McAdams will be booted, just like that awful Katie Holmes from BATMAN BEGINS, and replaced by someone older and frankly, better at acting. I'm also hoping the scriptwriters give her more to do.

SHERLOCK HOLMES is on release in the USA, UK, Bahrain, Croatia, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Canada, Denmark, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Australia, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Indonesia, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Mexico, Romania and Sweden. It opens next weekend in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and Estonia. It opens on January 14th in Argentina, Greece, Spain, and Turkey. It opens on January 22nd in Finland; on January 28th in Germany and Switzerland; on February 3rd in France and on March 12th in Japan.

ST TRINIAN'S 2: THE LEGEND OF FRITTON'S GOLD - too few genuine laughs

I rather liked the 2007 St Trinian's remake. It was cheeky, rather fun, but in a rather charmingly lo-rent way. Rupert Everett dressing up in drag to play Camilla Fritton, headmistress of the most anarchic school in England, was a fun antidote to all those airbrushed teen-rom-com flicks starring Amanda Bynes and Emma Roberts. I liked the visual humour and Colin Firth sending up his Mr Darcy image.

So it was with some anticipation that I watched the sequel, ST TRINIAN'S 2: THE LEGEND OF FRITTON'S GOLD. The story is rather clever in that it build's on St Trinian's anarcho-feminism. It turns out that an ancestor of headmistress Camilla Fritton (Everett) and new head girl Anabelle Fritton (Talulah Riley) was a swashbuckling pirate who hijacked gold from Lord Pomfrey - an anti-feminist who was going to use the loot to dethrone Elizabeth I. In the present day, Piers Pomfrey (David Tennant) is trying to steal the treasure back. The girls have to follow clues to London, find the gold and defeat the scoundrelous enemy, with the help of old head girl (Gemma Arterton) and Camilla's love-interest Geoffrey Thwaites (Colin Firth).

The film succeeds in some of the same ways as the original. There is a lot of visual humour around the production design of the school, and a certain lo-rent charm to the way it's been put together. Unfortunately, it does not have the verbal wit of the original. Indeed, there are very few genuinely laugh-out loud moments. The film misses Gemma Arterton in a starring role, and didn't really use Girls Aloud's Sarah Harding in a sensible manner. I know that most of the actresses are passed their school days, but Sarah Harding strains credibility as a current school girl - surely she would have been better used as a returning old head girl? In general, I feel the film might have benefited from spending more time at school, generating humour from the absurdities of a St Trinian's education, and less time chasing for gold in London. Ultimately, it just doesn't work.

ST TRINIANS 2: THE LEGEND OF FRITTON'S GOLD is on release in the UK.

HARRY BROWN - the only permissable bigotry

These days you can't hate people on the grounds of their race, sexual orientation, religion or political views. The only permissable form of bigotry in the UK is the hatred of the white working class, and in particular, white working class kids. The right-wing middle-class media make a living from depicting chav kids as feral, dope-addled, knife-wielding granny botherers and social menaces. English society is in decay! Suburbia is lawless! And it's all because a bunch of uneducated kids have taken to drinking cans of Super-tenants outside Burger King at 11 at night while wearing fake Burberry caps, and driving modified Novas. It says a lot about how insecure post-modern, recession-bound Britain is that the only new cinema we seem to be capable of producing is either lauding the "glory" days of 1980s soccer hooliganism (punching people IS our proud heritage) or decrying working class violence. Whether the films are glorifying or condemning chav-violence, they are still making the lethal assumption that this is the way life is. And you think to yourself, does Mike Leigh work in vain?

HARRY BROWN is a good film. It's technically well-made, visually impressive, suspenseful, and features a great central performance from Michael Caine as a pensioner who turns violent on the teenage drug-pushers terrorising his estate. There's a satisfyingly slow-build to a pretty convincing revenge thriller. Caine has some nice Tarantino-style one-liners while dispatching a dope-peddler. There's even some astute critiquing of how the police are riven by spin and politicking. Emily Mortimer gives a nuanced performance and Iain Glenn is absolutely menacing. There's no denying it - this is a good film. I would have really loved it had I not been continually wary of the fact that I was watching a sort of middle-class angst-porn, designed to push all my buttons as a tax-paying constructive member of society meant to be living in fear of being knifed on the Central Line.

I don't buy the Daily Mail and I'm not buying this. I don't care how nice the packaging and how gritty the performances.

HARRY BROWN played Toronto 2009 and is on release in the UK. It opens in the Netherlands on February 25th 2010.