Post by Capo on Oct 26, 2009 13:47:03 GMT
Shane Meadows's new feature is proudly presented as a 5-day-production made for "just" £30,000, as a way for the director to get "back to basics".
It's a simple faux documentary about loser roadie Le Donk (Paddy Considine) and real-life Nottingham rapper Scor-Zay-Zee, as they try to find a supporting slot at an Arctic Monkeys gig in Manchester.
The "return to roots" is a bit of a misnomer, really, and borders on pretentious, because none of Meadows's previous films are particularly ambitious; this is more a way of him making a film so relatively cheap that there's limited if any studio interference, which was known to be a problem for Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and reportedly resulted in a "long editing process" for This Is England.
Meadows dedicates most of his resources to scripts concentrating, with post-Scorsese focus, on what critics like to call "masculinity" and "working class male egos on collision courses". At this he's most effective when portraying domestic power struggles (all of the tension in Dead Man's Shoes stems from this), but he's not a great storyteller and often relies on a riveting central performance to give his narrative a drive (without Stephen Graham, This Is England loses much of its energy). On display here are the usual Meadows tricks: narrative dead-ends are overcome with montages to soothing acoustic guitars and gravelly male vocals.
That this film is more an outright comedy, then, than an attempt at drama, is a bit of a relief. More welcoming is the return of Paddy Considine as Meadows's leading man. The script, a fly-on-the-wall sort of doc with interaction between subjects and director (Meadows plays himself), relies heavily on improvisation, something at which Considine is very gifted.
Early on in the film we're introduced to Le Donk's former girlfriend, now living with somebody else, to whom Le Donk shows clear hostility. It's an uncomfortable attempt to form an emotional backbone to the narrative, especially when an off-camera Meadows becomes Le Donk's confidante, giving him advice on how he can win his girlfriend back.
This aspect of the film isn't thought through particularly well; it risks producing an antagonism between viewer and protagonist, so sore a loser is Le Donk. Thankfully Meadows and Considine don't dwell on it long, and though Le Donk becomes increasingly self-centred as the film progresses, it mostly develops in a humorous manner. At the core of this social reject is a battered ego that just needs a hug.
When it returns to this more "serious" tone later on, the film meets its biggest challenge in portraying Le Donk, a character difficult to take seriously, come to the man-making reality of fatherhood. It's presented as a brief aside to the comedy and courts sentimentality all the way, but Considine pulls it off with subtle and revealing facial expressions and a quivering voice.
Overall, it's a bit of a one-note film, resembling not so much a grounded work like Romeo Brass as a bloated effort to draw out one of Meadows's previous shorts to feature length; Le Donk - Considine's creation - previously featured very briefly in the 70-minute self-compiled anthology Shane's World in 2000.
There's no shortage of laughs, though, and Sight & Sound's review is right to note that the film's flaws are no more major than any other, more expensive film. In the climax, Considine and Scor-Zay-Zee perform to a bouncing Old Trafford Cricket Ground, a less excruciating, more satisfying version of Napoleon Dynamite, in which Considine allows his rapping sidekick to enjoy the limelight, while delivering a hilarious, nonsensical chorus of his own. ("Just calm down Deidre Barlow!")
It's a simple faux documentary about loser roadie Le Donk (Paddy Considine) and real-life Nottingham rapper Scor-Zay-Zee, as they try to find a supporting slot at an Arctic Monkeys gig in Manchester.
The "return to roots" is a bit of a misnomer, really, and borders on pretentious, because none of Meadows's previous films are particularly ambitious; this is more a way of him making a film so relatively cheap that there's limited if any studio interference, which was known to be a problem for Once Upon a Time in the Midlands and reportedly resulted in a "long editing process" for This Is England.
Meadows dedicates most of his resources to scripts concentrating, with post-Scorsese focus, on what critics like to call "masculinity" and "working class male egos on collision courses". At this he's most effective when portraying domestic power struggles (all of the tension in Dead Man's Shoes stems from this), but he's not a great storyteller and often relies on a riveting central performance to give his narrative a drive (without Stephen Graham, This Is England loses much of its energy). On display here are the usual Meadows tricks: narrative dead-ends are overcome with montages to soothing acoustic guitars and gravelly male vocals.
That this film is more an outright comedy, then, than an attempt at drama, is a bit of a relief. More welcoming is the return of Paddy Considine as Meadows's leading man. The script, a fly-on-the-wall sort of doc with interaction between subjects and director (Meadows plays himself), relies heavily on improvisation, something at which Considine is very gifted.
Early on in the film we're introduced to Le Donk's former girlfriend, now living with somebody else, to whom Le Donk shows clear hostility. It's an uncomfortable attempt to form an emotional backbone to the narrative, especially when an off-camera Meadows becomes Le Donk's confidante, giving him advice on how he can win his girlfriend back.
This aspect of the film isn't thought through particularly well; it risks producing an antagonism between viewer and protagonist, so sore a loser is Le Donk. Thankfully Meadows and Considine don't dwell on it long, and though Le Donk becomes increasingly self-centred as the film progresses, it mostly develops in a humorous manner. At the core of this social reject is a battered ego that just needs a hug.
When it returns to this more "serious" tone later on, the film meets its biggest challenge in portraying Le Donk, a character difficult to take seriously, come to the man-making reality of fatherhood. It's presented as a brief aside to the comedy and courts sentimentality all the way, but Considine pulls it off with subtle and revealing facial expressions and a quivering voice.
Overall, it's a bit of a one-note film, resembling not so much a grounded work like Romeo Brass as a bloated effort to draw out one of Meadows's previous shorts to feature length; Le Donk - Considine's creation - previously featured very briefly in the 70-minute self-compiled anthology Shane's World in 2000.
There's no shortage of laughs, though, and Sight & Sound's review is right to note that the film's flaws are no more major than any other, more expensive film. In the climax, Considine and Scor-Zay-Zee perform to a bouncing Old Trafford Cricket Ground, a less excruciating, more satisfying version of Napoleon Dynamite, in which Considine allows his rapping sidekick to enjoy the limelight, while delivering a hilarious, nonsensical chorus of his own. ("Just calm down Deidre Barlow!")
