british films
This piece originally
featured in The Face magazine after they forced me to trundle down the
video shop in pursuit of some insight into just what amounted to a British
Film at the time of all the palaver over The Full Monty. As you can see,
McCready forced to watch some fictional dole-ies from Sheffield waving
their bit about was not really great commissioning. Unless you want fireworks...
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Pardon my lack of celluloid patroitism but, having just subjected myself of a whole day of current British cinema in the interests of scientific study, tomorrow, having developed a taste for torture, I am planning to watch paint dry while having my leg sawn off before playing scrabble with a team made up of members of Sleeper, Shed Seven and Échobelly. I will be rounding the day off with a tape of Czechoslovakian cartoons used previously to extract confessions from particulalrly unhelpful terrorists. Fuck- you'll have to excuse the bad language but if it's good enough for salt o'terth apprentice strippers (Robert Carlyle in The Full Monty) then it's good enough for me- I haven't seen so much shit since I followed a man with a shovel around the course at The Grand National. You must also excuse my ignorance as I've spent the past year listening to Oasis, but, how on earth did Sheffield become Britain's answer to Los Angeles- an adventure playground for clueless producers- and just how many London pockets have been lined with the profits of grim oop north cliche pile ups where all the women, tied permanently to sinks, have no lines and faces like raisins while the men drink flat ale and suffer the slings and arrows of redundancy and outrageous scriptwriting ? The phenomenal impact of The Full Monty and the success of films like Brassed Off and When Saturday Comes has not gone unnoticed by the British film industry. The Full Monty has grossed 37 million pounds in just 12 weeks. It spent all of September and October as the most popular film in the country. January sees the release of, and please note I'm not making this up, Up N Under starring Neil Morrisey and Tony Slattery. I have here in my hand, and I am willing to post it to anyone who doesn't believe me, a press release which describes it thus: "A comedy about blood, sweat, tears and bruised cartlidge. A story of a man who bets all he has, which is not a lot, to train the worst local rugby League team in West Yorkshire. Along the way there is hurt, pride, jealousy, struggle, triumph over adversity and of course a lot of laughs!". I have not yet seen Up N Under but I am willing to eat the entire contents of a fair-sized milliners should it prove to be worth a toss. And this, believe me will turn out to be the tip of a clogtastic, up against it, regular sheep shagging festival of film assaulting anyone with intentions of eating last week's popcorn in Screen 32 of a Supermultiplex near you next year. I don't normally make fun of the educationally sub-normal but, what are they doing out unsupervised spending 37 million pounds in twelve weeks? I have high hopes that they will be splashing out to see my own efforts which has a considerable chance of being made in the current climate. Whippet Out! is the story of a group of unemployed milk men who club together with nuclear scientists (possibly also unemployed, I haven't decided yet). They meet at a Job Club to breed a dog eight foot tall. After initial failure, the dog goes on to win top prize at the All Yorkshire finals. The film, which incidentally ends with a hilarious ukelele concert ont' village green, will highlight the plight of milkmen losing their pride and livelihoods after people started using supermarket skimmed milk and creme fraiche. We have approached Peter Postlethwaite (rapidly becoming a pie-chucker's Brando) to play the whippet but his agent tells us he's all out of gritty realism at the moment but is willing to look at the script at a later date if he can (a) die in a mining accident or (b) say 'bollocks" whenever he likes in it. Such films present a stereotypical view of the simple world outside 'that' London. The Full Monty has nothing to do with brass bands, the subject of Brassed Off but, no more than thirty seconds after the title sequence, a brass band goes by for no good reason- obviously an everyday occurence as far as the folks in Soho are concerned. Despite the fact that all these films appear to be set in the present, much of the action appears to take place in carpetless pre- war homes where one dimensional Northern lads head-butt their dads before hugging them roughly. As far as I can tell, work or no work, most 'working' class homes are kitted out like the flight deck of a 747 with a selection of widescreen TVs, video games and oversized hi fi. In the real world, these people don't live on chips and hard-bitten optimism. Nor does dropping your kecks or playing the Tuba result in the kind of unlikely happy-ever-after endings that characterise these cartoon- like films. Their success is puzzling beyond belief. What it says about the mental state of the nation is that we are all brain damaged. Furthermore, considering the fact that the all swearing- he's a boozer, he's a loser but his feet are tipped with gold- travesty that is When Saturday Comes flopped miserably in London (by the second weekend of its release just one screen in the capital was showing it) while proving itself a considerable success in the rest of the country, its clear that there is no room here for the idea of smug southeners taking a cheap cinema holiday in other people's mining misery. The people watching these films are the the people who should be up in arms at the idea of their lives, their streets and their accents being used to help a film industry high on success beat bad ideas into the ground. John McCready ____________________________________________________________
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links coming soon
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