Reviews

Having an interest in British films that show something different to the usual run down council estate set dramas, or cockney gangster sagas, I was immediately drawn to the premise of Hinterland, which promised a gentle tale. Two former childhood friends, a boy and a girl now in their twenties, who have a platonic relationship, revisiting their shared past during a couple of days spent at their old holiday home in Cornwall.

Having read some reviews of the film by critics, who almost all gave the film a respectable 3 out of 5 rating, I went into it not expecting too much, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.

Having read the film being described as slight and insubstantial in almost all of the critical reviews of the film, I feel that they have missed the point somewhat, as on the surface this might appear to be the case, but there are definitely deeper emotions here between the two characters, which are expressed at times through the facial expressions of Harry Macqueen's character, Harvey, and which play themselves out by the actions of both characters at the end of the film.

To think that Hinterland was made on a budget of only £10,000, it's nothing short of amazing. There are some nicely composed shots, which utilise the Cornish coastal landscape well. The pace of the film is fairly slow, and scenes are allowed plenty of space and time to play themselves out, reminiscent of some of the films of the French new wave, and John Cassavetes, but despite these echoes, there is a definite British feel to the somewhat reserved emotions on display for the first three quarters of the film. There are also echoes of the British road movie, Radio On by Chris Petit, in the opening fifteen minutes or so of the film, as the characters make their way to the Cornish holiday home from their respective properties in London in Harvey's old Volvo car.

It's a very promising, and memorable, first film from the director Harry Macqueen, and it will be interesting to see what he could do with a bigger budget in the future. Recommended.

I tracked down a copy of this documentary on DVD purely for nostalgic reasons, being a former skater myself in the early 90's.

It is a well made documentary that starts right at the beginnings of the scene in the UK in the 70's when, much like in the US, surfers would make their own boards and skate when they wern't able to go out surfing, and charts some of the significant developments of the sport through to 2005. Despite being an avid skater, I'd never heard of the ESA English skateboard association, who remarkably paid for an English skate team to enter international competitions in Europe and the US in the 80's.

The filmmaker manages to get contributions from a large number of people who made an impact on UK skateboarding, including the founder of the seminal RAD magazine Tim Leighton-Boyce amongst others.

Despite some input from some legendary figures in the history of UK skateboarding, as the film wore on I found myself feeling that there was a definite London bias to the film, though.

Apart from about 45 seconds of the film, where the filmmaker talks to the guy who helped get the first custom built skate park in the UK built in Livingston, Scotland, the rest of the documentary is focused almost solely on the London scene, and while undoubtedly important, I felt it skewed the film somewhat, as I felt like the guy making it felt that there wasn't anything worth reporting outside of the city.

Being from the north of England, I distinctly remember pockets of skaters existed throughout the country in cities like Sheffield, Nottingham, and Leeds to name but a few places, and one of the biggest indoor skate parks in the UK when I was skating in the early 90's was in Barrow in Furness, Cumbria. As a consequence it felt to me somewhat like an opportunity was missed to document a definitive history of skateboarding in the UK, but still it's definitely worth a watch if, like me, you have an interest in the subject.

As an avid follower of British cinema, I like to think that I've seen most of the worthwhile films that our country has produced. But I'm always on the lookout for films that I haven't seen, but sound interesting, and so I stumbled upon Babylon, then tracked it down on DVD and gave it a watch.

Co-written by the writer of Quadrophenia, and directed by an Italian born director, and starring Brinsley Forde of Aswad, comedian Mel Smith, and Karl Howman, perhaps best known these days as the face of Flash household cleaning products, it seems an unlikely sort of project, which perhaps, not surprisingly due to its sensitive subject matter dealing with the institutionalised racism of late 1970's England, seemed to receive little attention when it was released.

This is a shame, as although not quite a classic film, the director, Franco Rosso, who sadly was unable to generate funding for any future film projects after making this film, shows that given time he could have been a significant voice in British Cinema. Babylon is a film made by a gifted director just finding his feet, with some memorable scenes littered throughout. It strikingly portrays working class London in the late 1970's as a pretty unforgiving environment, though, the drab atmosphere of the setting is frequently punctuated by tracks from the film's reggae soundtrack, bringing you into the characters' world as they seek solace from these surroundings in the reggae music they play through their cherished sound system.

Babylon should definitely have a place in anyone's top 100 British films of all time. For me It only narrowly falls short of classic status because the ending feels a tad abrupt, and the whole film does feel like it does not run quite as seamlessly as it should. Perhaps that's down to the editing maybe. Even so, I'd recommend it to anyone with an interest in British films.

I saw Tyrannosaur last week, and was prompted to sign up to IMDb just to write a review of it as I feel people are overrating this film somewhat. To kick off, I'm a big fan of the film Dead Man's Shoes,which the director, Paddy Considine, co-wrote with the one and only Shane Meadows, so I was expecting something fairly special, but I couldn't help but feeling slightly let down by Tyrannosaur. There are a few things wrong with this film imo. The direction is pretty much non existent, there were hardly any distinctive visual shots or sequences, which considering that Considine has a degree in photography was a bit disappointing. Also I think that the film as a whole seemed to be a bit flabby and could've done with tighter editing to make it more concise, more seamless. Perhaps the film's strongest suit is in the writing. The characters were interesting and 3 dimensional and there were some funny scenes, especially the one's featuring Joeseph's Irish mate, and I have to say that the last twenty minutes of the film were pretty engrossing. All in all it struck me as an actor's film as oppose to a filmmaker's, the emphasis was on the characters first and foremost everything else was secondary. I've no doubt that Paddy Considine will go on to make a great film one day, as Tyrannosaur did show some promise, especially in the script, but it struck me as a film made by a director still trying to find his film-making voice, he would've perhaps been better off following the path of his good friend Shane Meadows in making a few more short films first to develop this before attempting to make a full feature film. Still, definitely worth seeing, and better than a lot of other films currently being shown at the cinema. An above average but not great film.