Boys from the Black Stuff

There's a lot of interest in watching tv series on DVD these days. The trouble with this is that people seem to favour watching the next big thing over watching old classic television. Strangely this is the opposite to films, where the explosion of DVD rental has meant that a whole wealth of classic films are suddenly available to a modern audience. So here's a recommendation to you: go and watch some of the classic BBC television series, and start with Boys from the Black Stuff.

Written by Alan Bleasedale - Boys from the Black Stuff is both a gripping drama and a historical document. It tells the stories of the lives of 5 pavement construction workers ('Black Stuff' refers to asphalt) who are made redundant in Thatcher's Britain of the early 1980s and have to survive the dole queues and social upheavals of the day. The first episode is a feature-length one that sets the scene, the 5 other episodes focus on one of the main characters, looking at how they deal with life after their redundancy.

The series is firmly entrenched in a left wing view of events of the time, but rather than beating the drum about politics it focuses on the lives wreaked by economic policies and invites viewers to draw their own conclusions. Only one character in the whole series is an overt Marxist, and his views are derided as coming from ivory towers by the other characters who - despite largely agreeing with him - insist that he's living in a dream world thinking he change anything.

Instead of focussing on the politics, the series holds a microscope up to the mental anguish of being told that you're 'redundant', of being told that your job (and by extension life) has no further purpose. The men from the Blackstuff are forced into taking low-paid moonlighting work while claiming benefits in order to provide for their families. Several sides of this equation are shown; alienation of employees within the benefits agency is just as rife as those standing on the other side of the desk in the dole queue. The lives of entire communities are torn apart as neighbours fear each other as spies and families break apart under the intense stress of making ends meet.

The series isn't just memorable for its story; there are several outstanding performances including Julie Waters and Michael Angelis in one episode that shows how a loving marriage creaks under financial pressures. Perhaps the iconic image of the series is that of Bernhard Hill's Yosser Hughes imploring people to "... gizza job." It's easy to see why the character of Yosser carries so much weight; Yosser's second mantra is a simple "I'm Yosser Hughes", which he repeats to almost everyone he meets and in the episode focussing on him builds to a crescendo as he finally loses his mind. This desperate expression of individual humanity is so saddening, this was the 1980s, an age in which people were supposed to be expressing individuality through materialistic gain - the reality of which was a suppression of humanity through economic squalor.

It is the final episode of Boys from the Black Stuff which haunts me still even as I write this, in which a character is driven to an inevitable death by the state's uncaring attitude to his inability to work. The people around him know that his death approaches, they make his peace with him and help him to see his beloved Liverpool one final time. The character talks about his work on the docks and how strong and proud he was in the past as fought for what he believed - and his death represents a death of that way of life in the modern world. His funeral is a powerful scene, one in which the guiding hand of the catholic church is rejected by people who see not a caring priest, but someone trying to manipulate people in an emotional nadir. The final scenes of the last episode of Boys from the Black Stuff may appear confusing, but I think that they hint at a working class willingly losing its own power through indulgence and resignation to a position of underclass.

Boys from the Black Stuff now seems more important than ever, what with our new lizard overlords promising us an 'age of austerity'. At the moment it's an dramatisation of one of the toughest periods in the recent social history of Britain, it might not be long before we realise that it was also a portent for the future.

Law Abiding Citizen

Why did I bother watching this? Since the world cup started this is the first LoveFilm DVD I have watched - I shouldn't have done. I remember when the trailer for this came out at the cinema, it looked fairly exciting at the time what with Jamie Foxx frowning into the camera and Gerard Butler threatening to "... kill everyone!", hopes were high for an action-packed yet thoughtful drama that hinted at the difficultly of establishing a strong judiciary within a free democracy. Kind of like Batman Begins, but with fewer gadgets.

'Law Abiding Citizen' feels like it was written by three teams of people, each of whom had different ideas about the film and none of whom had any idea about the existence of the other. The first group wanted to make a action blockbuster with explosions and Gerard Butler shouting, the second group want to write an essay on the dark hidden agendas of the US legal systems, the third group are trying to make Saw 8 (I say 'Saw 8', who knows which version of that over bloated franchise they'll be up to by the time you read this article?). At various times in the film one of the groups seem to have total control, never are they all working together. I get the impression that the film was the originally the idea of a single writer, but that funding was a problem and as Hollywood execs got their mitts on it they insisted upon a series of non-negotiable changes that ballsed the whole thing up.

I guess a quick rundown of the plot wouldn't go completely amiss. Gerard Bulter is a 'Law Abiding Citizen' whose wife and daughter are killed by intruders into his home. One of the intruders testifies against the other, meaning that one gets the death penalty while the other gets 5 years in jail. Bulter's character (Shelton) decides this isn't good enough, and so spends 10 years planning the deaths of the murderers and those involved in the prosecution of the murderers - Jamie Foxx.

The film's problems start with its initial premise, that of Shelton as the 'Law Abiding Citizen'. In order to explain his near godlike ability to booby trap and kill at will, the background to his character is that he is some kind of ex-secret service black-ops assassin, the best of the best at killing people. He hardly sounds like a paragon for social justice to me, especially not when he decides it's his job to murder people he doesn't approve of. The problems continue when Shelton kills his cellmate (no motive at all for that - not a particularly 'Law Abiding' thing to do), ridicules and murders a judge (her crime - not locking him up without any evidence) and posts a tape of him sawing a man to pieces to a 10-year-old girl. Are we supposed to be questioning which of the characters is really the bad guy in all this? Are we supposed to be musing over what could possibly send this 'Law Abiding Citizen' over the edge? No. This is no man of peace, no man of law and certainly not a man with any right to issue or pontificate upon justice. No viewer with any sense can have sympathy for this reckless criminal mastermind.

Our second group of writers (see above) get a bit of a look in when Shelton appears in court as a criminal for the first time. He mocks a judge who is about to set bail for him, since he has 'confessed' (although he has already pointed out that his 'confession' is no more than the ravings of a mad man and as such useless) he insists he must be locked up and that the justice system is a farce for not thinking so. This is almost a good point, but it only lasts as long as it takes Shelton to set another booby trap.

'Law Abiding Citizen' is a film that with a bit of work could have been ok. In the end it's a mash of genres and plots that don't work.

4.3.2.1

Very much not the film I expected it to be, 4.3.2.1 is a story of 4 girls and one very strange weekend in their lives. Each girl goes her separate way on Friday evening, each girl gets into a wacky adventure, somehow gets connected with an international diamond theft and then ends up back with her pals on Sunday evening in a Mexican standoff. The story of the film is told four times, once from the view point of each of the girls. Bit by bit the story is built up until we see the whole picture.

The trailer made 4.3.2.1 seem like a copy of 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' - except with lots more girls in their pants. The interviews with writer Noel Clarke billed it as an antidote to the much-panned 'Sex and the City' sequel - it's 4 girls having a crazy time! In the end I thought it was closer to the later than the former, but although the premise should be interesting I felt fairly let down. When a story is told non-linearly you kind of expect that the point is to generate a big reveal which if revealed in chronological order would spoil the mystery. That doesn't really happen in 4.3.2.1. Only the stories of the first and the final girls actually seem connected to the diamond heist, everything in between is filler (and at times off-putting misandric filler).

In fact, thinking back over the plot there is very little connection between what the girls get up to and the diamond heist. Their interaction with it is brief and fleeting, their interactions with each other are electronically facilitated and not entirely character-building. Therefore although I came out of the cinema thinking "that was ok", thinking back I'm not really sure what was "ok" about it - what with its loose plot and dislikeable characters (apart from Shannon - why is she friends with the others? They have nothing in common). Also there seemed to be a bit of a problem with the acting, Shanika Warren-Markland (Kerys) was a little wooden and Emma Roberts (Joanne) seemed to be constantly channelling Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Noel Clarke was solid as ever in his acting role, and once again he has made a film that is set in and amongst the less desirable parts of London - for that he should be praised. I am glad I watched 4.3.2.1, but it really wasn't the film I had been expecting, and I was not exactly pleasantly surprised.

Alien - the best film ever

I have not written a post in quite a while. This is because I found out last week that I am having to move house in August. That sucks on a number of levels, including that a lot of my spare time is now taken up looking on rightmove - meaning less time for watching films. Also, what with the world cup starting up this afternoon I am probably not going to get to the cinema for a few weeks anyway.

In the meantime though there is always YouTube. By naively typing 'Alien' into youtube I expected to get clips of the classic Ridley Scott film - sadly I ended up with rediculous footage of 'real aliens' and frat boys dressing up in 'alien' costumes. Anyway, I did turn up the original 1979 trailer for it, check this out:



Sends a shiver down my spine even now. Alien is one of my favourite films, it is at the same time one of the best science fiction and best horror films - all rolled into one. When I went to the Nottingham Showcase in 2003 to watch the remastered re-release I experienced 'Alien' on a large screen and with surround sound for the first time, it was breathtaking.

And that tagline, how can it get any better?

Robin Hood - Gladiator 2?

Despite being typically black and white in its portrayal of history and full of some pretty laughable geographical inaccuracies, Robin Hood is actually pretty good fun. I had been looking forwards to this film since it was originally announced several years ago. Back then I was living in Nottingham and they were going to have Russell Crowe play the sheriff of Nottingham, several years later and several things have changed. Now I live in Berkshire and Crowe has switched to reprising his role as Maximus out of Gladiator - hmm, not a great start for either of us.

Let's have a quick debrief of the history before moving on. For a Hollywood-funded action movie about medieval England, the history is actually not as bad as one might immediately assume. The events surrounding John's ascension to the throne appear to be largely true, and the Magna Carta was eventually signed in 1215 by King John after a rebellion by English barons following a disastrous defeat of John in France - which is kind of hinted at. A bit. All the stuff about French hoodlums riding around England killing people and the coastal invasion by Phillip of France is a total joke of course, but we can let that slide I recon. Not to mention the fact that the nations of England and France as we know them today were not even close to being established in the late 12th century - so the concept of Robin Hood inspiring the locals of Nottingham to defend the realm in the name of national freedom is far-fetched indeed. Not to mention Robin's strangely modern live-and-let-live views on religion. Anyway, enough of that.

The point of films like this is not to worry about historical fact. The point is watch Russell Crowe leap around, shoot arrows and bash French people over the head for two hours. Maybe I should have been perturbed by Cate Blanchet turning up the end in armour riding a horse (so she's a knight? Really? Since when?) leading a pack of local children into battle? Perhaps I should have been more put-off by Russell Crowe's frankly dire effort at a generic northern English accent? I wasn't expecting anything more than a brainless action fest, and that's exactly what was delivered.

That being said though, it's not as good as Gladiator.