More pertinent would have been outrage over the bad acting the inept depiction of working-class characters and its naive view of the world
More pertinent would have been outrage over the bad acting, the inept depiction of working-class characters and its naive view of the world Only the camerawork of Yorgos Arvanitis has merit. It’s the experimental camerawork in Mary McGuckian’s Rag Tale that is its main flaw. Nick Love’s latest, The Business, is an altogether different proposition. A rambunctious tale of British gangsters living on the Costa Del Sol in the 1980s, it features great costumes and music from the era.Gaby Dellal’s On A Clear Day and Julian Jarrold’s Kinky Boots follow people’s reactions to being made redundant in a declining industry.
Kinky Boots goes for The Full Monty comedic approach and features a towering performance from Chiwetel Ejiofor as a drag queen. In Green Street, a Yank in London (Elijah Wood) gets entangled with the hooligan element of West Ham. Still, it’s gained far more attention than David Mackenzie’s Asylum. Adapted by Closer scribe Patrick Marber from Patrick McGrath’s bestseller, and starring Natasha Richardson as a bored housewife who has an affair with one of the patients at her husband’s psychiatric hospital, Asylum was plagued by production problems and it shows on screen.Both Lexi Alexander’s Green Street and Nick Love’s The Business are tales of lads who love drinking, fighting and shagging.
Featuring Emily Watson, Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson, it chooses family strife over political confrontation – to its detriment. Gorecki’s “holy minimalism”, emerging from a single line of plainchant in whispering string basses, has become the musical pieta of our times. The highest compliment that one can pay to soprano Susan Bullock and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under David Atherton is to say that they didn’t so much perform the piece as experience it.. Though every bit as cool, stylish and sophisticated as you’d expect from a Herbie Hancock project, this album of collaborations with pop and rock musicians does tend to drag somewhat, as most of the artists opt for ballads as the easiest method of connecting with Hancock’s jazz piano. Optimum wanted me to put in Me and You and Everyone We Know, but they also planned to release the film days after it showed at the festival, so I preferred to put in films that were in Sundance, like Police Beat, that British audiences might not have a chance to see.” Yet the closing film, Nick Love’s The Business, is showing days before its release.So what of the British films competing for the Michael Powell Award? First on show was Richard E Grant’s semi-autobiographical Wah-Wah, a genteel affair told from the perspective of an 11-year-old about his rollercoaster relationship with his father in Swaziland in 1969.
