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s-larcher
Reviews
The Grind (2012)
I really liked this movie! Why so many haters???!
OK first up. This film is clearly REALLY LOW BUDGET and I see from the credits of the director it's his first film and was made from a previous short film he made some years before. So going from a short to a feature is clearly a MASSIVE step up and over all I felt he did a pretty good job all being considered. Clearly having a bigger budget would have helped this film as they could have added more action, bigger named actors and better locations/extras, sound track and stunts etc. The DP has done a great job on this as it really helped the film feel edgy, dirty and the low budget feel really helped make it feel like a nasty bleak world! We are all going to Hoxton/Dalston darling!" this film ain't! :-) I personally thought the casting of Jamie Foreman was a master stroke as His dad used to be a real Hackney gangster and was in fact a hit man for the Krays for some years and KILLED A FAIR FEW PEOPLE FOR THEM. Foreman therefore lent the film a greater feel of realism than going for just another east end bad guy boss like other crime films have done. It was also a interesting part for Danny John Jules and bar his deleted extras scene in "Lock Stock" I haven't really seen him play that kind of role before or anything of that kind of low budget nature so I guess he and Foreman must have really seen something different in the realness of the script like for example Bobbie owing Foreman only £10k rather than say £250k which is more of a movie sum of money to kill someone over. In fact the fact he beat him to death himself for such a small sum of money was really shocking for me but again set up this kind of harsh and bleak, true London world. The movie does have it's flaws though it has to be said! There are far too many roles in the film (the cast seems pretty massive), there are clearly not enough extras in the night club which either means it was a real dive of a club or the film just didn't have enough money to really fill out the club scenes properly as they must have all cost money. A bit of both I would have thought. The trance music score wasn't really to my tast either but then I'm no trance fan so that's hard to judge the movie down for that one. Also the club scenes should have been edited a bit more as they did go on a bit. All in all I felt the director did a very good job on his first movie with room for improvement moving forward for future films. The Grind was a very gritty, real and hard depiction of a quickly changing part of the east end. This movie deserves it's place in the collection of gritty realistic low budget crime films. A pretty good job!
Baseline (2010)
Loved this film, a proper British Badboy Flick!
this film is excellent! The acting from (Danny) Freddie Connor was fantastic, how have I never seen this guy in other films??? (Terry) Jamie Foreman, bang on as always! Love this guy, always plays the nut's bosses in films. Really liked the the story too, was something different than what's out there already. Was not what I expected. Loved Dexter Fletcher in this, he's a proper actor too! Hats off to the film makers for getting Gemma Atkinson in there too, she should have been in it more though as she's proper hot! Didn't like the way Danny killed off Terry though, he should have had the balls to walk in to The Baseline and shoot him and his boys in the head like Tome Cruse does in Collateral.love that movie too! Still was a top UK film and me and the boys loved it! Is there gonna be a Baseline 2?
Eden Lake (2008)
Wow what a bad, BAD FILM!
Wow what a bad, BAD FILM! Three good moments in the whole thing which although only ninety minutes long feels like three hrs! Some how this film manages to make even good actors look laughable. The script is just so bad you end up laughing out loud at times. The acting is simply dreadful by nearly everyone in this film. Don't get me wrong as I don't live in the country so maybe I'm just being deluded here but I have never seen hoodies with London accents in little quite towns cutting people up because there bored, have you? Using a dead dog as justification for the main thug to go on a crazed, glue-sniffing rampage is just very weak writing. Yes I get their board and have sweet f all to do but the cheap gimmicks of adding hoodies, filming violence on camera phones, drug taking and knife crime that have been recent headlines over the last five years is just so old and tired now! Kidulthood and Adulthood pulled these kinds of tabloid issues off well; this film just tries to copy those same themes badly. Just plain lazy writing. Sorry have some imagination! If you know what's good for you take a miss on this one, it's a shocker. Still it did manage to make an impression on me which I will no doubt be talking about for some time, I'm just not sure it's the one the writer/director wanted. Please can I have my ninety minutes back now???? No really, REALLY!!!