Animol review – gritty young offenders drama challenges conventional machismo

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Institutional menace and an idealistic take on redemption sit side-by-side in Top Boy actor Ashley Walters’ empathic and occasionally over-earnest film The lawless brutality of a young offender institution is the setting for this British movie written by Marching Powder ’s Nick Love and directed by Ashley Walters. It’s a place where terrified newbies realise they can survive only by abandoning their innocence and decency, and submitting to the gang authority of a psycho top G, naturally involving a horrible loyalty test. This is a place where drugs arrive by drone, where facially tattooed men meet each other’s gaze with a cool opaque challenge in the canteen, and where the cues and balls on the recreation area’s pool table have only one purpose: to give someone a three-month stay in the hospital wing while underpaid guards in lanyards and ill-fitting v-neck jumpers look the other way. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/CLu4l65 via IFTTT
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Slade in Flame review – Midlands glam rockers offer A Hard Day’s Night meets Get Carter

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The 1975 musical satire is a curious amalgam of madcap comedy and Brit realism as the band ride the giddy highs and brutal lows of the 70s music industry

Here is Slade’s movie musical satire from 1975, a film with all the pungent historical presence of a pub ashtray, about an imaginary band called Flame which looked and sounded a lot like Slade, fronted by Stoker, played by Noddy Holder. It came out a year after the film’s soundtrack album was released, and now gets a rerelease for its 50-year anniversary. Slade in Flame – which is to say, Flame, starring Slade – is regarded by fans and non-fans alike with enormous affection and regard, and it certainly has a weird, goofy energy: the audio mix sometimes surreally privileging ambient sounds such as doors closing and glasses chinking, with the dialogue way in the background.

It’s about an innocent working-class Midlands band getting taken up by creepy adman-type smoothie Robert Seymour, played by Tom Conti, who exploits their raw talent for cash and takes them on a rollercoaster ride of fame, the action regularly suspended while the band sing their various tracks. But then their former manager, dodgy cockney mobster Mr Harding (Johnny Shannon) reappears – a man who never gave a hoot about them in their early days and contributed nothing to their career – demanding his share of the action. So it bizarrely mixes the madcap comedy of A Hard Day’s Night – or a late-period Carry On – with the brutal nastiness of a crime thriller like Get Carter. The effect is striking, in its way, but finally somehow depressing in a way that isn’t entirely intentional, and depressing in a way that actually listening to Slade is not. It also shows the unexpected influence of a particular kind of Brit social realism with a generic loyalty to unhappiness.

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