A long break and new films

It's been well over two weeks since I last made an appearance on the blogosphere and much of my spleen needs venting. I'm sure I've been missed. We seem to have hit the most boring part of the year, as people begin to obsess about Christmas and complain bitterly about important things like impending bank bonuses, two Irish simpletons with gravely misjudged conceptualizations of what constitutes a legally permitted hairstyle and the Prime Minister's apparent failure to master basic handwriting/spelling skills. 'Hip Urbanites' and media commentators now appear to be taking two contrasting approaches to the doomed month of December, either foaming at the mouth because large retailers have started the annual round of mind numbing commercials even earlier than usual, or (if they listen to Capital FM and shop in BHS) going weak at the knees for terrible ceremonies involving a band called JLS switching on city centre Christmas lights. The whole thing has become so turgidly formulaic that, as Charlie Brooker noted in his oh so witty Guardian column, even the offending advertisers themselves have started to mock the misery of a 'consumer' dominated Christmas by sneering at the poisonous destruction of festive 'meaning' with cringe worthy attempts at irony.

Where I work (sorry intern) I have had the pleasure of listening to two separate celebrations of wasteful, pointless celebratory illumination. Firstly there was the Oxford Street 'Christmas Carol' extravaganza, starring the cast from Robert Zemmics' new 3D take on Charles Dickens' seminal fable, who led roughly ten thousand complete tools in the world's largest collective rendition of 'Come All ye Faithful.' As this reminded me of that sickening T-Mobile karaoke wankathon advert filmed in Trafalgar Square over the summer, the less said about it the better. To annoy innocent people like me even further the powers that be shut Oxford Circus tube station for the evening so all the carolling fuckwits could retreat back to their miserable suburban bungalows in relative safely whilst enjoying the resolutely Autumnal weather conditions and thus disrupting my commute back to North London by a full thirty minutes. Ba Humbug and all that.

The other celebration of shitness and wasted electricity came only a week later as neighboring Carnaby Street was invaded by what looked and sounded like a troupe of sorry individuals who clearly thought they were getting 'groovy' in a new Austin Powers film. There were the crass, inexcusably faux 'Swinging Sixties' blowup decorations, the rock songs that middle aged men suffering from alcoholism or terminal disease in Richard Curtis films always seem to adore and a compare who sounded suspiciously like DJ Dr Fox. I say sounded because I was sat in my office having to endure the forced bonhomie whilst conjuring offensive images of all the dipsticks cavorting in front of Soccer Scene without considering the distinct possibility that they were almost certainly wasting a precious few hours of their sorry lives by lowering themselves to such iniquitous indignity.

Anyway on an equally angry note I went to see Harry Brown last Thursday and was forced to endure two hours of tedious, right-wing harping, which lacked any semblance of actual research or intelligent dissection of what is clearly an incredibly important but complex issue. We've seen the horrors of 'Hoodie Britain' evoked many times before, in recent films such as 'Adulthood' and 'Eden Lake' stereotypes were accentuated to the detriment of plot and effective characterisation. What we get here is more of the same, coupled with a refusal to answer difficult questions with anything but violence and retribution.

I should state now that Harry Brown starring Michael Caine is not totally woeful. Telling the story of an elderly war veteran meting out his own brand of violent justice to a gang of teenagers terrorising his London estate, it uses the uniquely grim light of an exaggerated urban dystopia particularly well, and builds a profound sense of oppression during the tense opening quarter. Whilst Caine is controlled and graceful, managing to retain a sense of believable pathos the plot sadly looses direction and honesty, tarnished by a poor script, lack of budget and ridiculous, 'so over the top they become comedic' villains.

My primary problem with the film was its refusal to move beyond fantasy and conjecture and actually provide some form of imaginative insight. The young men wreaking havoc on this miserable corner of the city are all shown to have endured difficult, damaging childhoods. The primary charlatan (played by the very talented musician Ben Drew aka. Plan B) is the son of a violent gangster whilst one member of his 'crew' has clearly been a victim of horrific sexual abuse from a young age. Having created these detailed and harrowing back stories however, the writer and director choose simply to ignore them; Caine's victims are blown away in a hail of bullets without remorse or regret. This ethos is distinctly troubling, in that the origins of antisocial behavior are initially identified, but then dispelled in favor of violence and a style of retribution lifted straight from the Old Testament.
What Harry Brown seems to be prescribing is the absolute condemnation of British children who have grown up under the 'protective' arm of New Labour. Brought up in a state that has chosen to cloak its poorest residents in the damaging swaddling cloths of easily accessible welfare, by single mothers living out miserable lives addicted to drugs, the world of Harry Brown uses broad brush strokes to tar a whole swathe of the population, salivating at the sight of Michael Caine destroying the tainted products of broken homes it depicts with such voyeuristic delight.
Not intelligent, not enjoyable and inherently negative, Harry Brown underlines the continued failure of the British Film industry to confront an issue that resonates well beyond the front cover of The Daily Mail.