Small Time

i watched this film at college and at the time i had never heard of shane meadows. since i watched this film i have become a huge fan of all his films. this man is the future of british cinema and is what the industry has needed. the film itself is very realistic in parts and is cast very well too. the script is brilliant and i found it inspirational as a way to write down to earth comedies with drama added on to it. hopefully this film is the way that meadows wants to go on and it seems that it will be from films such as room for romeo brass and 24/7.

This the 'diamond in the rough' in British cinema and will be given a new chance to shine later on this year with its re-release on DVD in February. The Limited distribution and rarity of VHS copies has meant this film is a cult classic within an already small group of fans. Made on a shoestring budget using friends and family as cast you could ask no more from this film. If it was only for better backing this would be at worst equal to Trainspotting as a definitive British film of the decade.The comedy is enough to sprout a TV series alone. This film is the christening effort of Britain most talented director who has gone on to prove with Romeo Brass and Dead Mans shoes that it wasn't a fluke.

This doesn't deserve a 1 rating but it's as low as I can give here. It isn't even a film - it looks like it was shot with one camcorder, and with zero artistic ability. Why it was made and how it got released is one of the great mysteries of modern times.

If there was a script - which I doubt - it was probably written by a monkey with a typewriter, and then destroyed in a mysterious shed fire. I don't think there is a single actor in the film, and most of the dialogue (or gibberish) appears to be improvised.

No attempt has been made to create characters or a plot. It doesn't tell us anything about the people, the places, the situations ... need I go on? It's just random and boring camcorder footage of strange people in weird clothes and wigs.

So what is the point? I have no idea. Should you watch it? No.

This small (and I use the word advisedly) has been reviewed on IMDb as though it were the second coming. Believe me it most definitely is not. Maybe Meadows intention was to display council estate stereotypes in an amateurish way but he certainly managed it in spades. The acting is not much above the level of Am-dram though it is not awful, the script such as it is seems improvised. I am sure that Meadows knows people like this but I do not. Why do the characters all wear really bad wigs?Why does every other word have to be F***? Why is there no story? It works on the level of an average student film but no better than that. After all I had heard and read about Shane Meadow's "genius" I was expecting so much more than was actually delivered. He fancies himself as Mike Leigh,perhaps, if so,he falls an awful long way short.

Glorious mini-feature from the extraordinary Shane Meadows, which shows up the amiable, timid amateurishness of LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS for what it is. It has been the stated aim of directors like Scorcese and Tarantino to demythologise the gangster, to expose him as a mundane, pathetic human being, but it never works. Maybe the style is too vivid, maybe the iconography is too strong, but the gangsters in GOODFELLAS or PULP FICTION are vibrant, vital, even likeable, motors of these films, and it is their wit and inventive opportunism we remember, not their sticky ends.

British cinema has had an easier time in deglamorising its gangsters, probably because the Krays et al are not very glamorous in the first place. They're seedy, brutal, unstylish, stupid, resolutely unexotic (US gangsters are generally Italian, a compelling, operatic founding myth to start with). Very often British films go the opposite direction, creating relentless narratives of grim, unloveable violence.

SMALLTIME doesn't take either tack. Like Olivier Assayas, Meadows 'just' films a group of ordinary people as they live, people like those you probably know, or might even be yourself. They're just a bunch of lads, living on their wits, mucking about, having a laugh, drinking, talking (not in the impossibly clever manner of Tarantino characters), brawling, having problems with their girlfriends. This could be anyone from a certain strata in British society: they just happen to be petty criminals.

Petty is certainly the word. Much of the comedy comes from the very 'small time' nature of their activities. These are not the meticulously planned heists of US cinema: in one hilarious scene, they try to steal dog food, are confronted with an unexpected and bewildering array of choice, and not realising that they don't have to climb over a back-wall door to get the stuff; in another, they actually rob a car-boot sale! The main 'heist' is a sublimely bungled attack on a massage parlour, just because its owner made fun of the Begbie-style psycho, Jumbo.

Actually, it's that scene, where Jumbo's childhood friend, a wonderfully weak-willed Paul Calf-alike, who is being constantly harrassed by his girlfriend to leave his wideboy mates, and goes with her to this masseur's house, that is the film's triumph, a masterpiece of Mike Leigh social comedy. What begins as exquisite awkwardness develops into a hilarious massage between the two men, a genuinely burgeoning relationship, and ends with a hurt Jumbo intruding, betrayed, aggressive, humiliated by the masseur.

For all its comedy, the film is a dark work, and Meadows doesn't flinch from showing the casual brutality of this world, especially in the character of Jumbo, played by the director himself. For all his macho bravado, he can't satisfy his missus, who resorts to (very funny) furtive engagements with a vibrator. His aggression begins as comic, and ends in disturbing (though unseen) violence, and it is his focal presence that prevents the film from slipping into mere patronising observation.

This doesn't mean that SMALLTIME is filmed with boring, typically British, naturalism. The casual, seemingly improvisatory air conceals style which is revelatory and supremely controlled - highly stylised, bringing out through colour and odd composition, the genuinely surreal in everyday life; cool, remote, often in long-shot, allowing for critical distance (close-ups are rare); but also, through editing and handheld camera, giving a real sense of being in the thick of the action, sharing the characters' highs and lows.