First up was ‘Cass’, a film based on the life of notorious football hooligan Cass Pennant, one of the leaders of the well documented 80’s West-Ham crew the ICF (Inter-City Firm). Pennant has built up a reputation over the years as a bit of a celebrity hooligan after penning a few books about his times in the firm so I was quite looking forward to it. There’s been a number of hooligan films in recent years from the ok (‘Football Factory’) to the absolutely awful (‘Green Street’), but none of them have matched up to ‘I.D’ which I think was the absolute daddy of them all and always seems to be overlooked (I left my copy on England and cant find one over here, gutted). The fight scenes in ‘Cass’ were spot on I thought as was the depiction of the 80’s hooligan fashion – love the bit where he asks for a Lacoste tracksuit in prison haha.
Being a part of that whole scene in the 80’s where racism was rife it’s kinda mad how a black man managed to be such an integral part of the firm and I liked that it didn’t try and pull the sentimental card too much with the scenes with his family. He was adopted and brought up by a white family with no idea of his heritage and the scenes with his fam were kinda sad, but in a good way. The soundtrack captured the period real well, lots of Desmond Dekker and the like, overall a pretty wicked film I’d say.
Then it was on to ‘Adulthood’, the follow up to ‘Kidulthood’. Now I thought ‘Kidulthood’ was pretty awful to be honest, really tried too hard so I wasn’t expecting much out of this one, but I was pleasantly surprised. They still had the blatent product placement throughout (Puma this time instead of Boxfresh), and a couple of the actors were pretty bait, but definitely an improvement on ‘Kidulthood’.
For those who have seen the first one, this one carried on 6 years later when Sam gets released from prison for the murder of Trife. The basic plot is that he’s had a bit of hard time in jail and comes out a changed man. He gets moved to by one of Trife’s relatives in an early scene and spends the rest of the film hunting out Trife’s friends in an attempt to find out who if any are gonna be seeking retribution for the murder. The film looks at a few of the characters from the first film and what they’re up to now 6 years on as well as bringing in a couple of new characters. Danny Dyer makes an appearance and does his usual ‘geezer’ role, Plan B has quite a major part too and aint as bad as I thought he would be actually. The film does feel at times a little bit moralistic and I suppose with the climate of crime in London at the moment the director Noel Clarke would have felt a little bit of pressure in this regard. Soundtrack again is much better than ‘Kidulthood’. Pretty entertaining film I reckon.
Lastly I watched a documentary from 2004 called ‘Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus’. I wanted to go watch this at Fed Square on Friday but ended up downloading it instead so I could just cotch on the sofa instead . I’m a documentary person and so out of the three films this was the one I was looking forward to most, but also the most disappointing. The film follows musician Jim White on a road trip through the deep South of the states looking at the poverty, craziness and fundamental religion of the south all set to a backdrop of the local music. It had so much potential but apart from a few scenes I found it soo boring. It just tried too hard and instead of being the raw sort of film I was expecting they ended uptrying to make it too glossy and staging too much. For example they’re on a boat drifting through the swamps and all of a sudden come across a house on stilts with a couple playing guitar and singing in what is clearly a pre-prepared scene. Another time someone’s being interviewed in a barbers and then this dude starts performing a tune with everyone watching on looking at him, half laughing and smiling to themselves like ‘blud, what the hell are you doing!’ I ended up deading it with 20 minutes to go and went to bed. Glad I never paid to go see it!
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