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| Released: |
1999 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
RITES-OF-PASSAGE
THRILLER
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| Origin: |
GB |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
90 |
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A Room For Romeo Brass starts out as a slow, mildly heart-warming study of a friendship between a white boy called Gavin (Ben Marshall) and his friend Romeo (Andrew Shim) who, though of mixed parentage, looks black. But it doesn't explore any of the tensions that might surround them in modern Nottingham, or explain why their friendship ebbs and flows. Instead, it goes off at a tangent and examines the relationship Romeo has with the local weirdo, Morell (Paddy Considine) who seems most at ease with boys ten years younger than himself. Morell resembles an idiot savant at first, but then takes a shine to Romeo's sister (Vicky McLure) and ultimately - through a change of character that seems supremely arbitrary - ends up trying to smash Gavin's dad's head in with a hammer. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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| Any picture which starts out like My Life As A Dog and turns out more like Taxi Driver has, to put it mildly, an identity problem. The film is being touted in some quarters as "a classic", and its writer-director Shane Meadows fancifully described as the new Martin Scorsese. But his shooting style is more heavily indebted to Ken Loach. It's hard to work out why his characters behave the way they do, or what the film-makers are trying to say (don't get too friendly with retarded people - they might turn nasty?). Some of this confusion may be down to the inexperience of Meadows' actors, but he might have done more to help. Despite a few lovely touches, Meadows' script (co-written with childhood friend Paul Fraser) is an ill-disciplined muddle, and its values are impenetrable. The happy ending, by the way, is when Romeo takes up cross-dressing - which may be a hommage to the films of Neil Jordan or, then again, may not. It's been publicly funded via the Lottery, and once again it's hard to know why anyone thought it worth making as a feature film. A more appropriate home for it is very late at night on BBC2. | |
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