This wasn’t quite as charming as i remember it being when i saw it a couple of years ago. Maybe i was needing to see it more then than i am now.
Maybe i needed to feel a (vicarious) part of a happy gang, hanging out with yer mates. Meeting them down the caff on Saturday morning for bacon sarnies. Evening out on the lash getting bevvied. E’d up knees up later in a Soho club. Piling back afterwards for a 4.am. curry party. Sunday morning hang-over in the kitchen together drinking pots of strong coffee and able to say “I can honestly say: I love feeling this shit” – and mean it.
Yeah, a need to be 26 again. Not the 26 i was. The 26 of this film – and being cool, feeling on the cusp – of something always about to be happening.
But watching this time around i felt like Mr I M Boring, a 47 year old postal clerk from Chipping Sodbury – with his responsible, sensible, brown plastic glasses on.
Lazy aimless sods! Shallow self-centred bunch of slackers!.
Just listen to that speccy-eyed pratt John “talking a load of bollocks“; and sarky Mikey doing his funny voices routine as usual; and having to wait for Oirish drimbo Frank (Aidan Gillen in the pic above) to climb out of his lost little haze of shy self-absorption.
Ok, Ruby gets the thumbs up because it’s Kate Ashfield (pic above) and she almost – but not quite – is making Frank seem mildly interesting (or vaguely puzzlingly “deep”) Altho eventually she’s gonna cotton on that his deep is actually quite dull.
Anyway. Go away Mr Boring! Back to your dockets!
Let me luxuriate in plangent melancholy church bells thro sunny open windows on beddy Sunday mornings… the London street below dozily, lazily, waking up… the fat smells of that bacon frying….and out for an afternoon of self-indulgent indolence … pint with the mates….. hanging around, messing about.. having a laff …. taking the piss …sharing one anothers’ farts …. throwing frisbees in the park..
It’s what it’s all about.
You’re only 26 once you know.
Dir: Jamie Thraves, England
7/10
Windows on the World 