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Shane Meadow's Collection (Twenty Four Seven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes, This Is England) [DVD] [1997]
![Shane Meadow's Collection (Twenty Four Seven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes, This Is England) [DVD] [1997]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VsKGQ9-PL._SL160_.jpg)
RRP: £34.99
Our Price: £10.16 (subject to change)
this is shane meadows
Review date: 2010-02-20 Rating: 10 out of 10
Shane Meadows IS the best film maker in the UK, possibly the best on the planet. Treat yourself!
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Reviews
Much loved gift!
Review date: 2010-02-07 Rating: 10 out of 10
Excellent films by the great but not overly well known Shane Meadows, good compilation with his best films, would recommend.
Leaves you breathless
Review date: 2009-01-21 Rating: 10 out of 10
These four films are works of pure genius.
This Is England is a coming of age movie, using Thatcherite Britain as its backdrop and portraying the bigotry of the right-wing elements of its society, whilst also showing the sensitivity and close bonds or pure friendship. From beginning to brutal end, this movie grips you throughout.
Dead Man's Shoes is a classic suspenseful thriller that keeps you guessing to the end. Paddy Considine is truly outstanding as the chilling avenging angel.
A Room For Romeo Brass is much more sedate. Another coming of age movie, Meadows perfectly captures the mood of a Midlands council estate and the problems of youthful friendship. Paddy Considine shines again as the slightly unhinged suitor of Romeo's sister, but the violence (compared to TIE and DMS) is purely psychological.
Twenty Four Seven is about a boxing club for working class kids in the Midlands and again grips the viewer with its gritty realism.
A box set for all fans of modern British cinema.
9/10. The Shane Meadows Collection
Review date: 2008-02-01 Rating: 10 out of 10
Dubbed the `Scorcese of the Midlands', Shane Meadows is one of the UK's brightest modern filmmaking talents. This fantastic four-disk set includes all Meadows' full-length film work bar `Once Upon A Time in the Midlands', a critical and commercial failure that the director has since distanced himself from. The four films are unified by their stark Midlands settings, non-professional actors and a liberal use of improvisation - harking back to kitchen sink dramas of the British New Wave in the 1960s. But while Meadows belongs to a similar tradition to Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, he is also arguably closer to his subjects, having the empirical eye of a man who has lived the life firsthand. Moreover, the raw approach to filmmaking, coupled with the director's handpicked indie, pop and reggae soundtracks, makes it easy to see why the Scorcese comparison persists.
Shane Meadows's first movie set the template for his more accomplished later work. Bob Hoskins excepting, `Twenty Four Seven' features a cast of non-professionals and a typically tragic-comic approach to realist drama. As someone who viewed Meadows's later work first however, Twenty Four Seven seems really quite amateurish. While it is lovingly photographed in black and white by cinematographer Ashley Rowe, it is Meadows's weakest work in terms of plot and character development. I was quite surprised by how weak this film was given that it made the directors' name and became the launchpad for his career. There's simply not enough depth to the characters to be moved by the consequences of their actions. Furthermore, Meadows' use of a comtemporary indie soundtrack - another hallmark of his filmmaking - has never been lazier than here. A whole sequence of the film, dedicated to the supposed bonding of the key characters in the film on a trip to Wales, is a perfunctary montage of lame visual jokes set to The Charlatans.
Like Shane Meadows' later `This is England', `A Room For Romeo Brass' is a coming of age drama revolving around friends growing up in the working class Midlands. Both films feature friendships tested by the divisive arrival of an influential older figure. The protagonists in both films seek friendship to escape disappointment or disenfranchisement from family life. While the latter film places this scenario in the context of class conflict in Thatcher's Britain and the rise of the skinhead movement, the thematic concerns of `Romeo Brass' are less contemporaneous. Its outsider comes in the surreal shape of Morel (played by the brilliant Paddy Considine), a small-town oddball who takes an instant and ultimately obsessive interest in the eponymous character's sister. Considine is always fascinating to watch (from Meadows' own `Dead Man's Shoes' to Pawel Pawlikowski's `My Summer of Love') and he is by turns hilarious and terrifying here as the volatile Morel. However, for all Considine's brilliance on screen there is something lacking in this film's purpose. Whereas This is England's small-scale drama manages to address wider social decline in a specific historical context, A Room For Romeo Brass` concerns are perhaps not broad enough. It is certainly not the first film about an obsessive and intimidating individual insinuating himself into family life (cinema is rife with them, from the great to the really poor). Once you take that out of the equation, there is not a great deal else to capture the imagination.
Arguably Shane Meadow's most accomplished film to date, `Dead Man's Shoes' combines the director's normal witty observance of small-town Midlands life with that of a classic revenge movie. It stars co-writer and Meadows regular Paddy Considine as Richard, an ex-soldier returning to his hometown to avenge his brother's bullying at the hands of some drug-dealing townie low-lifes. Richard's mildly mentally handicapped younger brother is played so convincingly by relative newcomer Toby Kebbel that he threatens to outshine even the brilliant Considine. Some of the low-key scenes of the two together talking are probably the best pieces of ensemble acting in any Meadows film, while the more typically improvised gang of tawdry, small-town drug-dealers are both hilariously and horribly believable.
What marks Dead Man's Shoes out in comparison to Meadows' previous films is that there is a real twist - a sting in the tail. This leads to a climatic but ultimately ambiguous ending which flips the revenge movie formula on its head. Is Richard's act of revenge more an act of atonement for his own failures as a brother, his own guilt about failing to protect him? Or does this act of atonement extend to the soldier's private shame in having a disabled brother? And at what cost is this act of revenge on Richard himself? "Now I'm the monster", he reflects, managing to get the balance right between menace and remorse in a way that marks him out as one of the best actors of his generation.
While belonging to a British cinematic tradition - social realism with a twist of surreal humour - that owes much to the work of the Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, `This is England' is a classic rites of passage drama with roots that can be traced back to Trauffaut's `Les Quatre Cents Coups'. You have to have lived in Thatcher's Britain to fully appreciate the attention to detail put into recreating the mood of the times here. The credit sequence - a montage of contemporaneous news footage - sets the scene: royal weddings, the Fawklands war, the miners' strikes and class conflict. For all the verisimilitude, though, it's the honesty and intensity of the performances that carry this film. Meadows looks at the skinhead movement with the sympathetic eye of someone who experienced it first hand. He does not seek to demonise those involved, but to show how what began as a fashion with roots - paradoxically - in black culture, became politicised at a time of class strife and high unemployment.
Meadows uses a ska soundtrack to demonstrate the contradiction at the heart of the skinheads, that the music they loved was directly influenced by reggae imported to the UK by Carribbean immigration. The director's use of contemporaneous music not only sets a sense of time and place, but also brings a tangible voice to the emotional turmoil of his characters. At times this can be a little too literal, especially in the final sequence when we are treated to some of Morrissey's finest lyrics: "See, the luck I've had / Can make a good man turn bad". It's a shame that they couldn't use the original Smiths song, for the singer in the cover version is a pale imitation of Morrissey. All in all, though, this a great value box-set from one of the UK's best modern filmmakers.
Great Films but... Be Warned
Review date: 2007-09-05 Rating: 8 out of 10
For this box set, they've simply inlcuded Disc 1 from the 2 DVD set of "This Is England" so you wont get the extras from disc 2. The disc is even labelled 'Disc One', they could have at least relabelled the disc for this box set (or included disc 2 as well).
If you havent seen any of these films though, this is a great buy. Shane Meadows is one of the best film makers in the UK. His films have a lightness of touch and humanity which is a joy to behold.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Stephen Graham
Paddy Considine
Andrew Shim
Frank Harper
Vicky McClure
Creators:
Vicky McClure (Primary Contributor)
Frank Harper (Primary Contributor)
Director(s):
Recording label: Optimum Home Entertainment
Manufacturer: Optimum Home Entertainment
EAN: 5055201800770
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Anamorphic, Box set, PAL,
Release date: 2007-09-03
Aspect ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 363 minutes
Language: English (Original Language)