London to Brighton (2006)

Although the number of movies that I manage to watch most days has not decreased, the ones that I actually want to write about seem to be diminishing -- a good case in point being my recent viewing of "Talledega Nights".  I just couldn't decide whether this Will Ferrell starrer (and I believe a big hit) was meant to be an unfunny comedy or an undramatic moral lesson, but either way it left me in a state of despair at modern tastes.

The above gritty British flick was well received at festival showings and won its writer-director Paul Andrew Williams a BAFTA award for most promising newcomer.  With its no-name cast he managed to structure a marginally involving tale of a scruffy whore on the run from her pimp with an 11-year old in tow.  By backflashes we were given the full story of how she was forced to recruit a runaway for an aging gangster paedophile and how the encounter turned to violence as her nobler instincts kicked in.  However I kept asking myself if this was the sort of story I really wanted to see.  One knows the world is full of ugliness, but that to me is not sufficient reason to celebrate it.  There were one or two interesting twists as Mr. Big's nasty son leant on the pimp and his sidekick to find the two females and how he planned to extract his revenge for the insult to the father that he quite obviously hated.  However, like life, there was no tidy ending for the surrogate mother-and-child.  The kid could possibly look forward to something more in the future, but the tart-with-a-heart seemed to believe that her only place was back on the streets.

As a slice of unsavoury underlife, it was probably reasonably well put together on a small budget and the two female leads were more than adequate for the job.  However whether a subteen actress should have been subjected to the nastiness of the story (thankfully not pictured at any length) is a very moot point.  And please don't remind me about Jodie Foster in "Taxi Driver"!

Tags: London to Brighton, paedophiles