Film Archive (73)

© Words William Goodchild

It’s completely understandable if you have preconceived ideas about this film (in a not good way). But it’s best to put them aside. The poster, undeniably fetishising the bodies of the two leads, doesn’t exactly help. The mixed martial arts in this film is incidental. It is not a film about mixed martial arts. (Or rather, I should say, Ultimate Fighting Championship or UFC.) Instead it offers a very moving story of a family torn apart, with the conduit of that story being men fighting in cages.

Writer/director Eran Creevy takes a huge leap - from the grungy, micro-budgeted Shifty - to this slick, attractive action flick. Detective Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy) remains hot on the heels of the elusive Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong) and is given a second chance to take down the master criminal when he is forced to return to London.

The cinema release of Good Vibrations is perfect timing in many ways. With the UK struggling economically and creatively, coupled with the British gangster film which has seriously run its course.  Please, no more films with the thug narrative telling us a tale of greed, blood etc. etc.  So it is refreshing to have a film that focuses on a man, his passion, his achievements and failures and his sanity against a harsh political and social backdrop. All based on the life of Northern Ireland’s Godfather of Punk, Terri Hooley ,founder of the Good Vibrations record shop and record label in the late seventies.

The Outsiders (1983) is a film based on the best selling novel, The Outsiders, written by S. E. Hinton who was a resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma and a pupil at an Art Deco school, Will Rogers High School, in the early sixties. It was here that Hinton observed and possibly participated in the gang counter culture The Greasers. 

                                                                      The Early Years

When critics discuss the movies James Fox starred in during the ’60s and early ’70s, his co-stars often seem to overshadow him. This is somewhat understandable since Fox’s greatest films from that period feature amazing talents from the decade such as actor Dirk Bogarde and musician Mick Jagger, but James Fox is an extremely talented actor who possessed the uncanny ability to brilliantly portray young men of various backgrounds wrestling with their sexual identity and social class as the sexual revolution of the ’60s was still taking shape.