David recommends . . . INVOLUNTARY and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

Two films offering very differing opportunities to explore the same themes of great contemporary importance. The relationship of individuals to group, community, and society. Is there "no such thing as society", as Margaret Thatcher declared, "only individuals and their families"? Was Gordon Gekko correct that "greed is good" for all of us?  Or do we have reciprocal obligations to one another and for our own actions?

It's that time of year when IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE comes round again for its traditional Xmas slot.  But now with a more acute than usual exploration of differences between good and bad bankers. But more about that later.

Swedish movie INVOLUNTARY is a well-made and thoughtful offering for the World Cinema crowd.  Its Unique Selling Point is its 5 entirely separate stories. All told in parallel, not as a series of shorts - like the dreadful Night On Earth (Winona Ryder as a taxi driver?).  Nor interconnecting at times via shared characters, as Robert Altman used to do. Or in the more recent Crash.

No, INVOLUNTARY cuts between five different narratives which are linked only by the common tension of individual responsibility versus individual rights in the context of misbehaviour within a group.  This intercutting is confusing at the start, but gradually we begin to sort out who is who and which thread is which. Once that settles down we are left to compare and contrast the many characters' differing dilemmas.

Should a teacher intervene when she sees another act violently to a child? Is a teenage girl to blame for what happens to her when she is drunk? Should we confess to a wrongdoing or let others suffer? When do high spirits cross over into abuse? When we are damaged can we accept help or do we have to soldier on? Above all, what duty do we have to intervene when others are misbehaving?

No Swede will be left in any doubt of the political and historical context which necessitates these considerations. For decades after World War 2 Swedish politics was dominated by a stable consensus around the social democratic model. Which delivered high material standards of living combined with considerable collective provision of public services. 

But fiscal crisis in the 90s shattered voter confidence in this local version of the European Social Model. And after dominating national politics for 70 years the Social Democratic Party suddenly fell from power in 2006, after it received its lowest ever percentage of the votes.  Sweden entered the world of what the French call The Ango-Saxon model, with its free markets, low taxes, and reduced state role.

INVOLUNTARY invites Swedes to ask whether that violent change of philosophical direction is truly good for them, at the level of social cohesion. Questions that all of us are now asking in countries reacting to the 2008 banking crisis and facing stark choices over austerity versus economic stimulus.

For in each of INVOLUNTARY's  five stories we see interactions between two sorts of individuals.  Those who live their lives as if greed, or at least the relentless pursuit of one's own gratification, is, indeed, good. And those to whom it is important to consider the impact of one's behaviour on others, and who are willing to go further and intervene on behalf of those others.

But this is no simplistic division into good versus evil. All five stories feature genuine dilemmas. For none of the participants are the choices straightforward. Sometimes acting for the group can reflect one's very individual motives. When does defending the group cross over into authoritarianism? How do we reconcile conflicting wants and needs within communities? 

INVOLUNTARY explores these fundamental questions of political philsophy and social ethics by taking them down to the most concrete and personal of levels, situations which all of us encounter every day. In so doing it avoids the trap into which so many "message films" or "idea movies" fall. Which is to centre around only one message, or only one idea. Thus coming across as rather obvious one trick ponies.

It is precisely the narrative structure of the five different stories, each of them complex in its own way, which enables INVOLUNTARY to provide such a sophisticated exploration of its subject matter. And with no obvious answers or solutions. 

This is very much an intellectual film. Not quite an art movie, but slow-paced enough with its long uncut takes to put off the commercial movie fans. Typical, if you like, of the best of Scandinavian cinema (the GIRL WHO . . . franchise notwithstanding). Reviewed by many as a comedy, you are unlikely to laugh out loud. No thrills or spills. No edge of seat tension.

For these reasons there are many among us who would not find INVOLUNTARY entertaining in the wider sense of the word. Most suitable perhaps to kick off an A Level discussion on Citizenship, or an undergraduate sociology class. But for those with patience and an interest in contemporary socio-political dilemmas INVOLUNTARY is very much worth the detour.

Far more richly entertaining, though morally much more simplistic is IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. A relative flop when it came out in 1946, it has become regarded as one of the best ever US films. The American Film Institute placed it at Number One in its chart of the "most inspirational" American films of all time.

IAWL spent a few decades not getting a great amount of attention. Director Capra never saw it as a Christmas movie. But because of its Yuletide setting it became an annual fixture of seasonal TV schedules in the 1970s. Leading to increased popularity and new recognition as both an entertaining favourite and an officially worthy classic.  Hence its annual place in the TV schedules is now mirrored in the programming of film societies, art house cinemas, and bastions of the worthy like the BFI.

If you've already seen it countless times, no need for a plot resume - just enjoy it again. If you've not seen it, just go and do so and thus join the rest of humanity.

Like INVOLUNTARY, IAWL has serious issues beneath its feel-good plot. And a not dissimilar economic and political provenance. It originated in a short story which Philip Van Doren Stern began drafting in the 1930s. During which the socially disastrous effects of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression were being felt acutely in The Land of the Free Market. 

34 million people in families with no wage-earner. Industrial production down by 45%. Homebuilding by 80%.  One million families kicked off their farms.  Two million homeless people wandering the country.  A period which generated Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath of 1939, made by John Ford into a movie in 1940.

The Great Depression of the 30s was not America's first such experience. The so-called "Long Depression" kicked off in the US with the "Panic of 1873"  and lasted in various part of the globe into the 1890s. As millions were laid off, the 1870s saw a massive wave of industrial strikes across America. Smaller, briefer depressions occurred again in 1918 and 1920.

During these periods something happened in representations of banks and bankers in American popular culture. They became the bad guys. 


As far back as the 1870s the white supremacist murderer and bank robber Jesse James began to be represented in novels and songs as a Robin Hood style outlaw, robbing the rich and helping the poor. Representations which continued into Hollywood movies of the 1930s and early 1940s. 


As late as the 1940s, leftist folk singer Woody Guthrie was recording traditional Jesse songs with words changed to portray him as equivalent first to a union activist and then as a Christ figure.

Throughout the 1930s a series of real life, high profile bank robbers became similarly portrayed as outlaw heroes. John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Bonnie (Parker) and Clyde (Barrow) were all without exception narcissistic psychopaths happy to kill anyone who stood in the way of their machine gun toting pursuit of Gordon Gekko's later materialistic ethos. 

It was the banks who kicked people off their farms and out of their houses. And it was the Police who assisted the banks in those tasks, in between breaking the heads of striking industrial workers. So it is less than surprising that popular culture came to lionise those who took from the banks and made fools of the Police with their daring get-aways. 


Life and art imitated each other in considerable working class community support for these Depression-era outlaws, enabling them to elude capture for so long. Like James before them, and Christ before him, the hoodlums of the 30s tended to meet bloody ends via denunciation by a member of their own circle followed by the lethal extra-judicial force of the State.

In both versions of The Grapes of Wrath economic depression is portrayed as something incomprehensible to its victims. Sometimes seen as an impersonal force of nature. Sometimes as vaguely involving the actions of a handful of brutal farm owners, bankers and police officers. The 30s gangsters were represented in a spirit of triumphal personal victory over the Establishment bad guys. 

Whereas in Grapes of Wrath we see a family struggling to find any source of hope in an almost overwhelmingly depressing situation. Economic depression luring its victims into a psychologically depressed state of powerlessness. The surviving remnants of the Joad family manage to keep hope alive, but this is far from the celebration of violent individual resistance present in the bank robber films.

And so, on to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE.  Written towards the end of the Great Depression and produced as a film just as the state interventionist policies of The New Deal were kicking in.

Reflecting the bad times of the 1930s IAWL continues the popular cultural tradition of the Bad Banker in the character of Mr Potter, who takes the Gekko greed principle even unto the stage of straightforward criminal theft.

Nobody in IAWL totes a machine gun or goes on the rampage. No bankers or Police are harmed in the plot of this film. IAWL organises itself around selfless to a fault Good Banker George Bailey's own confrontation with psychological depression, which takes him to the brink of suicide. Thereafter it's a long, long way from the gloomy search for hope in Grapes of Wrath. Pretty rapidly we are on the feel good up and up. 

How do we get there? This is where IAWL lacks the sophistication of either Grapes of Wrath or INVOLUNTARY. 

The antithesis between good George Bailey and bad Mr Potter reflects the simple division of humanity, typical of US evangelism's contribution to popular culture, into fundamentally good people and fundamentally bad people. 


In this ontological and individualist division out have gone the huge social and economic forces of Grapes of Wrath, as well as the interpersonal, psychological and moral uncertainties of INVOLUNTARY. 


Grapes and this new Swedish film represent, if you like, the two ends of a continuum of analysis about social responsibility in hard times: huge and impersonal forces at one end, and individual choices at the other.

By contrast, the struggle of good versus evil is pared down in IAWL to a depiction on film of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Some of us are destined for Heaven and some for Hell, and who is who is revealed by what happens in our lives.


As directed by Divine Intervention - here in the form of an Angel. In contrast to the alpha male violence of the 30s gangsters, or the arrival of State-funded public services of the New Deal.

Thus the spiritual takes the place of social forces or individual violence in IAWL. In 1946 Frank Capra told an interviewer that he made IAWL "to combat a modern trend towards atheism".

Now in 2010 economic depression is back at the top of all our agendas, How are we going to get out of it? Working together? Or by competing with each other? With machine guns? Or via state intervention?  Or thanks to angels?  

In the UK in 2008 and 2009 bankers had once again become the Bad Guys, objects of popular rage and violence as the greedy and selfish architects of our collective distress. As we near the end of 2010 it seems as though rage against bankers has been almost forgotten. 


New targets of blame and hate are being found. The greedy unemployed. The mercenary sick and disabled. Feckless recipients of Housing Benefit. Profligate occupants of social housing. And, perhaps above all, the selfish, gluttonous and outrageously affluent midwives, care assistants and dustmen of the Public Sector.

Which way will we go? IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE offers the best good time Christmas entertainment to take our minds off current financial anxieties. But INVOLUNTARY provides the better vehicle for sober reflection on what we all owe to our fellow beings. 


A clue is perhaps found in the title as seen on the film's posters. 

The letters "IN" and "VOLUNTARY" are in different colours, enabling the option of reading two words instead of one. Voluntary action, the Swedish film seems to be saying, can be so much more than just a Big Society smokescreen for dismantling the Welfare State. There IS such a thing as society, and it consists in how every one of us treats every other one of us in our every action, every day. 

IAWL turns on a crucial decision whether or not to jump into a river. This week in London a homeless black man dived into the freezing waters of the Thames to save a young woman from drowning. Thus himself winding up in hospital being treated for hypothermia. When he first emerged from the icy water, Adan Abobaker discovered that during his rescue mission thieves had stolen his jumper, coat, wooly hat and gloves, discarded in his unhesitating haste to assist another human being.   

More on that story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1331311/Homeless-hero.html (copy and paste into your browser).

David recommends . . . THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT, CARLOS, and BURKE AND HARE

Best film this week, if flawed, is the witty and intelligent THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. We're in LA. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are married lesbians, neither in the first flush of youth, very much in love but with tensions emerging in the relationship.  We know they are lesbians because Julianne wears no make up and sports chunky safari shorts, and Annette has short, slightly spiky hair. And because their sexual orientation is referred to about every 30 seconds. 

Each has a child, product of the same anonymous donor's sperm. Joni, 18, named after Joni Mitchell (geddit? ma is a lesbian).  "OMG I'm eighteeeeen, you have to let me make my own decisiooooons!". And the intriguingly named Laser (boy), 15 and all surging testosterone and moods.

Secretly the kids trace their donor Dad, Paul, and the fun starts. Cue Mark Ruffalo, an actor with much in common with Tony Blair: they both used to be the future.  Ruffalo turns in an excellent performance which makes clear he should have been doing more comedy back when his career nosedived. 

Is Paul a charming, right-on guy? After all he runs an organic vegetable nursery and his own restaurant. But cooking is the single best-known way to get into a lady's pants. So is he a preening narcissist who uses women? We are left in no doubt Paul is hotttt. First, we get to see his hairy chest throughout the movie. Second, the much younger woman at the nursery clearly longs for him. It's OK, it's not sexist cos she's a white chick with dreadlocks. Third, the much younger woman at the restaurant is sleeping with him. It's OK, it's not sexist cos she's a black chick with an impressively retro Afro hairdo - Angela Davis style.

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT is great for people who like sitting around dinner tables discussing the wine and being witty. Because it's full of people having dinner and discussing the wine and being witty. Think Woody Allen, if his skin could handle the LA sun.  

It's the sort of film Hollywood does very well, but not often enough these days. Harking back to the screwball comedies and 'social comedies' (Preston Sturges) of the 30s. Via genuine comedy serious issues are raised and discussed - sexual orientation, diverse families, sperm donation and the needs of the offspring, confidentiality, parenthood and adolescents, desire versus honesty. Think how appalling that would be if done without the humour.

Sister: "He donated sperm - that's, like, weird!"

Brother: "But if he hadn't, we wouldn't be here. So - respect."

But the film loses its way a little in the Third Act when suddenly it goes all earnest, letting go the wit for drama and emotion. And another flaw is to drop a major character somewhere before the traditional Hollywood resolution. But once you've seen the film you can ask whether that jettisoning is in fact the subliminal message of the film's social commentary. Answers on a postcard please.

Some may question why two lesbians get played by straight actresses. I guess Ellen Degeneres is not pretty enough, and Anne Heche has gone back to the Boy Side.  But Moore and Bening deserve Oscar nominations for performances whose excellence ranges across both the comedy and the rising emotional tension of the piece. This is Bening's strongest outing since American Beauty and Moore is as good as, well, always. Maybe they can share Best Actress?

For CARLOS we turn to our guest reviewer, Simon King, who is Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Arts in London.  Simon saw CARLOS for us and then answered our questions about this Biopic of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka 70s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

Before we go further you need to know there are two versions doing the rounds.  There's the 2 hours 45 minutes version for softies. Or the 'extended version' at 6 hours 34. If you pick a screening with a break and some Q&A you are looking at an 8 hour experience (take a cushion).

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Give us your 25 word summary.

SIMON:  It's one part Mesrine and two parts Baader Meinhoff Complex, liberally sprinkled with The Life of Brian, then simmer for several hours.

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Life of Brian?

SIMON: There's a slightly absurd element.  Carlos is not actually very successful.  He gets the nom de guerre of Carlos the Jackal because he is busted in London and the cops find the novel Day of the Jackal.  

Philip French says he is a Scarlet Pimpernel character.  The Bin Laden of his day - seen as behind all outrages, but actually was not.  Always aiming at spectacular coups de theatre - but many actually go wrong.  Partly because he's working with a bunch of disparate and unhinged Left wing groups - with those interchangeable names ridiculed in Life of Brian.  

In the end he gets past his sell-by date and is shunted from country to country.  The 1975 killing of a Libyan delegate at OPEC haunts him for the rest of life.  So Libya won't harbour him.  

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  So would you recommend it?

SIMON:  Definitely. It's very well done indeed.  The viewer is immersed into that very different world. It seems extraordinary now that Carlos and pals keep getting away with amazing political blags.  There's a couple of great set pieces - the OPEC kidnapping in Vienna - that just would not happen now because of advances in hardware and surveillance.  So very relevant to the modern era, and political nostalgia at the same time.

Edgar Ramirez as Carlos gives an extraordinarily compelling performance.  A truthful performance.  At times he enables a faint identification.  Someone taking on the Establishment.  A Robin Hood figure.  At times I wanted to root for him.

DAVID RECOMMENDS:  Is he played as a hero? You mention the French biopic, Mesrine. (French bank robber and murderer, played by Vincent Cassel.) Those films display the cold brutality of Jacques Mesrine and yet there is no doubt he is portrayed as a hero, cleverly and audaciously outwitting the bumbling cops at every turn. Perhaps aimed at the disaffected youth of the Banlieu. Is there a moral ambiguity in CARLOS?

SIMON:  There is no moral confusion. He stands against the Establishment, but I was not seduced at all.  At the height of his powers Carlos explicitly imitated Che Guevara.  In love with own publicity -  presenting himself as an outlaw figure.  In the film Carlos is good looking and seductive.  But he is a bit of an idiot.  Spouting soundbites like "guns are an extension of my body".  A psychopathic idiot. 

And now to BURKE AND HARE, a film which is much better than the sniffy reviews it is getting. 

The Times gave it 2 out of 5, referring condescendingly to the Carry On films. BURKE AND HARE is both better and worse than that, if you know what I mean.  High production values, and excellent design and photography make this rollicking comedy one of the best-looking British films I have seen in a long time.

But most of all it is funny.  The tale of two grave robbers who morph into murderers zips along at an excellent pace. The comedy combines intelligent wit, social comment regarding both the 1830s and the present day, and no opportunity for a sick gag about death or corpses is overlooked.  This is good, black humour.  And it does sit well in the great British tradition of popular comedy. It is in fact an Ealing Studios production, and does not shy away from taking on that heritage. 

Simon Pegg as Burke continues to establish his credentials as a serious actor in an understated performance. Which leaves the space for Andy 'Gollum' Serkis to push the envelope in the more outlandishly comedic role of Hare.  Especially in one of the funniest sex scenes in cinema history.  One which asks questions about today's worship of money.  

Australia's pocket sweetheart Isla Fisher - surely the best contemporary comic film actress - puts in a decent shift as the strumpet / thespienne trying to put on an all-women version of The Scottish Play.  And the three leads are backed up by a long list of British actors, comedians and celebrities to provide enjoyment just spotting and naming them. Another aspect in the great Ealing tradition.  Just wait to see who runs into a coach-related disaster.

BURKE AND HARE lacks the sophistication of THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT. But it is an excellent and very funny piece of traditional British film comedy brought up to date via Pegg's now standardly fine input. Don't be put off by bad reviews. It's fun.

David recommends . . . . go and see FORBIDDEN PLANET at Dulwich Picture Gallery Monday 18th October 2010

FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956, USA, 98 mins, Cert U)

1950s pulp sci-fi classic as Shakespeare meets spacemen meets Freud

Monday 18th October 7.15 for 7.45pm in the Linbury Room, Dulwich Picture Gallery

£8 (£6 for Friends of the Gallery)  Free nibbles and wine.  Google SE21 7AD for map.

In 1609 the Sea Venture set off from Plymouth as flagship of a small fleet bringing supplies and new migrants to the first successful English colony in the Americas, Jamestown. The ship was severely damaged in a violent tempest and deliberately driven onto a Bermuda reef to save it from sinking. Crew and passengers spent 9 months on that exotic island while their ship was repaired, before finally making it to Jamestown. And then the ship back to England.

This adventure was the biggest news story since the defeat of the Spanish Armada twenty years earlier. It captured the imagination of Jacobean England, including one William Shakespeare. 

To his contemporaries, America was a fantasy land offering riches and a new future. Much was written by wildly imaginative writers who had never set foot there. The Americas became for the 17th Century English a socially constructed fantasy of dreamlike possibilities. But combined with danger.  For Jamestown was the 12th English attempt to start a permanent colony on the land they called Virginia.  A majority of the souls who took part in the previous 11 efforts died - drowned, starved, or killed by the indigenous inhabitants. Virginia meant adventure and anticipated wealth, but also danger.  

Which is where Shakespeare and Forbidden Planet explore the same themes - psychological ambivalence.  

Most Americans today do not have a passport. Apart from day trips to Canada or Mexico only a small minority travels abroad. So abroad can seem an alien, scary place, as often represented in Hollywood films. Large numbers of Americans left their continent and found death,in 1917-18 and in 1941-46. Forbidden Planet was released 10 years after the War in the Pacific, and just 3 years after the Korean War ended.  And at the height of fears of Soviet invasion.  Not to mention Martian invasion. A new generation is now finding, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that exploration and the pursuit of gold are mortally dangerous.

The ambivalence of excitement versus danger begins in both The Tempest and Forbidden Planet with this geographical exploration. Forbidden Planet starts with the characters of The Tempest, and with its opening situation. A spaceship is sent to a planet to search for colonists not heard from for 20 years. 

Doctor Morbius is Prospero, enabling an update of Shakespeare's question about a second form of ambivalence: science. Can the exploration for new knowledge go too far? Prospero and Morbius use science to do good, but can they unwittingly do evil? Shakespeare wrote when the Renaissance was a hundred years old. But with the Scientific Revolution still a hundred years ahead. And the burning of women as witches in between. 

Forbidden Planet was released not long after the scientific horror of Hiroshima, and the scientific industrialisation of death at Auschwitz. And with worries about global warming, nuclear power, and GM crops lying ahead in the future.

Hence our third level of ambivalence - the psychologically deepest of all. Are humans good or bad? 

The Tempest's characters can be placed on a continuum from good to evil. Prospero and Morbius both have sweet, innocent, virginal daughters. Reflecting the Jacobean assumption that the natives of Virginia would be innocent, 'noble savages'. The 'natural' versus the civilised, including science. Prospero's helpful spirit Ariel has become Robby the Robot. In the middle of the continuum are the ambivalent figures of the two magician-scientists.  But what about the far end of the scale- Evil?

The most interesting character in The Tempest is Caliban,a  hideous, deformed monster. Not just evil but the son of evil, begotten by a witch. And confined by Prospero in a tree, repflecting the socially necessary suppression of our dark side. For Caliban expresses the dark side of nature / The New World / space. And of us, humans. Who is Caliban in Forbidden Planet? The film takes a thoroughly 20th Century route to answer this question.  And contemporary ones: how can we ensure we do good rather than evil?

David recommends . . . go and see WINTER'S BONE

Hot on the heels of MADE IN DAGENHAM comes a much better film about female self-empowerment.

Ree Dolly is just 17, her father Jessop has "gone" and Momma is "sick" and "don't talk much". Which means Ree has to bring up her brother and sister (12 and 8) as well as take care of Momma.  All this happens amid the tree-clad and beautiful Ozark mountains of rural Missouri.  

Culturally, if not geographically, the Ozarks are an extension of the Appalachian back hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.  All double denim, checked shirts, unemployment and family feuds. "Cooking up crank" is both a popular local lifestyle choice and cottage industry.

This is real poverty.  The horse has not been fed for 4 days. Ree has to teach the young siblings how to use a rifle. Then how to skin squirrels and prepare them for the pot. Turns out later that being able to cut up dead things comes in handy in them thar hills.

The Sheriff is looking for Ree's father who is due in court next week but cannot be found. He explains that the terms of Poppa's bail bond mean if he fails to turn up then the family will lose their house and land. "We'll have to live in the mud!!" No namby-pamby social safety net in this Cameronian-Cleggian free market paradise.

So we are perfectly set up for a Quest Film, one of the half dozen or so basic plots. For young Ree sets off wandering round the neighbours and extended family to ask if they've seen the errant dad. And a mystery emerges. Asking questions is not encouraged among the local community. "Talking just causes witnesses". "You were warned, why didntcha listen?". Something suspicious is going on. To find out what, you have to see the film.

Jennifer Lawrence is excellent as Ree.  And this is so much more of a "women's film" than the faux left-leaning Made in Dagenham, for at the helm is celebrated young Director and co-Writer Debra Granik. 

WINTER'S BONE won the 2010 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize, which establishes it's Indie credentials. Independent US cinema, as encouraged by Sundance, challenges the myth of many Europeans that all American films are dumb mass-audience fodder. WINTER'S BONE is an intelligent and thoughtful piece. It provides mystery and suspense without a single car chase, gunfight, or gag.  And the autumnal Ozark countryside is atmospheric and beautiful.

David recommends . . . don't believe the hype about MADE IN DAGENHAM

MID will be an enormous box office success. The reasons are very simple.


1.  It's about wimmin, nay working-class wimmin, empowering themselves against discrimination. So millions of women will go see it.


2.  There is a new law, apparently, that all reviews of MID have to refer to it as a "feel-good movie". So that whole Richard Curtis "I wanna feel-good!!!" crowd will be queuing fast.


3.  It portrays trades unions and strike action in a positive light. So everyone on the Left will go and see it, especially given the New Dawn of Edism.  This, combined with 1, will draw in millions of right on men.


4.  It's a British movie which has been massively hyped. This will bring in all those who (a) are desperate for the UK film industry to do well (despite making crap films) and / or (b) hate American blockbusters.


5.  It's set in the 60s so will draw in herds of 60s nostalgia fetishists, irrespective of whether it accurately reflects the 60s. (See "The Boat That Rocked")


6.  Everyone covered under 1 to 5 will fall for the hype and tell all their friends it is "the best movie ever made", "it's really really feel-good!!!" etc.  Bringing in even more millions.


7.  It's got Sally Hawkins in it, who gurned her way, appallingly, through previous bad British film HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (bit like "feel-good" - are you getting the picture?). And there's another new law that she has to be promoted as (a) a wonderful new talent and (b) the future of the now-being-reborn UK film industry.


In other words it's a triumph of marketing that will be studied in business schools for many years to come. It illustrates the difference between advertising and marketing. The latter meaning you plan for what demographics (see 1 to 6 above) you are going to sell to BEFORE you even design the product. Which means YOU are being manipulated even as you consider - for no longer then 3 seconds probably - whether to go and see it.


Since I'm already clearly biased, here's a few snippets from a couple of the less hysterical user reviews on imdb.com. And note that these are quotes from what are positive reviews overall.


"The film has all the look and feel of a TV movie and is utterly predictable in its mix of humour and tragedy."


"The movie is set in May/June 1968 and it's a pity more care wasn't taken to ensure the period detail was spot on."


"All the ingredients of a British feelgood movie are there but the overall effect is somewhat spoilt by the tendency to portray all the male authority figures as buffoons."


"It's just a pity that in portraying the women as strong salt-of-the-earth characters, the men have to be seen as caricatures."


"This is big screen TV material. A bit of humour; a bit of heart-string tugging; a bit of stereotyping; a bit of costume drama, a bit of vintage vehicle spotting; a bit of real life documentary; a bit of 'celebrity star' spotting - actors playing roles you wouldn't think they'd take; a bit of flesh baring, a bit of social comment; a bit of this and everything else so as no one feels left out. Trouble is, this makes it a Jack & Jill of all trades and master/mistress of none".


"It is, at the end of the day, a superficial treatment of a ground breaking industrial dispute."


Or how about rottentomatoes.com?


"It’s jolly stuff, yet for all the bawdy banter, there’s a Boat That Rocked-like sense of a genuinely interesting moment being regurgitated as a cuddly sitcom."


"I'm not saying Made In Dagenham is a shallow piece of nostalgic fluff. But within five minutes, Bob Hoskins is singing My Old Man Said Follow The Van during a power cut."


The comments about the male characters are perhaps the most subtly significant. Basically, it's a chick flick.  As a few minutes spent watching TV advertising will reveal, marketers sell to men using sex, and to women by portraying men as stupid.


That is perhaps the ultimate irony. A film promoted as about women's self-empowerment will make millions by manipulating women. The film clearly (some would say, rather obviously) reveals women's oppression by capitalism as workers. Less obviously it reflects how women are oppressed by capitalists as consumers.  I wonder what Naomi 'No Logo' Klein would have to say?