Peaches

As if in response to all those British movies that present Irish people as being melancholy, dreamy alcoholics who sit around singing forlornly and then getting into fights - those of us who aren't terrorists, that is - here's an Irish movie set in Britain that's willing to perpetuate a few stereotypes of it's own.

Set among the slacker milieu of Kentish Town, it concerns a student who's growing old and wondering what he's going to do with his life - Stop me if you've heard this before - and is living with an unemployed guy who challenges him to see who can conquer the most young women - the "peaches" of the title. What's striking about the film is the narrow range of it's characters interests, which seem to extend only to pursuing women, clothes, drinking and avoiding work; like copies of Loaded magazine that had grown legs and started to walk. The one well-developed female character, in contrast, wants a more serious relationship (Bet you didn't see that one coming). If she was in an American movie she'd be telling us what a difficult place she's in right now, but she's too British and reserved for that.

The film has it's redeeming features, it's got moments of humour and uses it's locations well, even if some of them don't seem like that sort of locations unemployed people would live in. I'd like to see it get a wide release in the UK in the hope that less stereotypical Irish characters would populate their movies in future, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

This movie has no point except to expound on the fact that it has no point. There are a few reasons to sit through it, though.

1. The three mates have the funniest hand gestures down. The script has them playing off one another really well.

2. Justin Salinger's character, Frankie, had me on the floor laughing. Really well played.

3. Kelly Reilly as Cherry could not have been more cute.

I didn't say they were great reasons, but they were good enough.

There is nothing really to recommend "Peaches". You could see the ending coming from the beginning (esp. with the preview ads). The audience only laughed on spotted occassions, and often the laughter was patched even then. The male protaganists seemed to be one dimensional mostly with the only character development being based around relationship attitudes.

A big problem I felt however was the lack of any real direction in the movie. There was no structure to it and it seemed to drift aimlessly. Sure there's nothing wrong with experimenting with the narrative design but theres no point if it doesn't amount to anything.

So what do we end up with? A snapshot of the lives of three guys just leaving college and finding out how to live life properly? You can see it on a variety of tv programs done to a superior degree. Peaches are not the only fruit...thankfully we've more variety.

One wonders why this was even adapted from the stage. Maybe the play was worth seeing but this movie arrived a few years too late to be a decent critique of lad culture.

Yaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwn!

Lazy adaptation. And as for the ending? We didn't write any decent scenes to wrap the film up so we just wrote these stupid captions instead!

Come on guys! How could a screenplay that had such noticeable flaws ever make it to the screen?

Don't even bother seeing this.