The Announcement

I'm rarely moved to make a comment online about a film. But I can't understand how this one got made. Who made it? How could they have possibly thought they were capable of making a feature film? Did they do a weekend course at some film school, get a nice big cheque from daddy and kidnap David Badiel's family one by one until he agreed to be in it? Or was he by any chance a longtime family friend/distant relation doing this out of sheer, misplaced kindness? I don't care, don't want to know. Even he looks utterly embarrassed to be in it, mumbling his lines and hiding his face from the camera. Meanwhile the DOP must have been the gaffer from Neighbours, there seemed to be absolutely no sound design, the script, the direction and editing were all abysmal, and quite frankly the apathy that overwhelms me right now means that I can't be bothered to spend any more of my life thinking about this film.

A dinner party for a group of young friends in their early thirty's seems to be nothing more than a cool get together for food, drinking and messing around. However when the hosts announce that the holiday they are about to go on is actually as honeymoon as they have gotten married. Everyone is pleased of course and congratulates them but, as the group retires into different rooms and continue their drinking and chatting, reservations, secrets and past hurts are quick to come to the surface.

You know how if you photocopy an image out of a newspaper it will be slightly more grainy than it originally was? Then if you copy the copy and so on it will only get lower quality, even though the original image is still recognisable? Well, that's how it is with this film because, as writer Noah Brown has already noted this could not have been obvious in its influences if it had been entitled "That Life". I say this as someone who never really cared for that series but appreciate for some people it was perfectly spot on. However outside of this select, young middle-class set of media sector professionals, this film will offer very little in the way of substance, narrative or characters. The secrets are wheeled out at a dinner party where (surprise, surprise) there are drink and drugs going around. None of it is original or clever and it is hard to shake the feeling of how very derivative it is. I wanted to care about the characters but there is nothing in the script that made me believe about them (outside of the world of the film) and absolutely nothing that made me care about them or be interested in their self-absorbed world of problems.

The cast match this more or less by turning in easy turns without ever risking getting to the hearts of their characters or making them real people. Banks, Hardie, Addy, Baddiel and others are all just re-enacting their favourite scenes from This Life and the only things approaching genuine performances came from the rotund single guy (sorry – I didn't catch his name) and Lennie James. Troy Miller directs with no other aim that aping the moving camera, off-centre framing and "carefree cool" that This Life and the like had; he may do it well but, as my teachers would tell me, copying others is not an acceptable way of passing a test.

Overall then a nice film for those who love things like This Life without exception but even they may struggle with something that never aspires to be more than just a derivative copy.

There is no way on earth you are going to care about any of these characters. A bunch of spoilt middle class overgrown kids take some drugs at a party and get off with each other and argue. I've just seen this on TV and I didn't think it was a 'film' as such, more a post-'This Life' indulgence that really has no resonance or proper drama to it. Stuff like this will get commissioned for time immemorial unfortunately, irrelevant middle class "lifestyle" crap that takes itself far too seriously. It's got David Baddiel in it and that bird out of "Cold Feet", you know what to expect. There was a lot of this stuff about in 2000, it was a particularly British malaise..."they're educated and doing drugs? friends, but kinda dysfunctional and with incestuous relationships? sounds great!". This kind of nonsense, and post-Guy Ritchie comedy- gangster stuff...dark days. If you have taste, this will annoy you to the point of violence.

No it's not The Godfather, but it passed the time. Sure some of the characters were pretty unpleasant, and I didn't care that much about those that weren't, and the ending was weak. BUT I did think it was quite well observed: it rang true. The obsessions and insecurities and instabilities of a gang of mates slowly growing up is clearly not a new subject, but there weren't any characters that I didn't believe in, and I thought the script worked. The childrearing plot didn't really convince, but the general métier of discussion between the actors was very believable and occasionally quite witty. Made me wonder what kind of rubbish I spout when I'm drunk.

If, unlike some of the commenters here, you are not staging a class war and don't mind seeing the lives of other people who are fairly successful, extroverted, bohemian (gasp) and not being terribly English at a party and getting into all sorts of trouble as a result this is not a bad film, closer to Euro cinema rather than an imitation of the usual slick American crap... I believe the minimal sound design and cheap camera is a conscious decision rather than bad film making, I'd defend this, the film isn't any worse as a result, and it puts the spotlight on the cast, some of whom are really good (Kate Hardie- think that's her name, as the sarcastic drunk is spot-on) the one exception being David Baddiel, who should never be allowed to appear in serious stuff!! It's light, and we don't go for this kind of anatomising-of-relationship crap in this country, but if you don't have any real friends to go to a party with than you could do worse than to sit in and watch this.