thomasjay-2201

Metallica are a band who've always loomed over my music taste but recently, especially during isolation, I've dove deep into the groups story and discography when I stumbled on this.

Edited/Directed by Stewart Kirwan, it stitches countless interviews, clips and stills to chronicle the making of their third album. Unauthorised I was impressed to see this have better quality than most generic documentaries and it was a stunningly made. Smartly not adding in a third party and just letting the band speak it was so informing and visually striking I was blown away.

Honestly I'd recommend you watch this as I can't do it justice enough, whether you're a fan of many years or a new member of the 'Metallica Family' you'll love this

It's had a fair share of controversy as you'd probably expect given the nature of the film but, don't miss the point by skipping this, so yourself a favour and see it. The tale of Timmy and Marco and how their friendship is ravaged by the fact they live in separate postcodes in a petty postcode war. Semi-autobiographical, Rapman shows just how easy things like this can occur whilst also carefully considering the effects after and many of the flash points which trigger such headlines. As a film/singular piece it's rather impressive, merging in the signature style of Rapman featuring himself as a character who fills in the gaps essentially, narrating the 11 years of backstory in a brief rap and speeding up the pace later on as acts close and change it was a useful tool to progress the narrative and was refreshing to see used. Feeling like a modern day Shakespeare story, not too dissimilar to Romeo and Juliet in all honesty it did perhaps suffer from being so short, having to condense in so much as well as humanise both of the joint protagonists to a level where you can't really decide who to root for. For a film made on a shoestring budget there's some impressive but also reserved action sequences scattered throughout all of which shot in an extremely visceral way it's likely to be the future of British film, revolutionising the nature of production with a total of around 80% of cast and crew hailing from a BAME background this is a voice that has to be heard, not justifying but explaining why and how such things happen, feeling firmly rooted in reality throughout its a travesty that it's being stifled and not reaching those who really need to see it, equally tragic the fact it's released in this window of death alongside more mainstream Hollywood releases such as Frozen II and Knives Out, if you want something different, closer to home and challenging then this is the one for you. Heart wrenching, genuine and gritty it's a new step for the 'British Urban' genre of sorts and should have its place in the history books, despite it being pulled from various cinema chains