The Low Down

A soft and subtle film that I found quite dreamy and languid. It doesn't knock you over but seeps into you. It is very English, and it's all about the characters and scenes which are very real. I found it a very natural film, where you didn't feel you were pushed along to a climax but were happy to be on a travelator with these characters. Film doesn't always have to be about escapism, where there are Tom Clancy storylines, glossy set ups and oohs, and ahs; instead this is a personal film which might make you think and feel.

I am taken aback by all the bad reviews. It glued me to the screen from the get go. The acting is superb, the characters nuanced and believable, the eye of the camera loving and inquisitive. I don't rate it a ten only because the ending is a bit facile. Maybe I especially empathised with this film because I am of that very generation and it all feels very real, very familiar - it didn't bring tears of nostalgia but it was almost too close to the bone. It reminds me of the Aldo Busi quote "What remains of all the pain we believed to suffer as youngsters?".

The lives of a group of lonely London losers comes under the spotlight in Jamie Thraves' film 'The Low Down'. As a director, Thraves is very keen on breaking up the flow of images, and disconnecting them from the dialogue, a trick annoying enough when Soderbergh does it, but frankly plain odd in this film, which is otherwise unassuming and generally low-key. The script is good at the sort of dialogue spoken by people who don't really know each other very well, or like each other very much, but who pass the time in each other's company for the want of anything better to do, and there are some funny moments. But there's little real warmth on show, and little explanation provided for the characters's disaffection: pointless moody shots of overflying aircraft aren't really adequate for this purpose. Overall, it's a bit of a waste of the beauty of Kate Ashfield, and a forgettable movie.

The Low Down can be rated as an undeveloped good idea, not more not less.

The good side of this movie is the effort to capture an transmit the confusion of those years, but it falls hard on that, sometimes the movie captures the esense of that behavior, but those not transmit anything at all. After watching the 96 minutes I was like `so what?', not a single feeling about the film or the characters, characters that just wander, one does not know where they come, where they go, what moves them, you can not make any contact with them just watch the as watching a pst in the street.

I am waiting for the next movie to see where the director goes; it can be a very good thing or jus another empty presumptuous thing.

This has a fresh "new wave" feel to it. It's filmed in an inventive and original style that makes it very watchable for most of its duration,

though there are influences, most notably Ken Loach with a hint of Mike Leigh on the acting side and Nicolas Roeg on the experimental way it's directed. It's not a total success it does seem to run out of steam towards the end, but it's still a very impressive first feature and hopefully the start of a long and interesting film career for the director. (7/10)