Neds (2010)

Awesome Movie

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Peter Mullan's film about Glasgow's Non-Educated Delinquents is not quite as straightforward as it may at first seem: there are some fairly common elements (the bright kid trying to learn his way out of poverty, the drunken father, the violent street gangs) but also some odd, surreal imaginative scenes, and an overall narrative that grows more opaque the longer the film lasts. It's the scenes set at school, which showcase the diversity of approaches employed by the teaching staff, that are most powerful, making the point that if your rear children as animals, animals are what you're going to get out the other end. The almost total absence of any positive virtues: humour, love, progress are all absent from the narrative; ultimately make for hard watching. Mullan himself is mesmeric in a small role, but the failure to make that role more central is just one of the film's narrative oddities; as a writer, Mullan could have done with some help to better shape his material.

Peter Mullan has produced a film of outstanding beauty, raw brutality, warm humour and real pathos. Even without being unable to understand a fair deal of the dialogue, the excellent acting and characterisation was enough to convey the powerful storyline with ease. This is brutal British cinema at it's best. John McGill, a promising schoolboy in 1970s Glasgow, is a sensitive and gentle child routinely subjected to intimidation. As John becomes increasingly angry and determined to fight back, he begins a descent into violence and apathy that threatens to overwhelm him. Will he succumb to the dark allure of gang life, or will he regain the strength he needs to get his life back on track?

Neds tells the story of John, a Catholic teenager growing up in 1970s Glasgow. The story line follows John's involvement with his city's Ned culture and the consequences of it on his teenage years. The movie won Best Film at the San Sebastian Film Festival in January 2011.Good points: The characters were well portrayed and gave a good performance, making it realistic and a good representation of how life would have been like as a young Scottish boy. Also, the music that is played in the movie is well suited to it and is the correct year when released.Bad points: The accents were very strong, at some points I couldn't understand what they were saying. The ending, might have had a good meaning to it, but was a disappointment as I was expecting something that was exciting. Also the film is over two hours long, which was too long.Overall: I would give the film 6.5/10, because the acting was good, along with the representation of teenagers in1970's Scotland, but the film was very long and the overall story line could have been better scripted.

It looked good and was a fun watch, even if I couldn't find subtitles. The shift from good to bad was great but the struggle back seemed rushed and incomplete.To be perfectly honest, I believe the struggle of trying to put that old lifestyle behind would have left a much larger impact on me as I walk away from having seen this film. I don't think that showing the darker side of the violence and gangs would have been lost if it had taken half the time it did.7/10 is a little generous but in the end. I was entertained.I think I said what I needed to say but sadly I cant submit this without a certain number of sentences. It seems slightly ridiculous to me that I need to be forced to add text after saying what I came to say. Sad to think that fluff needs to be added to meet a length quota, I'm sure there is something to be said about this and the extra fluff in a lot of today's cinema as well.