Addition:

Just caught up with Shane Meadows' lyrical and short (71 min) Somers Town (trailer). As I've written before, Meadows is always superb at infiltrating the black humour of violence. Yet I prefer him in elegiac Brit mode as in this new film. Many critics felt a bit short-changed by running time (though Meadows really made his Eurostar commission money earmarked for a short go a long way). I didn't have a problem with the missing 'third act' though. For an essentially narrative filmmaker, Meadows has conjured something quite experimental - an American indie 'mumblecore'; seemingly aimless existentialism while in the far, far-off background perhaps an old black and white Hollywood romance is playing. And maybe not. This black and white adventure of plucky Nottingham Northern England Meadows regular Thomas Turgoose who's runaway to London circles the Kings Cross rail terminal (hence the funding). He hooks up with a young Polish chef, his girlfriend a French waitress in a cafe and they all burst into colour as they whizz off to Paris like a riff from Truffaut's film Jules et Jim. This really is England! I have a dream: now look what you've done, the tea's gone cold.
Turning customer delight into disgust


BBC's award -winning Panorama documentary slot asks what is Britishness.
Mike Leigh's Happy-Go Lucky now out on DVD, (my blog review of the film) and Criterion's excellent double-disc Naked (with audio commentary)has been available since 2005 in the States and a single disc version(with commentary) has just been issued by Momentum for Region 2.
The loss of sadness
Satirist, cartoonist and jazz musician Barry Fantoni is this week's guest on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions. Worth tuning in just to hear Spike Milligan's Another Lot 'auction sonata'.
And The Perfect Vagina (recommended last blog) is repeated Sept 3 at 11pm on Channel Four.

Jag Mundrha's Shoot on Sight (trailer)almost passed unseen through the 'dead' week of August like a ship in the night. A political thriller about Muslim, Commander Ali (Naseeruddin Shah) investigating London police shooting an innocent Muslim on an underground platform, it's clearly based on the true incident of the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes meeting a similar fate in July 2005. Carl Austin's screenplay tries to balance this with the story of Ali's family and a terrorist within. There are really good performances here, Brian Cox (Tariq's boss) as always, Greta Scacchi as Ali's wife, India Wadsworth as their teenage daughter and Om Puri as the Imam. But the film's 'balance' is frustratingly 'correct' with none of the moral ambiguity you'd find in say Walter Hill's universe. And the press conference scenes are quite embarrassingly amateur bearing no comparison to the docu-drama tension of Paul Greengrass' Bloody Sunday. It's a real pity because the de Menezes incident is still an open sore years on from the event and this is a brave film at a time when any sort of criticism puts one under scrutiny. But it's not the film to set consciences alight. And set aflame with debate they should be.
Freedom of speech under PM Tony Blair: Labour issues apology to heckler
Met police vows to challenge Ghaffur's race discrimination claims