Just went for a spur of the moment movie night with my friend Issie and decided that we would raid her sister's DVD collection as she's away in San Francisco! And we stumbled upon this little item. This isn't going to be a long review I'm afraid because I'm actually rather tired and there's not an awful lot I can say about it anyway.
Cemetery Junction is a comedy set in 1970's Reading written by the famous duo Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Effectively, the story is about 3 childhood friends that are trying to find their place in the world as such and somehow advance out of 'Cemetery Junction' which is where they live.
Okay so Bruce, Freddie and Snork have a beautiful bromance that's filled with banter and offensive pranks throughout the movie that sort of try to ruin each other's careers but it's okay because they're doing it in a light hearted way and they all love each other and so forth. This is obviously inspired by Gervais and Merchant's comedy genius (no sarcasm intended, I think they do the offensive humour thing very well). Luckily the boys can get away with their rowdy antics because they have a mate in the police force, he's a family friend of Bruce's father, although Cemetery Junction looks like the sort of place that everyone knows everyone. Although Tom Hughes who plays Bruce seems to be the face of the film (the guy in the centre of the poster) I wouldnt say he was the main character, although he has a big input to the film and is significant to the storyline Christian Cooke who plays Freddie, the aspiring Health Insurance salesman is definitely the more prominant. Hughes also got nominated for the 'Best Newcomer' award at the British Independent Film Awards which I think well done, good for him and all but I really think that Cooke was the far more impressive out of the two actors in this film alongside Felicity Jones who plays Julie, Freddie's ex girlfriend. Predictably they still have smushy feelings for each other and thus a romance subplot is added into the film
To be totally honest the film is okay, there's nothing particularly wrong with it. However, it's very slow to start and really Issie and I agreed that it only gets interesting about half an hour until the end of the film. Issie was very stern that she could have packed the whole film into about 10 minutes which I think is a fair point, however I think the development of character relations is probably one of the strengths of this film. Gervais and Merchant taking backseats as characters works well as actually the stars of the film needed to be young adults. Some lines, especially Gervais's, who plays the father, are actually very funny and do make you laugh out loud which is positive and what you want out of a comedy however, there weren't all that many of them which was a shame. The sort of makeshift 'baddy' of the film is Julie's fiancé Mike, played by Matthew Goode. He is represented as the sleezbag, another salesman who works at the company Freddie is trying to make it big in, only being with Julie to get the boss's favour (oh I forgot to mention that Julie is the boss's daughter). Not much comes of that though as it's not really a good vs. evil kind of a film but more a journey through life and self discovery and all that shit kind of a film with a bit of romance running through. Everyone obviously wants Julie and Freddie to get together despite her engagement, but that's just how these things work isn't it? Gotta have an obstacle!!
The film touched heavily upon sexism in the 70's and about women being 'seen and not heard' and that sort of thing which is why Julie's parents are looked at a lot throughout. The 'deeper' more 'meaningful' messages throughout this film are nice and add another layer to the plot. The word nice keeps coming up, that's not a good word...
So So So, is it worth a watch?
The Verdict
Hmmm, I'm afraid despite me pointing out it's positives I'm going to have to give it a NO, unfortunately there's just not enough to this film to make it genuinely enjoyable throughout and worth watching. Yeah there are some funny lines and the ending is nice (not giving it away) but that's just it, the best bits are "nice" and it just didn't really do it for me. If it had started at the level it reached just before the end then it could have been a really good film, hit and miss I'm afraid boys!
Thanks for reading, if you have any comments or opinions about my review then don't hesitate to drop us a comment or an email to suzy.keeping@hotmail.com
Cheers Guys!
Suze x
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