4 disc box set of the best of Shane Meadows films. Includes: Twenty Four Seven, A Room for Romeo Brass, Dead Man's Shoes, This Is England.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3564 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-03
• Rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Box set, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 363 minutes

Synopsis
Fours films from critcally-acclaimed British filmmaker Shane Meadows. Includes TWENTY FOUR SEVEN, A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS, DEAD MAN'S SHOES and THIS IS ENGLAND.

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Customer Reviews

Great Films but... Be Warned
For this box set, they've simply inlcuded Disc 1 from the 2 DVD set of "This Is England" so you wont get the extras from disc 2. The disc is even labelled 'Disc One', they could have at least relabelled the disc for this box set (or included disc 2 as well).

If you havent seen any of these films though, this is a great buy. Shane Meadows is one of the best film makers in the UK. His films have a lightness of touch and humanity which is a joy to behold.

Satisfying but incomplete over view of a talented film makers career so far
Shane Meadows is the new Ken Loach, Mike Leigh , Alan Clark...delete as appropriate , or not as the case may be. Whether you do agree with any of the following its hard to deny that Meadows has carved out a niche for himself with his docu-drama type approach to film making and his empathy with working class characters . Meadows , though is probably more empirically sympathetic to these characters and is closer in nature to them than any of the above film makers. That means they have a real frisson of veracity and a tarnished cadence of truth . Mainly though they are by turns funny , moving , shocking or just entertaining .It's not a bad mix anyway you look at it.
This collection unfortunately misses out "Once Upon A Time In The Midlands" for some reason. It's the weakest film Meadows has made , but it's still worth a viewing and it would have been nice for anal completist reasons to have it included here .
Meadows first film "Twenty Four Seven " (1997) is a tale of dragging inspiration from alienation as Alan Darcy (Bob Hoskins) tries to motivate the delinquent youths of a Midland town by forming a boxing club. Shot in grainy black and white with a cast of largely unknowns the film never descends into the sort of sickly sweet barely credible overcoming the odds tripe that Hollywood excels at , but instead subverts our expectations with an out of the blue tragedy that leads to a very moving coda that showcases how the challenges of making the world a better place often come at a price for the most altruistic .
A Room For Romeo Brass (1999) like Twenty Four seven was written by Meadows with collaborator Paul Fraser and is essentially a buddy movie the buddies being young Romeo Brass (Andrew Shim) and Gavin" Knock Knock" Wooley (Ben Marshall) .They are neighbours and inseparable but when shell suited older misfit Morrel (Paddy Considine) saves Romeo from a beating after Romeo had intervened on behalf of his limping friend a wedge is driven between the pair. Morell mutates from a gawky impressionable eccentric, humiliated by the two boys when they advise him how to impress Romeo's older sister Ladine ( Vicky McClure) to a hissing snide bully who threatens Knock Knock on a day out , causing him to withdraw from Romeo.
The return of Romeo's father Joe ( Frank Harper) exacerbates the situation as he threatens Morrel after his ministrations on Ladine and Romeo moves in with Morrel but a further attempted seduction of Ladine ends in humiliation for Morell who throws Romeo out leading to another violent confrontation which bonds the families again and re-unites the two former friends . With some wonderful naturalistic performances, a testimony to the director who is not adverse to actors improvising , and a compelling turn from Considine the film has a warm empathetic feel. Meadows it would seem is one of those film makers capable of avoiding cliché and gross sentiment in order for us to sympathise with his characters . This is his finest achievement in that regard.
Dead Mans Shoes (2004) was made after the rather light-hearted "Once Upon A Time In The Midlands" (2002) and is an entirely different proposition. It's a revenge movie , and a very unflinching one at that but it doesn't resort to over the top action or attempt to leaven it's impact with casual humour .This film is deadly serious and because its moral and aesthetic imperative is stripped to the bones unlike contemporary films like "Kill Bill" it achieves a gritty realism not seen since "Get Carter" .
The screenplay has paratrooper Richard (Paddy Considine who co-wrote the screenplay with Meadows)returning to his home town (The film was shot in Matlock Derbyshire) to avenge the tormentors of his mentally challenged brother Anthony ( Toby Kebbell) .The gang are big fish in a small pond and are led by the swaggering Sonny (Gary Stretch) but Richard using almost psychotic conviction and psychological warfare unsettles the gang and then starts to pick them off one by one. There is a twist at the conclusion which brings Richards frontier value revenge into harsh focus and though the denouement slightly defies credibility there is no doubt that this is a film with topical resonance and a tangible emotional kick.
The final film here is the recent This Is England(2006) a semi-autobiographical tale set in Grimsby in the early eighties just after the Falklands and the biting down of Thatcher's policies. Like many of his films it see's a young impressionable boy taken under the wing of older flawed men .This time its 13 year old Shaun ( Thomas Turgoose) ,a lad picked on because his dad had been killed in the Falklands and for his horrible flared jeans which make him look like "Keith Chegwins younger brother". A chance meeting with a gang of skinheads ,who prove to be sympathetic to his plight lead to him becoming one of the gang and as well as forming a bond with the groups charismatic leader Woody ( Joe Gilgun) he strikes up a tentative relationship with Smell ( Rosamund Hanson) a languorous girl-punk. However when violent and political Combo(Stephen Graham) a member of The National Front re-joins the gang after a period in jail the gang is torn apart and it's not long before virulent racism and brutality follow.
This Is England attempts to humanise Skinheads (The gang listen to a ska music and have a black member played by Meadows regular Andrew Shim) and while that is not entirely successful it does show that the gangs offered a surrogate family for alienated youths , something that still resounds with modern-day youth culture. Mostly though it is a superbly acted (Thurgoose is a revelation) rites of passage told with pragmatic conviction that convincingly juxtaposes it's political content with the personnel .
This is an excellent box -set with some worthy extras but I feel it would have been preferable to include everything Meadows has put his burgeoning name to including the unjustly maligned OUATITM and the shorts he made especially "Small Time". But for anyone wanting to investigate arguably the most essential film maker currently working in Britain (Danny Boyle would raise an objection here I think) or just to purchase a large chunk of his output in one hit, this does the job though I repeat , the market for a more definitive overview still remains to be exploited.

9/10. The Shane Meadows Collection
Dubbed the `Scorcese of the Midlands', Shane Meadows is one of the UK's brightest modern filmmaking talents. This fantastic four-disk set includes all Meadows' full-length film work bar `Once Upon A Time in the Midlands', a critical and commercial failure that the director has since distanced himself from. The four films are unified by their stark Midlands settings, non-professional actors and a liberal use of improvisation - harking back to kitchen sink dramas of the British New Wave in the 1960s. But while Meadows belongs to a similar tradition to Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, he is also arguably closer to his subjects, having the empirical eye of a man who has lived the life firsthand. Moreover, the raw approach to filmmaking, coupled with the director's handpicked indie, pop and reggae soundtracks, makes it easy to see why the Scorcese comparison persists.

Shane Meadows's first movie set the template for his more accomplished later work. Bob Hoskins excepting, `Twenty Four Seven' features a cast of non-professionals and a typically tragic-comic approach to realist drama. As someone who viewed Meadows's later work first however, Twenty Four Seven seems really quite amateurish. While it is lovingly photographed in black and white by cinematographer Ashley Rowe, it is Meadows's weakest work in terms of plot and character development. I was quite surprised by how weak this film was given that it made the directors' name and became the launchpad for his career. There's simply not enough depth to the characters to be moved by the consequences of their actions. Furthermore, Meadows' use of a comtemporary indie soundtrack - another hallmark of his filmmaking - has never been lazier than here. A whole sequence of the film, dedicated to the supposed bonding of the key characters in the film on a trip to Wales, is a perfunctary montage of lame visual jokes set to The Charlatans.

Like Shane Meadows' later `This is England', `A Room For Romeo Brass' is a coming of age drama revolving around friends growing up in the working class Midlands. Both films feature friendships tested by the divisive arrival of an influential older figure. The protagonists in both films seek friendship to escape disappointment or disenfranchisement from family life. While the latter film places this scenario in the context of class conflict in Thatcher's Britain and the rise of the skinhead movement, the thematic concerns of `Romeo Brass' are less contemporaneous. Its outsider comes in the surreal shape of Morel (played by the brilliant Paddy Considine), a small-town oddball who takes an instant and ultimately obsessive interest in the eponymous character's sister. Considine is always fascinating to watch (from Meadows' own `Dead Man's Shoes' to Pawel Pawlikowski's `My Summer of Love') and he is by turns hilarious and terrifying here as the volatile Morel. However, for all Considine's brilliance on screen there is something lacking in this film's purpose. Whereas This is England's small-scale drama manages to address wider social decline in a specific historical context, A Room For Romeo Brass` concerns are perhaps not broad enough. It is certainly not the first film about an obsessive and intimidating individual insinuating himself into family life (cinema is rife with them, from the great to the really poor). Once you take that out of the equation, there is not a great deal else to capture the imagination.

Arguably Shane Meadow's most accomplished film to date, `Dead Man's Shoes' combines the director's normal witty observance of small-town Midlands life with that of a classic revenge movie. It stars co-writer and Meadows regular Paddy Considine as Richard, an ex-soldier returning to his hometown to avenge his brother's bullying at the hands of some drug-dealing townie low-lifes. Richard's mildly mentally handicapped younger brother is played so convincingly by relative newcomer Toby Kebbel that he threatens to outshine even the brilliant Considine. Some of the low-key scenes of the two together talking are probably the best pieces of ensemble acting in any Meadows film, while the more typically improvised gang of tawdry, small-town drug-dealers are both hilariously and horribly believable.

What marks Dead Man's Shoes out in comparison to Meadows' previous films is that there is a real twist - a sting in the tail. This leads to a climatic but ultimately ambiguous ending which flips the revenge movie formula on its head. Is Richard's act of revenge more an act of atonement for his own failures as a brother, his own guilt about failing to protect him? Or does this act of atonement extend to the soldier's private shame in having a disabled brother? And at what cost is this act of revenge on Richard himself? "Now I'm the monster", he reflects, managing to get the balance right between menace and remorse in a way that marks him out as one of the best actors of his generation.

While belonging to a British cinematic tradition - social realism with a twist of surreal humour - that owes much to the work of the Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, `This is England' is a classic rites of passage drama with roots that can be traced back to Trauffaut's `Les Quatre Cents Coups'. You have to have lived in Thatcher's Britain to fully appreciate the attention to detail put into recreating the mood of the times here. The credit sequence - a montage of contemporaneous news footage - sets the scene: royal weddings, the Fawklands war, the miners' strikes and class conflict. For all the verisimilitude, though, it's the honesty and intensity of the performances that carry this film. Meadows looks at the skinhead movement with the sympathetic eye of someone who experienced it first hand. He does not seek to demonise those involved, but to show how what began as a fashion with roots - paradoxically - in black culture, became politicised at a time of class strife and high unemployment.

Meadows uses a ska soundtrack to demonstrate the contradiction at the heart of the skinheads, that the music they loved was directly influenced by reggae imported to the UK by Carribbean immigration. The director's use of contemporaneous music not only sets a sense of time and place, but also brings a tangible voice to the emotional turmoil of his characters. At times this can be a little too literal, especially in the final sequence when we are treated to some of Morrissey's finest lyrics: "See, the luck I've had / Can make a good man turn bad". It's a shame that they couldn't use the original Smiths song, for the singer in the cover version is a pale imitation of Morrissey. All in all, though, this a great value box-set from one of the UK's best modern filmmakers.