Drama viewing materials

http://www.gboyle.co.uk/aag%20qt.HTM

Whilst this film is well shot and edited it suffers from an unlikeable main character and a story that doesn't really answer a lot of questions that are brought up. The main character is a teenage girl from a northern council estate as she explains why she's unhappy and frustrated with her life, with her divorced parents, unpleasant surroundings and little to no opportunities. This character, although unlikable and "chavvy" with her vocabulary and accent does have a motivation: To get into the music business and move away from her current surroundings, she sings Britney Spears songs both alone and with her friends. However at the end of the film the girl drops a stillborn baby into the canal before leaving in a saddened state, the meaning of this is mostly left ambiguous though it may be implied that she herself had the baby and it was born dead.

Personally I disliked the main character due to the previously mentioned aspects and found her aspirations a little delusional, I also didn't like the ambiguity of the ending and its relative suddenness. That being said I think the film did depict life in these areas relatively accurately and I think a lot of people could sympathise and understand the main character a little better than I did.

Sign Language

"Sign Language" is an enjoyable short concerning people with one of the most mundane jobs in Britain; standing around with advertising signs. Told in the style of a documentary it follows a man who claims to be "an advertising technician", the man is very upbeat and optimistic about his extremely boring job and keeps his spirit higher than anyone in his position in real life might do. The whole film has a tongue in check style, from the man describing his "co-workers" with terms that certainly seem very misguided. The penultimate scene where the advertisers turn round is a rather amusing twist to the story as it goes someway to confirm the man's claims of his co-workers being nice after he himself has started to lose hope in them.

I enjoyed this film and how different it was filmed, and the main character was very likable with his optimism and upbeat attitude.

Audiotour

This film again has a very tongue in cheek value to it and made me wonder what it would be like if machines had thoughts and a personality. While the audio tour starts off normal enough it soon becomes clear that this will have a humorous tone to it when the machine starts describing a man stood by the woman who is listening. From then on the device starts to describe a lot of the aspects of life, objects and behaviour that the woman encounters, eventually accumulating with a small character study of herself, making her realise that she is a flawed character. The audio tour recording is an interesting character in his own right, acting very cynical with a lot of dry humour and despite his obvious limitations of being a machine he does seem very human and is the only character in the film with any dialogue as such.