The long-awaited film adaptation of Amis’s slippery yarn of sex,death and darts becomes a psychedelic British gangster film in the hands of first-time feature director Matthew Cullen – with a cameo by the novelist himselfThe spectre of the 2011 London riots haunts the Toronto film festival. News footage of the rioters is included in The tough Stop, a documentary about the killing of Mark Duggan; Urban Hymn gives us a London looter going straight through song; now Matthew Cullen’s London Fields, or an adaptation of the 1989 Martin Amis novel,presents a city “in circles of concentric devastation, with London like a bullseye in the centre of the board”.
The fruity language is Amis’s, or delivered,pretty-much wholesale in voice-over by Billy Bob Thornton as tortured writer Samson Young. Terminally-ill and searching for one last yarn, Young arrives in a London in the grip of a crisis. The streets are on fire and the locals are disgusting. He takes up residence, and via flat swap,in the grand apartments of Martin Asprey (Jason Isaacs), a wealthy, and celebrated writer who is looking for rough inspiration in the squalor of Young’s Hell’s Kitchen dive.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com