Word: brits
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Happy-Go-Lucky Written and directed by Mike Leigh; rated R; out now Sally Hawkins won the Berlin Film Festival's Best Actress award as a cockeyed-optimist schoolteacher in this larkish entry from the usually dour Brit auteur Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Vera Drake). Even if you don't find Hawkins as adorable as the movie does, you're likely to fall in love with Karina Fernandez, who plays an imperiously funny flamenco teacher...
...Once again Ritchie needs a narrator to set the tone and occasionally explain the plot machinations to slower members of the audience. His name is Archie (incarnated with just the right mix of menace and mystery by go-to Brit character actor Mark Strong), and at the beginning he helpfully deciphers the movie's title: a higher, more voracious strain of London gangster. "We all like a bit of the good life: some the money, some the drugs, other the sex game, the glamour or the fame. But a rocknrolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real rocknrolla wants...
...McGinty) to the working class in big cities (Christmas in July) and small towns (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero). If appreciation for RockNRolla's entertainment abundance is freighted with disappointment, it's partly because Ritchie's early work has been elaborated on in sharp Brit gangland capers like Layer Cake and The Bank Job. But the main problem is that Ritchie keeps playing the same old song. It's a swell tune, and we don't mind hearing it every few years, but we'd welcome another subject in a transposed key. Even the Material...
Americans are much more straightforward about being able to say even something like, "I had a really good day at work today." That would be straightforwardly happy. A Brit couldn't come and say that to a bunch of friends over a drink. They'd have to make some joke about how they screwed up somehow...
...uncommunicative. They really don't want to talk about feelings. They really don't understand when you're having an emotional meltdown. It's one of those things you have to laugh at and make fun of. That's one way to have a relationship with any kind of Brit. If you make fun of them, they can really understand that and then you're getting somewhere...