By Marti Dols Roca.
Thanks to the acceptance of my short film to EEFF 201 7(East End Film Festival), I had the chance to request tickets for some of the screenings featuring in the still ongoing event. So I decided to take a look through the website and pick the ones that looked most interesting; amongst many options I ended up deciding for three different movies. From my P.O.V those were: one about an Iranian taxi driver in one of his night shifts; All Eyez on Me (the Tupac biopic) and a movie about an apparently super famous bare-knuckle boxer in East London. Much to my delight, I managed to get a ticket for the latter: My Name is Lenny. And off I went to the indicated venue of which I didn’t know a thing: York Hall.
I didn’t pay much attention to the “come early as there will be security in the door” notice as sadly, the recent events in London made that sound more than logical. I arrived early indeed and took my seat in the balcony of the venue. Slowly, the other attendants started to arrive. Of course, when I heard the accents, saw the size of arms and chests and witnessed the attitude, I thought to myself: what were you expecting? This is a movie about a bare-knuckle boxer from East London. Well, the party was just getting started.
As a side note, I’m a boy from a normal neighborhood in Barcelona that, even though I’m no street cred master, I’ve seen my things and I live in a South London area that caused a big effect on me the first weeks of living there. My point being, I’m no Avon Barksdale but I’m not Milhouse either. Now believe me, I was impressed, to put it gently, for what I witnessed that night.
So, as probably everyone in England but me knows, this is a movie about Lenny McLean, legend of the East End, the Guv’nor, and Barry the Baptist in Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock amongst other memorable roles. My Name is Lenny is his life story and its produced by his own son Jamie McLean alongside Van Carter and Nick Taussig. The movie it’s alright. It is what you would expect from it and judging by the non-stopping cheers of friends, family and regular attendants of York Hall during the movie (which made almost impossible to hear the “Oi Want Me Mony” lines delivered by the Australian-not-from-the-east-end Josh Helman) it fulfilled the expectations of the crowd. A crowd that, for what I saw from the balcony, being absolutely picky and speaking from the perspective of a complete ignorant of this world, could well have starred in the movie themselves.
So the film finished and I didn’t stay to the Q&A because: A- If it was difficult to hear the dialogues, my hope of understanding what the cast and crew said was quite low. B- It was late. And C- I was a bit scared. Once I got home to my dear South London I thought: OK, maybe I was exaggerating. After doing some research on The Guv’nor and York Hall I understood I really wasn’t.
Being as it may, it was an experience worth living with no doubt at all. This is of course my point of view seasoned with a few poetic licenses to make this article, hopefully, somehow interesting. Apologies if I have hurt someone feelings though.
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EdmundF 20th July 2017
Josh Helman did well but I found the film’s flashbacks of Lenny’s horrific physical abuse at the hands of his step-father got a bit repetitive and pointless. UFC-fighter Cathal Pendred was hilarious as a heavily-accented trash-talking Irish gypsy streetfighter and I would have liked to see more individual characters like this.
BRWC 21st July 2017
Hopefully he will reign things in for his next film.