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Hello, and welcome back to “Keeping Up”. This week’s quick rec is the short film Fish Story (2017), directed by Charlie Shackleton. I can’t beat the official synopsis for giving you a sense of what it’s all about:
Sometime in the 1980s, Caspar Salmon’s grandmother was invited to a gathering on the Welsh island of Anglesey, attended exclusively by people with fish surnames. Or so he says. Thirty years later, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton attempts to sort myth from reality as he searches for the truth behind this fishy tale.
Like much of Shackleton’s work across mediums, Fish Story is witty, resourceful, and aesthetically/sonically engaging. It’s also absolutely hilarious; for me, the whole film manages to conjure the sensation of constantly being on the edge of collapsing into giggles. It’s a shade under 14 minutes long, and it flies by. You can, and should, watch it here.
Last weekend, I watched and enjoyed Rye Lane, the debut feature film by director Raine Allen Miller. It’s a funny and sprightly romantic comedy set in the South East London district of Peckham where, back in the day, I spent a fair amount of time, including many hours inside the pretty unique, and famously cheap, independent Peckhamplex cinema, which features prominently in Miller’s film. (I also once had a firework launched in the general direction of my head by a passing cyclist when I was trying to order a three piece meal in the Rye Lane KFC. You can’t win ‘em all.)
While Rye Lane received a theatrical release in the UK, it went straight to streaming Stateside—I watched it on Hulu. Miller clearly has a keen eye for color and composition, and it would have been nice to have had the opportunity to see the film, with its ultra-widescreen, fish-eye-tastic aesthetic, on the big screen. Alas, I had to make do with the small screen, which had its benefits, because, tonally speaking, Rye Lane’s more sitcom-esque moments happily reminded me of another Peckham-set classic, Desmond’s, one of the first, funniest and most influential black sitcoms ever broadcast on British TV—it ran from 1989 to 1994, and was one of the first shows I ever fell in love with. One of my career highlights was getting to sit down with the show’s creator Trix Worrell and three key cast members, Carmen Munroe, Robbie Gee, and Ram John Holder for a good old chat at the BFI in 2016. You can watch the filmed Q&A here.
While I hate to skirt spoiler territory, one of Rye Lane’s more Desmond’s-y moments involves a backyard barbecue, a singing uncle, and the music of Daniel Bedingfield. The New Zealand-born, Britain-based Bedingfield, you may recall, sprang from nowhere in late 2001 with an absolutely massive debut single, “Gotta Get Thru This”, a propulsive and extremely relatable garage ditty—recorded on his laptop in his bedroom!—about his romantic woes. You cannot deny that it still bangs today:
Bedingfield then released a string of subsequent singles from his first LP (also titled “Gotta Get Thru This”), including the stunningly maudlin but undeniably effective ballad “If You’re Not the One” (his first US hit), and the curate’s egg “Friday”, a tinny-sounding, amphetaminic thrash-rave track which haunts my dreams to this day.
I saw the video for “Friday” only once, late one night, alone in my living room, and were it not for the subsequent invention of YouTube, which confirms the video’s existence, I may have gone to my grave wondering whether I’d simply made it all up. If you’ve ever wanted to witness a berserk Daniel Bedingfield taking apart his house like a UK garage version of Gene Hackman at the end of The Conversation while spitting out lines like:
I live in an ice house-a
I never do dance salsa
I’m living in Jamaica
I live in an ice breaker
I’m living in Africa
I never do know where-a
…then you’re in luck! You can watch the video here. “Keeping Up” is nothing if not a public service, and I must in turn thank Raine Allen Miller for propelling Bedingfield—seen not so long ago looking rugged on Instagram, as I learned during “research” for this letter—back into my consciousness after a long absence.
Before I go, a quick salute to the great jazz pianist, composer and bandleader Ahmad Jamal, who died this week at the grand old age of 92. I’ll leave the obituaries to the experts, but I wanted to share this Jamal version of Nat Simon’s song “Poinciana”, one of the most simultaneously relaxing and uplifting pieces of music I know.
Until next time!
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