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Just for the Record (Part 2) Go back to Part 1 of the review
What about the plot? A film like this, about people struggling against the odds, usually involves some sort of triumph, however small; some aspect of redemption, a learning experience, a coming of age, a realisation of pathos that leads to the replacement of a meaningless obsession with a joyful embrace of reality. It’s there in Take Me to Your Leader, it’s there in This is Spinal Tap, it’s even there in some genuine documentaries like the wonderful Anvil: The Story of Anvil. It’s there in narrative films about creative struggles, like Ed Wood or School of Rock. It’s not here. This is a film where the three-act structure is: pre-production, production, post-production (each introduced with a little semi-animated caption) as the interviewees discuss each stage of the film-making process in turn. But that’s not a three-act structure. That’s not thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That’s not boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. That’s not man climbs tree, man falls out of tree, if he’s alive it’s comedy and if he’s dead it’s drama. Pre-production, production, post-production is just a sequence of three things happening in order. A hero’s journey? Who the hell is the hero here? Harlan Noble? Derek La Farge? Flynn Beatty? Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes? There is no hero, there is no journey. There’s a quest of sorts, but it’s not a quest we care one iota about. We have to care about what happens in a film, even in a supposed comedy. We need at least one character to identify with and we have to want him or her to succeed in some way. It really is that simple. Towards the end, there is the closest that the film gets to a plot when Wickes appears, wanting to know where his money is. The production wraps with about three quarters of the script filmed, a rough cut is cobbled together by Colin Salmon’s blackest, gayest editor, but it’s unusable so the whole thing stops. We’re not shown anything from this unusable rough cut, we’re not told anything about it, and with the information that the fictitious film was never completed, the real film just ends, about an hour and a quarter in. The last line is a weak, crude gag about sex which is meant to be some sort of shock revelation but is in the trailer anyway. That’s it, that’s the plot. Which doesn’t chime at all with the advertising strapline that says: “They made the worst film of all time ... let the trial begin!” Because, clearly, the characters in this film didn’t make the worst film of all time. Because they didn’t finish the film. You can’t judge a film, even a fictitious one, on the basis of an incomplete rough cut. That nobody has seen. In the tiny, tiny amount of information that we are given about the fake film, there is no suggestion about its quality, no clue that it’s ‘the worst film of all time’ (apart from the incongruous-yet-unfunny presence of space monkeys in a romcom). Even in a fictional world, ‘the worst film of all time’ is an epithet that can only be bestowed on, well, a film. And there’s no film here. We’re not shown any of it, we’re not shown anyone making it, we’re given only a handful of vague references to its content - and in the end it doesn’t exist.
And therein lies the supreme irony here and the terrible danger which other films about film-making have generally avoided. This movie is peppered with comments about how useless everything going into this film is: how the script is shite, the director hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing, the actors are wooden, the whole production is shoddy beyond belief, an embarrassment to those who worked on it etcetera etcetera etcetera. If you don’t want to sit through the whole 79 minutes (understandable), most of these comments are collected in the trailer. And pretty much all of them accurately describe the real Just for the Record. The characters are talking about the fake film but what they’re actually describing is the real film. “I’ve been watching the film they’ve been making - and it’s absolute fucking shit,” observes Fairbrass/Wickes. “It’s got no story, it makes no sense, and it’s the same thing all the time.” Never has a truer word been spoken. (Actually, in the film it is revealed that what Wickes has watched are the dailies, multiple takes of the same scene, but he is so ignorant of the film-making process that he thinks he’s seeing part of the finished movie. That gets perilously close to being a funny joke but sadly ends up as just another ashtray.) It is always a bad idea to give your characters lines about something awful which can be applied by critics to the movie in question. To stick them into your trailer is suicidal, but perhaps by then the people involved realised that they had a turd on their hands and thought: what the hell? So who is responsible for this mess, this dog’s dinner of a film? And let’s be fair, it’s not the worst film of all time - although bizarrely Rik Mayall was in that picture too... Although some of the acting is poor (some of which may be the actors, some of which may actually be good actors struggling with one-dimensional characters) and although the director’s decision to shoot a documentary in a non-documentary style is bizarre, the root cause of all the problems is, of course, the script. All the fundamental flaws - the lack of likeable characters, the lack of interaction and character relationships, the lack of any stuff about the actual film, the lack of a narrative structure, the lack of an ending - they can all be blamed wholly or in part on the script. Three people take credit on-screen for this: screenplay by Phillip Barron and Ben Shillito, with additional material by Steve Lawson (although only Barron and Shillito are named in the credit block on the DVD sleeve). One might think that the film’s failure is a result of three writers trying to pull it in different directions, maybe. But all the posters and trailers give a solo writing credit to Phillip Barron so I believe that he is the principal author. And this belief is backed up by Barron’s blog on which he said: “Obviously, I can’t take any credit for anything you liked in the film - that privilege is reserved for either director, Steve Lawson, or the specific performers; but on the off-chance the bit you liked was in some way connected to the script I wrote - I’ll bask in that little glow. “That’s not to say the happenings on screen bear little or no resemblance to the script - far from it. In fact, I’d say 90 odd percent of what’s there comes from my script - but obviously anything you write is made or killed by the performances, the editing, the direction … a whole myriad of stuff.” An acknowledgement of Lawson there but, interestingly, nowhere on his numerous blog posts does he mention Shillito’s involvement. Still: “90 odd percent of what’s there comes from my script.” And it was when I found Phillip Barron was one of the writers on a gut-wrenchingly shoddy and unfunny series called The Wrong Door and popped up on a TV discussion board to defend himself and the show after I started a thread on it. He also wrote for a thing called Shoot the Writers which wasn’t even as good as a bad BBC3 show; it was tucked away on ITV late night in 2005 and was probably the worst comedy show I’ve ever seen in my life. It was not only a non-stop barrage of unfunny, unoriginal sketches written by amateur wannabe writers, it was also shot for about five pounds, apparently using drama students as the cast and media production students as the crew. It just beggared belief. A blank screen would have been more entertaining. Now, let me pause here to be fair to Phillip Barron (who will no doubt be reading this at some point and probably e-mail me or post in my guestbook). He is making a living as (to use the title of his blog) a jobbing scriptwriter. That’s a goal that many people strive for and he has achieved it. Obviously, like any pro scriptwriter, much of his work is on projects which never see the light of day. No shame in that, it’s how the film and TV industries work. Film production is a zero sum equation: anything that gets made prevents something else getting made. So it is all the unmade stuff that keep writers off the dole queue. Although frankly Barron spends so much time writing his blog that you do wonder when he has time to write any scripts. Although most of his work is ‘comedy’ he has a few other genre credits: script editor on British vampire feature Night Junkies, co-writer of obscure Troma pick-up The Evolved and a ‘story’ credit for the Sothcott-produced Exposé (yes, it’s a remake but a very loose one). He's not credited n the website or the trailer but he did do an early draft of the script.. Here’s the thing. On the evidence of his sketches for The Wrong Door and Shoot the Writers (the former I saw at the time, the latter are on his website) and this film, I see no evidence that Phillip Barron has the slightest idea how to write comedy. And yet, his blog is full of advice for wannabe writers about how to write comedy. The man drones on and on about his projects and his achievements without a hint of irony. If he acknowledged, as many full-time writers do, that the way to make a career in this field is to be able to produce the crap that producers ask for, on time and to specification, and leave your artistic pretentions on the coat-stand, then I’d say fair dos to the bloke. But it is clear from his blog (and from his posts on the Wrong Door discussion thread which I started) that he really, honestly believes that what he writes is funny. That it’s good. That’s he’s a good writer. The man is deluded. He actually is Flynn Beatty. And that - much more than anything in Just for the Record - actually is pretty funny.
Perhaps I’m being unfair to Barron, maybe he wrote a great script that Shillito and Lawson then buggered up, but that seems unlikely. He’s happy to claim ownership of ‘90 odd per cent’ of the film and it’s 90 odd per cent unfunny crap. It’s not original in any way; everything in this film has been done already and done a lot better. It thinks it’s funny but it’s not, it thinks it’s clever but it’s not and, reading Phillip Barron’s blog, he obviously thinks it’s clever and funny - but it’s not. If he thought his precious script had been ruined, I’m sure he’d have something to say about it. And he hasn’t. Which is telling in itself. Pretty much every scriptwriter I know has some horror story of how his or her work has been bastardised and ruined by directors or producers sticking their oar in, but Barron seems to be entirely happy with this film and with his TV sketch work. He’s living in a fantasy, Flynnbeatty world. Possibly with his mum, I don’t know. What I believe happened, from my researches, is that Barron wrote a crap, unfunny script but Lawson thought it had potential and brought in Shillito to do a rewrite. Which merely turned it into a different crap, unfunny script with more credited authors. Frankly, Shillito was on a hiding to nothing there. Nothing short of mahjor root canal surgery was ever going to rescue this toothache of a screenplay. Lawson and Shillito went on to work with Sothcott and other interested parties on Dead Cert. Barron didn't. While we’re here, how does Barron’s ‘90 odd per cent’ claim square with the possibility of improvisation? Pertwee reckons (in a Youtube interview) that the film was about half-and-half scripted/improvised (which sounds like an exaggeration). Berkoff seems to have improvised his old folks’ home scenes though and I’ve seen a clip (somewhere in the various Youtube videos I’ve watched) of Berkoff improvising desperately in the record shop and Manookian responding blankly, clearly struggling to find anything interesting to say. So who knows? Who knows? Good luck to Phillip Barron, I say. I hope one day he learns how to write stuff which not only sells but is actually entertaining. Maybe he should spend less time writing about how to write comedy and more time learning some of the basics of scriptwriting, like having characters we care about doing something we know about with some sort of resolution at the end. Who else is involved with this waste of good plastic? Glamour model Kitty Lea plays a nurse in the old people’s home. Barry Austin, reputedly Britain’s fattest man, plays a fighter in Pertwee’s dojo (yet another ashtray). We can also spot Joe Egan (Jack Said, Dead Cert), Jamie Foreman (Sleepy Hollow, The Football Factory, Inkheart), Stuart Furlong (Jack Said, Dead Cert), Amii Grove (Dead Cert), Jenna Harrison (Dinotopia), Page 3 stunna Tracy Kirby, Gil Kolirin (Return to the House on Haunted Hill, Wrong Turn 3), Jade Goody’s ex Jack Tweed(!), Allen Lawson (Jack Said, Dead Cert), Danny Midwinter (From Hell, Dinotopia, Rise of the Footsoldier, Anacondas 4, Dead Cert), dancer Corinne Mitchell (Dead Cert), Pete Morgan (A Day of Violence, Kung Fu Flid, Dead Cert), Patrick Naughton (Jack Said), Nick Onsloe (Jack Said, Cut, Dead Cert), Lucinda Rhodes-Flattery (Cavegirl, Dream Team, Dead Cert), Ellie Stewart (Dead Cert) and Isabelle Defaut who, astoundingly, has managed to appear in several films without any of them being Jack Said, Dead Cert, Doghouse, Devil’s Playground, the remake of Exposé, The Football Factory or Rise of the bloody Footsoldier.
First AD Dan Mumford has pulled similar duties on Doghouse, Dead Cert, Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures. It’s difficult to see what visual effects there are in the film but apparently they were supervised by Jason de Vyea (Exposé remake, Dead Cert). Pippa Woods (The Hunt for Gollum, Doghouse, The Reeds, Exposé remake, Harry Potter 8, John Carter of Mars) handled the make-up and Alice Woodward (Doghouse, Jack Said, Dead Cert) oversaw the costume department. Editor Will Gilbey not only cut Rise of the Footsoldier (and Doghouse) he also appeared in it and co-wrote it, but then it was directed by his brother. And apparently he’s the great-grandson of Nigel Bruce! There is - allegedly - an early cut of the film which runs an agonising two and a half hours... Most of these people undoubtedly did their best, but the film was so fundamentally flawed from the start that good costumes or cinematography or supporting actors were never going to make any difference. And there, my friends, the review would normally end. It’s been another very long one, but we’ve said everything there is to say about this rubbish movie. What we haven’t discussed is the marketing - and that’s a fascinating thing in itself. The sleeve is double-sided. One side has black and white headshots of Mayall, Fairbrass, Dyer, Murray and Silvstedt in character and the ‘They made the worst film...’ copyline. The back of this sleeve has a colour photo of Dyer and little photos of Pertwee, Terry and Mayall-with-Salmon. Plus a review quote: “Hip and hilarious with an impressive star cast ... comedy gold!” - Allan Bryce, DVD and Blu-Ray World Ah yes, Allan Bryce, a man of sound and reliable judgement who has certainly never ever filled his magazines with reviews cut and pasted off the internet. If he says it’s comedy gold, it must be. Unless somebody else said it on a review website first... But let’s consider the blurb on the back of the sleeve, before we turn it over, for both sleeve designs have the same text: Danny Dyer (The Football Factory, The Business), Craig Fairbrass (Rise of the Footsoldier, The Bank Job), Sean Pertwee (Dog Soldiers, Doomsday), Phil Davis (Dead Man Running), Steven Berkoff (The Krays) and Billy Murray (Rise of the Footsoldier) come together as one of the greatest British casts in recent memory. Two years ago, persuaded by suave producer Derek LeFarge (Dyer) to fund a low budget feature film with a location to die for, psychotic local gangster Malcolm Mental Fists' Wickes (Fairbrass) stepped into a world of chaos and anarchy. Now as the oddball group are rounded up to discover exactly what went wrong, it's a barrage of threats, accusations, recriminations, back-stabbing, head-butting and insult throwing - all in a days work for a crew that will be lucky to escape with their reputations intact! We’ll gloss over the missing apostrophes. We’ll note in passing that Dyer’s character’s surname is very clearly shown on-screen as ‘La Farge’ not ‘LeFarge’. But what do we really notice most of all about this summary of the film?
Now turn over the sleeve - very, very carefully - to see the one that was actually put in the case facing outwards, the one that was looking out from the shelves of Morrisons. No quote from Allan Bryce, no mention of ‘worst film...’. The copyline here is: ‘Get in on the ACTION... try not to get CUT!’ And on the back: ‘For this mob, the business is tough!!!’ Can you see how the print-out label style used for the title on the other side, and in all advance posters, and indeed on screen, has been replaced with a riveted-metal-sheets font and that the F has actually been turned into a pistol! (There are precisely no pistols in Just for the Record although there is one headbutt.) And while that’s a photo of Craig Fairbrass as Malcolm ‘Mental Fists’ Wickes, that photo of Danny Dyer certainly isn’t from this film. There’s another, full-length shot of Dyer on the back, again looking like a gangster geezer (or maybe just like Danny Dyer) rather than the pencil-moustached, Clark Gable lookalike which he plays in this film. The role he took specifically to show people that Danny Dyer can play characters other than Cockney geezer gangsters. And what do Metrodome stick on the sleeve? A photo of Dyer looking like a Cockney geezer gangster, a geezer gangster-style font, some geezer gangster-type copylines, some badly punctuated text that implies geezerness and gangstericity. And a completely irrelevant London skyline just to emphasise that this particular gangster picture is set in Laandaan, innit. (It’s actually set in Croydon, a town which once boasted the UK’s largest second-hand record shop.) We’ve all seen films misrepresented by distributors before but Just for the Record sets a new British and Commonwealth record for outright deceit in video marketing In fact, I feel that I should quote the estimable Mr Fairbrass himself from his own website:. Just for the Record Craig would like to offer his sincere apologies to anyone who bought this film and thouht it was a London gangster thriller..its a comedy about low budget film making and I joint the project as an actor to be involved with other respected actors in a trendy comedy. The sleeve is totally misleading..its a shame because its damaging and I always want to treat my fans with total respect. please dont judge DEVILS PLAYGROUND or DEAD CERT..the same way. Thanks Craig Let’s look at what has happened here. Metrodome has acquired the UK rights to this film on the basis of a trailer and a frankly amazing cast list. They have agreed to give it a small theatrical release and then a push on DVD but they have asked for complete freedom in marketing. The film-makers, undoubtedly aware of what a stinker they have on their hands, have been happy to take the money and run. Then Metrodome have taken a look at the finished movie and realised that they have bought a pig in a poke. It’s awful. It’s a self-indulgent, unfunny piece of crap with no story and a bunch of cardboard characters varying from despicable to dull. In the word of that noted gentleman of culture Mr Malcolm MF Wickes: “It’s absolute fucking shit. It’s got no story, it makes no sense, and it’s the same thing all the time.”
But what about the DVD? No-one will buy it on the recommendation of reviewers because any reviewers will simply echo the words of young Mr Wickes there. No-one will buy it on word-of-mouth recommendation from their mates. And the number of people who pick it up and buy it out of curiosity will be tiny if it is advertised as a spoof documentary about low-budget film-making. It’s not a sequel or a remake or based on an old cartoon. It doesn’t have fabulous special effects or a name director. The one and only exploitable angle is the amazing cast., especially Danny Dyer who is, let’s face it, Mr Goldenballs right now as far as low-budget British DTV films go. But what genre is Danny Dyer associated with? Not comedy that’s for sure (despite Doghouse). No, he plays hard-as-nails geezer gangsters in films about East End, wide boy, didn’t-you-kill-my-brother geezer gangsters and gangster geezers. Innit. And so someone at Metrodome said ah fuck it, let’s try and con people into thinking it’s a gangster film. We know they’ll hate it whatever they’re expecting so if they’re going to be disappointed that it’s shit, they might as well also be disappointed that it’s not even the film that the sleeve promises. One final note, still on the sleeve. You will note that it is black, white and red. Both versions. And that is because there seems to be some sort of EU directive that all Danny Dyer films must be released with DVD sleeves that are black, white and red. Or at the most have a little dark sepia. Dead Man Running, The Other Half, City Rats, Goodbye Charlie Bright, Jack Said, Borstal Boy, Malice in Wonderland, The Last Seven, All in the Game, The Football Factory. Only Outlaw, Pimp and Doghouse display any colour other than red. Maybe it doesn’t apply to films with one-word titles? No, that’s no good - look at Severance and Straightheads. It’s extraordinary, it really is. Have all these sleeves been designed by the same person? As for the disc, there are no extras, not even a trailer, although it’s easy to find it on Youtube. There was an earlier trailer which was removed from Youtube that had most of the same clips but completely different music, which might be why it disappeared (alng with the film’s website of which there remains not a trace, not in Google cache, not at wayback.org, nowhere). Also on Youtube, if you can be bothered to search around, are dull three-minute on-set interviews with most of the cast, two ‘deleted scenes’ totalling 48 seconds, a ten-minute AFM promo and a 30-second clip of Mayall in character which might be from a teaser trailer. Anyway, that’s Just for the Record. It’s the ultimate recursive mockumentary. It’s a film that is ostensibly about an utterly shit film called Just for the Record, cack-handedly made from a dreadful script, which actually is an utterly shit film called Just for the Record, cack-handedly made from a dreadful script. And it’s taken me more than 8,000 words to tell you that. If this review has been a chore to get through, consider that I have at least saved you from watching the damn movie. Once again I never set out to write such an epic review but it all seemed to run away from me. There is so much to be said about this film, almost none of it positive. I think we must consider it a blip on the careers of Dyer, Fairbrass, McAllister, Murray, Sothcott, Salmon, Berkoff and most of the others. Let’s instead look forward to Dead Cert and Devil’s Playground and all the other juicy stuff coming up from this gang. MJS rating: D Go back to Part 1 of the review | ||
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So what have we dealt with so far? The unsympathetic characters, the ‘mixed’ acting, the absence of actual fake film clips, the almost complete absence of fake behind-the-scenes footage, the inability of the director to make it look like a real documentary - and of course, the aching void of humourlessness.
This is a film about people we don’t like trying to do something we don’t care about and don’t know about who then stop before they’ve finished anyway. 
Barron’s blog, while googling for background information on 
It looks likely, from the last-minute addition of Ben Shillito to the writing credit (and Barron’s non-acknowledgement of same) that Shillito was brought in to sort out the problems evident in Barron’s script. Although why those weren’t apparent before anyone filmed this thing isn’t clear. Shillito also gets a co-producer credit which indicates a level of involvement more than just script-polishing.
James Friend was the cinematographer, adding to a long CV that includes 
That’s right, there’s no indication that it’s a mockumentary, or even a comedy. We might also note that Fairbrass’ psycho gangster is implied to be a major character when in fact he doesn’t even appear until one hour into the film. It’s almost like they want people to think this is some sort of gangster picture.
So: damage control. How can Metrodome minimise their losses on this thing? Well, the first thing to do is to reduce the ‘domestic theatrical release’ to an absolute minimum. There were 21 unadvertised, midday, midweek screenings in five cinemas in five small towns: Altrincham, Burnley, Leamington Spa, Stroud and Torbay. It’s quite possible that no-one saw it at all except for Phillip Barron and his three mates.