Bullet BoyBy Megan Duffy 13D

Brief Description

Ricky (played by Ashley Walters, aka So Solid Crew's Asher D) is just out of a young offenders' institute, heading home to Hackney and determined to go straight. Instead, he heads straight for trouble when he becomes involved in a street confrontation, siding with his best friend Wisdom (Leon Black) against a local rude boy. The trouble escalates into a series of tit for tat incidents that threaten to spiral out of control. Ricky's 12-year-old brother Curtis (Luke Fraser), hero-worships Ricky, though he appears smart enough to know he doesn't want to follow his example. Yet, despite the stern warnings from his mother (Claire Perkins) and support from her friends in the community, might Ricky's bad boy allure be too attractive for Curtis to resist?

Overview

Bullet Boy was released in 2004, the films written by Saul Dibb and Catherine Johnson and it’s directed by Saul Dibb. The stars who play in this film are Ashley Walters and Leon Black. The film genre is Drama which has reflects on themes which are social realism, youth culture, prison, church, gangster, sex scene, status and ghetto. This links in with the location which is set in Hackney, London.

Companies

• Production Companies: BBC Films, UK Film Council and Shine.

• Verve Pictures, who handled the release of Bullet Boy, recognised that the film had wider appeal. Its unique selling point was that the cast included Ashley Walters - whose own life in many ways mirrored that of the film’s main character. With the help of lottery money from the UK Film Council’s Printing and Advertising fund, Verve were able to give Bullet Boy a much wider distribution.

• Distributors: 21st Century Pictures, Arkles Entertainment, Image-Entertainment, Verve Pictures, Warner Bros Entertainment Finland OY.

How The British Are Represented

Delinquent

Violent

vengeful

volatile

The British (mainly the younger generation) are depicted as troubled youths, set against a backdrop of sex, drugs, slang, gratuitous violence and wicked tunes. By including these themes which explore the adult world, the film was given a certificate provided the treatment is appropriate to 15 year olds.

Troubled

Deprived

Lost

Important Characters through whom this representation is achieved.

19-year-old Ricky is played by Ashley Walters, a member of the notorious rap group So Solid Crew. In the film Ricky has completed a year in jail for stabbing a man in an affray, interestingly Walters himself served seven months for gun possession. But though Ricky tries to end the circle of violence, he's hopelessly in thrall to this macho culture.

Curtis: His emergence from the darkness of the car's boot in which he's locked is a metaphor for the possibility of his own release from a society and set of false values in which he's trapped. The film does see possibilities in the restoration of positive male role models and the rejection of a gun culture.

Wisdom welcomes Ricky back into the macho world by restoring to him his old gun.

Their mum Beverley understands this dilemma better than anyone - she tries to hold the family together but is powerless to control what her boys do, where they go, and who with.

Important Scenes in which this representation is achieved

An environment where pride and reputation are everything an element that did not have to deal daily with the reality of modern gangsterism expressed in Bullet Boy.

The estate presented to us in Bullet Boy is at the least a ghetto, where white faces are few and far between, and at the most a modern ‘colony’ of a suburban ‘empire’, where all the officials, doctors, and police are white, and constantly clearing up after ‘degenerate natives’ of that colony.

Important Quotes and Keywords

Taglines• Pray... They may be your last words...

• You only get one shot at life.

.

Historical SignificanceWith the ASBO legislation introduced in 2002, youths, black youths in particular, have attained such low status within society with factors such as drug abuse and educational low-achievers attached to their identity, leading to such headlines as “Britain a nation of yobs” . From early days, ‘Blacks’ have been represented as criminals, and now in the 21st century, to an extent, they still are, in films such as ‘Bulletboy’ and ‘Kidulthood’ this portrayal continues. Presenting the black youths as uneducated, prone to crime, and the usual suspect, leading the audience to predict the characteristics of black characters.

‘What I wanted was an innocent’s point of view on an adult world’. Dibbs

If you look around the country the issue of people with guns goes across all races. It’s got much more to do with people who feel excluded, or haven’t got much vested interest in society. The people who get involved in this kind of thing feel that they haven’t got that much to lose. It’s about people in a particular situation who have an uncertain and limited number of choices in their lives.

Social Implications

Language:Slang and patois, e.g. ‘Stupidness,innit, bredren, sometink’, are spoken throughout the film to emphasise authenticity/credibility of the dialogue, even at the risk of offering the ‘outsider’ a slightly stereotyped view of ‘black youth’.

What we’ve tried to do is humanise the issue, to say this is happening to ordinary people. My feeling is that the story is a universal one. It’s not a black story, it’s a story with black people in it. - Dibbs

Target audience and reactionsThe set audience for this particular film would be teenagers and young adults, and notsingling a particular race .

REACTION: Within the first six months of its release, Bullet Boy had grossed £450,000, a substantial sum for a low-budget UK film, at the UK box office. Most of this money had been made at carefully selected urban multiplex cinemas rather than the art house cinemas Bullet Boy had originally been destined for.

They've given their low-budget movie a sense of authenticity. The cast, a mixture of professionals and non-professionals, has contributed not merely through their response to Dibb's direction but also in partially improvising their scenes. They are all fine, especially Luke Fraser. We are not only viewing the world from his perspective, but we are also looking into his puzzled and puzzling mind through his big, sad, expressive eyes.

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