Yay! I ordered a couple of DVDs the other day and they just arrived - 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', and the follow up 'Snatch' - both from filmmaker Guy Ritchie. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels actually won Guy Ritchie a well-deserved first in the 'Best New Filmmaker' category at the 1999 MTV Movie Awards. I've never actually watched Snatch, so it will be interesting to see if it comes even close to the level of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - if it's anything like it, then it's gonna be a goodie for sure. Back in Hamilton (New Zealand) when I was flatting with Rob & co. we had a copy of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels which we watched regularly - so much so that we'd often spit out lines from the movie and mimic the various heavy cockney accents if the situation warranted it. There's some classic one-liners:
"If the milk turns out to be sour, I ain't the kinda pussy to drink it."
Some of the more memorable lines are actually from one of the supporting characters, Rory Breaker, mainly because his accent and his attitude are so extreme.
If you hold back anything, I'll kill ya. If you bend the truth or I think you're bending the truth, I'll kill ya. If you forget anything I'll kill ya. In fact, you're gonna have to work very hard to stay alive, Nick. Now do you understand everything I've said? Because if you don't, I'll kill ya.
In one part the cockney slang is so full-on that there are sub-titles to translate a few of the more extreme terms (intended as tongue-in-cheek humor, but helpful all the same if you're not a native speaker) - for example, when a barman at a 'Samoan pub' is talking about, you guessed it, Rory Breaker:
Rory? Yeah I know Rory. He's not to be underestimated, you've got to look past the hair and the cute, cuddly thing - it's all a deceptive facade. A few nights ago Rory's Roger iron's rusted, so he's gone to the local battle-cruiser to catch the end of his footer. Nobody is watching the custard so he turns the channel over.
A fat man's north opens and he wanders over and turns the Liza over. "Now fuck off and watch it somewhere else."
Rory knows claret is imminent, but he doesn't want to miss the end of the game, so, calm as a coma, he stands and picks up a fire extinguisher and he walks straight past the jam rolls who are ready for action, and he plonks it outside the entrance. He then orders an Aristotle of the most ping pong tiddly in the nuclear sub and switches back to his footer.
"That's fucking it!"' says the guy.
"That's fucking what?" says Rory. Rory gobs out a mouthful of booze covering fatty, he then flicks a flaming match into his bird's nest and the man's lit up like a leaky gas pipe. Rory, unfazed, turned back to his game. His team won too. Four-nil.
If you're familiar with the movie you'll already be smiling and nodding - there are so many great lines in that movie I could go on quoting here for pages. There's a heap of strong supporting characters in this movie all the way through it, which just make it that much better. It is seriously one of the best movies I've seen, full of brilliantly unexpected twists and turns and some absolutely hilarious scenes, all based in London's gangland East End. I can't wait to watch it again.
