LE DONK AND SCOR-ZAY-ZEE
Staff Review
LE DONK AND SCOR-ZAY-ZEE is a musical mockumentary that will very likely bring comparisons with THIS IS SPINAL TAP, but it probably has a lot more in common with the work of Armando Iannucci and Ricky Gervais’s The Office. This is thanks in no small part to the performance of Paddy Considine. Considine is often referred to as the British De Niro, and if he is De Niro then his ‘Scor-Zay-Zee’ is definitely Shane Meadows.
One of the UK’s most prolific filmmakers, Meadows teams up with Considine for the first time since the brilliant revenge thriller DEAD MAN’S SHOES, to produce LE DONK: the first of his production company’s Five Day Features (an initiative at giving young filmmakers an outlet for their films, the only rule being that they “have to be made in just five days”).
In this film, Meadows plays himself as part of a documentary crew following Considine’s Le Donk (a washed up roadie whose real name is Nicholas and whose ex-girlfriend is about to give birth to their baby) as he tries to get his protege Scor-zay-zee (imagine a fat, Northern Eminem) a gig supporting the ‘Arctic Monkeys’, simultaneously poking fun at the music world and the fascination of today’s obsession with fly-on-the-wall documentaries.
Paddy Considine is normally associated with playing slightly unhinged psychopaths but displayed a talent for comedy in HOT FUZZ, and with Le Donk, in an almost entirely improvised performance, he has created a comedy character in the same vein as Alan Partridge, simultaneously eliciting cringe-worthy embarrassment, sympathy and laughs.
This is seriously low-budget filmmaking (the entire shoot cost just £30,000), but it shows that sometimes all you need is a good idea as it manages to pack more laughs into its short 68 minute runtime than many of the big budget Hollywood rom-coms or so-called spoofs like EPIC MOVIE.
Dallas King, General Manager, The Belmont
