Layer Cake

In my flat, between three of us, we have somewhere in the region of about 400 DVDs. With such a large selection, you’d think that we’d be able to find something to watch with relative ease.
Unfortunately, when it comes time to make a decision, this is how conversations often go:

“Film?”

“Go for it”

“What do you fancy?”

“Don’t mind, anything”

“How about X?”

“Nah”

“OK, how about Y?”

“Nah, saw that too recently”

“What about Z?”

“Not sure I’m in the mood for that.”

This conversation can go on for some time and often results in nothing being chosen.

Fortunately this wasn’t the case on Saturday morning and the number of titles shouted out by my brother was mercifully short once we both spotted Layer Cake, a film I haven’t seen for a couple of years.

Layer Cake is an impossibly cool film. It actually made me want to become a cocaine dealer. Well, not really, but they do a great job of glamorising the underworld. In fact I find it quite remarkable that people complained that Trainspotting might make young people think drug taking was cool (because overdosing in a Glaswegian slum flat is my idea of awesome!), yet, to my knowledge, no one made a peep about this film.

As far as I can tell, the message is that if you deal in enormous amounts of drugs, you become stinkingly rich, intelligent, charming, stylish, get to enjoy all sorts of crazy hijinks and then shag Sienna Miller. OK, so your white suit might get ruined when you get shot at your local golf course, but I think it’s a small price to pay when you consider the upside.

Either way, I love this flick. While I usually bemoan the fact that we only seem to make three types of film in this country (Northern working class misery, Richard Curtis/Hugh Grant idyllic posh England and the gangster movie), this is a really enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. It’s well written, well directed, well cast and well acted. Not much more you can say about a film than that.

So I won’t.