This is England

This is England, British director Shane Meadows' latest film is one of the best films that I've seen in years.

The film tells the rite of passage story of twelve year-old Shaun's holiday off school and relationship with a group of local skinheads.

Oh my God! Skins. Bovver boots. Gorgeous New Romantic teenagers. And  a Jamaican skanker caught between deciding whether he should follow the racist crowd or assert himself.

Oh my God! Sean's loss and urban Nazism's gain is a generation of fatherless men seeking some kind of new nirvana in tin-pot Oi and local tyranny of the estate.

I saw the film on a flight and was the guy without the eyepatches sniffing in Row 12.

First was the fatherless-ness - something I know from personal experience. Then, there was England. England then. Subways. The color of your boots. Eyeliner. Fucked up local tin-pot dictators. And a cynicism and innocent dunder-head dysfunction that never let truth out.  An age of  knee-jerk directionless.

Then there is England now. Gorgeous Paris Hilton-ness. Nu everything. Poles in Middlesbrough. Simon Cowell. Isolated pockets of old England.  New  pockets of Al-Quaeda.

Trash pop culture may at times be shite: our century's version of the disco diva-dom we despised back in 1977. But at least, all the alienation and post-industrial detritus appears to have slipped away.

Today, England may be more like Malibu beach mashed with wall-to-wall beige. We may be tripping on consolidated debt, New Look heels and snazz-tastic dayglo pendants. But at least that sense of dead-end-ness seems to have passed.

Maybe that's why I cried.