Lady Godiva (2008) User Reviews

So bad it's actually very entertaining!

[colinmetcalfe · 4/10 · 1 April 2011]

Oh gosh where to start. I saw Miss Jewson being interviewed on Chris Jones' web site where she spoke about this film. Interested I logged on here to look at some reviews and was shocked at the viciousness of the comments (some of them personal, which reflect more on the reviewers than the reviewed!). Now intrigued I bought a copy off amazon and sat down with the 'misses' to watch it.

Well I have to say - yes it is a stinker, but it reminded me of a TV adaptation of one of Jilly Cooper's novels 'Riders' which was also awful but interestingly so awful people liked it! It was unintentionally hilarious and this is in the same category.

Watching it is like sucking on a lemon and trying not to wince. It is full of cringingley clichéd moments that you find yourself looking away from and feeling embarrassed.

But hey this site does not need another person slagging this film off so hats off Miss Jewson for getting a feature made, and on that patronising note I think I'll finish the review. Except to say in years to come I'm sure the director will have a laugh at her own expense and think: 'what was I doing?'

If this lasts more that a week at cinemas i will be VERY SURPRISED...

[baileyjason39 · 2/10 · 23 January 2008]

After winning tickets to the premiere on local radio, I was looking forward to the event, but after reading up on the film's history was sceptical about the film.

The plot, while it touches on the original story, sends you off course all the time with poor direction, and what to me, was obviously at best a pretty poor script. The sub-plots tried to grab your attention, but in reality only increased your eagerness for the film to grind to a blundering halt. I don't want to be too harsh on the director, and whilst she could of perhaps done better, the "hollyoaks" style actors are mostly to blame. The lead male (matthew chambers) was no where near strong enough for the part, and, an already "fake" uninteresting side plot involving prince William (matthew Turpin), was made worse by the "prince's" acting. At times it looked like he was reading off an auto cue for direction. The film then, I would only recommend to die hard lady Godiva fans or girls/guys on a awful blind date, as their is a perfectly acceptable excuse for leaving early. Dire! I don't normally comment on film's but I usually check reviews before going and only see "good" ones, so as no one had commented I thought it was only my duty to try and save some peeps some money.

I'll give it a 2/10 as I saw a semi naked young lady riding into the premiere on horseback...

Thanks for reading, Jason

My poor city reduced to this...

[oxford_mmmm · 1/10 · 19 August 2008]

'I've bought a new film' my girlfriend beamed ' and it was only £3!'

'Oh, cool i said, picking up the case' Pink letters a ginger on the cover, lucky it wasn't made out of glass or it would have shattered on impact as I dropped it.

'Um, you appear to have bought the film made by that jumped up girl who's always in the newspaper' I said...

There was a moments pause, in which she had plenty of time to shout 'nah only kidding, it's actually the Lost Boys, I switched the covers!'

Instead she said 'But £3...'

'What's going on?' I said about 20 minutes in, we'd seen a nice but cheaply made, with some woeful sound effects flashback sequence, which basically killed any hope of a final pay off, as you already got to see her ride naked although it could have been mistaken for an ironing board. A few bits about a bloke who was a 'bad boy' and a lot of mixed up plots involving school children, badly dressed women and dead brothers...oh and lots and lots of cheesy music. 'I'm not sure' my girlfriend said 'but I'm sure it'll make sense and it was £3'

I wish she'd stop using that as an excuse.

What seemed like a lifetime passed, but it was actually only half an hour, in which we'd seen some Japanese men strip a girl whines a lot (take your pick from any of the female cast) and lots of people acting, talking and dressing like it was 1955...oh and a slow mo horse ride...in black and white...to Enrique Iglesias...without irony. 'What's going on?' my girlfriend said 'I'm none the wiser' I said 'but I feel like crying, for all the wrong reasons' An old lady using a Zimmer frame doddered past my window at the slowest speed ever recorded; even she was having more fun than we were.

In the end, not much happens the big naked ride never really materialises; it looks like it's about to…then just turns into something that looks like a documentary shot by 17 year olds who've got their mums to play members of the crowd. A fake Prince William turns up, fluffs some line, but it was in keeping with the rest of the acting so nobody really notices and the ironing board and the bad boy, who clearly hasn't done anything bad except forget to send a birthday card get together – hurrah you should say

We both could have cried, not at the appalling script/acting/Directing/ (I would say delete where applicable, but they all are) but that it cost £3…still it looks like by our single purchase they recovered all their budget.

My verdict – Don't watch this film, instead go out, find a ginger person a rocking horse and some mums, borrow your dads handy cam and make your own version, it'll be a fun way to spend a couple of hours

What on Earth Went Wrong Here?

[Dipsy-8 · 1/10 · 7 April 2009]

OK, I'm not one for cheap shots or gratuitous personal attacks BUT I will call it how I see it: Lady Godiva is a disaster and a depressing waste of resources. It may not be the worst film ever made, but it's certainly the worst British romantic comedy ever made, beating the hateful Love Actually into a distant second place - which I guess is some kind of achievement.

So how did this happen? Firstly, the director had VERY little experience and apparently little to no interest in the 90-degree rule or continuity in general. Godiva is a mess of weird blocking and odd cuts throughout. And not in a good way. The editing feels like a salvage job which doesn't work. Secondly, and despite her inexperience, I believe the director was very badly served by some of her crew. £1.4 million in the right hands can go a LONG way, and it seems clear that some of the people involved in Godiva were not giving of their best.

Godiva feels cheap - the school and "art factory" with suspiciously few kids, the Prince William lookalike and Queen cover version on the soundtrack, the rubbish attempt at CNN-style graphics.

One thing director Vicky Jewson can fully take the blame for is Godiva's pervasive upper- class snobbery. It's there in the fawning over Prince William (woodenly played by a lookalike who unlike the real Wills isn't going bald). The snobbery is also present in the extraordinary character of Michael's 'unsuitable' girlfriend Veronica, a middle class woman who drinks martini instead of sherry and thinks that letting a horse run around the kitchen is "unhygenic" (she's got a point). Tellingly, Michael (Matthew Chambers) twice disparages Jemima's Mini. The Mini factory in Oxford has been a fixture of Oxford's economy for years, but this fact is either unknown to Jewson (likely) or ignored by her as she fetishises more upper class aspects of the city.

Over and above these flaws however is the damning fact that Lady Godiva is meaningless and unfunny from start to finish. Scenes start and finish at random points, dialogue is either completely inconsequential or totally explanatory.

Worst scene: The business meeting. Somehow, thorough a "hilarious" sequence of accidents, Michael and his business partner are shirtless when 2 Japanese businessmen enter. The businessmen, having no understanding of western culture or basic common sense then proceed to strip off. Oh, the hilarity! Then - get this! -Michael's secretary takes her blouse off! And the Japanese businessman whip out cameras and start taking pictures of her! It's like the one racist urban myth Sofia Coppola couldn't cram into Lost In Translation crossed with a '70's sitcom, only worse.

Other people on this board have nominated many other 'lowpoints' in the film. They're all right. Everything sucks.

And now, just to be fair, I must admit that over the course of the film I actually smiled once. It was when Matthew Chambers copies the "I'm watching you" gesture Robert De Niro does in Meet the Parents. God knows why I found that funny, it may have been hysteria induced by the extreme rubishness of what I was witnessing. After that my brain just shut down under the onslaught of ineptitude and wrongness.

So Bad It's Offensive! It stinks of the first thing to enter the mind of a self-important wannabe in her own imaginary world

[alex2070 · 1/10 · 1 March 2008]

Just abysmal. All of it. Unprofessional, poor excuse with no redeeming features, made by a talentless hack who is so naive about the industry and yet so pretentious - the two always go together. No surprise she had to raise the money herself - there is not a professional in the world would give her a penny, or do anything other than laugh and cringe at her every attempt to sound like a director who follows Orson Welles. She probably enjoys pretending, but you wonder when she goes out in public where is her self-awareness for herself and her material. Her naivety and lack of personality shine through her every word.

The movie itself doesn't even bare thinking about. It aims to be one of those 'Let's get the show on' movies, where it's all leading up to this one performance. If you can't get the climax right with this kind of thing, then you have no movie. The climax, which in this case culminates in the protagonist baring all and riding naked on a horse (as goes the legend of Lady Godiva of Coventry), could have been handled in one of two ways. It could have been done tastefully and elegantly which is probably how this pompous director would have like it to be. Or it could have been done with an element of sex appeal to it, which doesn't even necessarily mean nudity, but something sexy about - and that would have been the better way to go with it so that it would at least get people talking about this scene, generate attention to at least one remotely memorable scene and as anybody knows (except for Ms. Vicky Hack-son) movies need a couple of very memorable - aspiring to iconic - scenes. Either way it achieves neither and is merely as bad as the rest of it, she must be the only person who can make stripping, streaking and riding a horse bareback bare completely boring, stale, flat, trite and what I thought was chalked up the biggest cringe of the movie... until I heard the final line - I went away with stomach ulcers!

If you look at the great filmmakers (which Vicky Jewson seems to believe she is destined to become with her delusions of grandeur), from Welles to Spielberg, and Allen to Scorsese, their debut/early films have been their best or at least shown some signs of developing talent. The only thing here seems to be some ideal that she is going to turn Oxford into Hollywood. She wanted to make a comedy. People are at least laughing at her, but for the wrong reasons.

The worst film ever

[reservoy · 1/10 · 6 August 2008]

To say that this is the worst film ever is probably the safest statement that I've made in my life. Where does it all go wrong? It's hard to know where to start but I guess that the beginning is a good place; the film opens with a naff historical reenactment of the Godiva legend which adds nothing to the film that follows but at least this part is reasonably well shot unlike the rest of this movie. Thereafter the film jolts about like an episode of Hollyoaks with simply the worst script and flimsiest characterisation of anything ever seen on screen. It is truly that awful! The story, which might have started as something worth telling, is ruined by appalling direction which jolts around unfathomably with characters acting out of character and for cheap laughs to the extent that after half an hour the amateurish crassness of the whole production isn't even funny any more. At several points I asked myself how the film could get worse only to find that the next scene eloquently answered my question. The saddest part is that I watched this film hoping to like it and believe that someone could fight the corporate film making machine from the outside. This however is an embarrassment to independent film makers everywhere, as though a bunch of drunk sixth formers had run amok with a camera. Nobody associated with this film apart from Phoebe Thomas emerges with any credit. Sorry.

The lady rides again...

[barnthebarn · 10/10 · 28 April 2008]

Unlike another reviewer I was not lucky enough to win tickets for this movie at the premiere. However I eventually joined an unfortunately small audience locally a few months later to see the film with an introduction from director Vicky Jewson. I'd recently seen 'The Oxford Murders' introduced by John Hurt and whereas the star of the latter film seemed disinterested in the film that was to follow his short and uninspired words Vicky clearly has a passion for film and most importantly this, her feature debut. The film, a human story, was more than suitably imagined by the humanity of its writer/director.

Despite reviews to the contrary the film appeared to be well received. I have never sat in such a quiet cinema and no-one was sleeping! The script worked a fine line between human and emotional drama and historical and darker visions preferring to keep to the former to create a fresh and certainly unique film. Michael (Matthew Chambers) is a little adrift in his acting style but it meets the requirements of his role, a slightly hapless play-boy famous for his horse breeding antics. He loves horses (his favourite called Lady Godiva) more than anything but this is about to change when he meets Jemima (Phoebe Thomas), a kooky art teacher who dreams of continuing to run an art space created by her recently deceased brother. Aside from the beguiling romance there are themes including dealing with grief, bullying and simply taking responsibility leading to happiness. I do have complaints with the films though these are few, namely, with Oxfords' happening music scene it would have been great to have used local bands or even specially written songs to provide the soundtrack. Instead we are given James Morrison's 'Wonderful World' and McFly's 'Don't Stop Me Now' among others - though the latter does mention Lady Godiva in the lyrics. The songs are used as almost advert breaks, a kind of wake up call for those bored with the story and I wonder if the choice is partly down to the financial backers rather than Vicky herself. Either way its not a problem as such, more a pity, and regardless of preference the songs do work and provide - more than a break - a chance to mull over the striking scenes that have just occurred. My only other grievance is that something is slightly wrong with the May Day scene actually filmed not during the famous celebrations but at 4am one morning with extras and secretly from Police who had threatened arrest. I think the problem is because the entrance of our '21st Century Godiva' seems a little like a film set rather than a woman doing a naturally liberating act. Even this is difficult to fault based on the shear fact that May Day morning in Oxford is manic with celebration and revelling on a huge scale and quite how the crowds would react to a naked lady on a horse is unbeknownst. Thus to have pulled off what must have been one take filming of this nature is quite frankly breathtaking and a brilliant close to a really quite brilliant film.

Oxford looks truly beautiful in every scene and the film presents a stunning backdrop of Oxford as more than a university city and does so in vibrant colour and endurance. At times it seems like each cell had been hand painted such was the clear signs of devotion from the writer/director. Critically there is no obvious audience for Lady Godiva. Critics like raw and edgy films, a bout of sudden torture, a taboo breaking sex scene set to the music of Michael Nyman. Critics don't like human stories unless they feature someone impaired mentally or psychically. Here perhaps it is emotionally impaired characters but they are fascinating human examples and its' a true shame that the pompous air of critical theory is so strong. From an established filmmaker 'Lady Godiva' would be rich, scrumptious and very daring. From a newbie? It is honestly overwhelming and truly recommended.

majestic

[G-Pal · 10/10 · 7 February 2009]

Vicky Jewson shows a talent and flair on the level of Scorsese in Goodfellas with her debut masterpiece Lady Godiva. After seeing this film, i now realize that all other films are meaningless by comparison. This film is a shining example of true British female directing talent...of which their is little, unlike the UAE where females are allowed to direct larger budget films. Vicky Jewson should direct the next James Bond film, because of her godlike skill in getting great performances from her exceptional cast. Vicky Jewson for president. I just hope people realize the greatness

G-Pal

Sunny fun :-)))

[deborah-jones48 · 7/10 · 25 January 2008]

I also viewed this picture on the premiere evening in Oxford. A friend somehow managed to get her paws on a few tickets for the girls and I!!! How cool hey? I have to say, any criticism is unfair.

Each to their own of course - and all opinions are welcome.

But, we (5 young girls) found this film to be fun, sweet and humorous.

After researching the cast, I know more information about them and after also seeing the film - can make an informed decision on performances.

Chambers and Thomas lead well with great chemistry. Two excellent young actors. Much more to come from them I think.

Supporting cast is OK - and direction is confident and impressive, especially when you realise the directors very young career/age.

I would advise you seeing this film if you are a fan of Rom-Coms.

Some very good and funny moments throughout. A refreshing inclusion was the surprise cameo of "Prince William." HAHA.

Actually, it isn't the real prince, but his lookalike (Turpin). He is not a professional actor, but does add to the film through looking very like William and delivering a few semi-funny lines - has decent screen presence. Oxford is also refreshing as back drop. Makes a change from London!

In summary, a good achievement in my book - an enjoyable light hearted film. Check it out if its the genre you tend to like. 7/10. :-)