Fabulous apart from one thing...
The damn hand held camera thing was a bit much, especially at the start with the sudden zooms.
Still, wonderfully biting script.
"It's always opening time in the Sailors Arms".
The hand-held camera is much more noticeable and much more jarring in the TV series that this is a spin-off of: "The Thick of It". The movie is actually very toned down. The TV series is much like "The Office" is filmed.
The hand-held camera serves two purposes: It lets us know that this is a "documentary" -- that we are spying on real people, in real time. It also lets the actors ad-lib as they please. The finished product was over four hours long and was mostly the actors ad-libbing, moving and talking as they pleased. They didn't have any marks to hit (as they would have with a normal script and a stable camera). The lightweight hand-held cameras allowed the cameramen to follow the actors wherever they went, much like in a reality show.
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