What a difference a name makes. Thirteen little letters. Deceptively prosaic. As humdrum and hackneyed as St George's flag. Stark white against violent red. But the symbols we sport and the banners we bear are never so simple. They are history and ideology, identity and community, victories and pride, shame and defeat.
Before Branagh, Sorrentino, Cuarón, and even Spielberg sought to encapsulate their adolescence in celluloid, Shane Meadows drew upon his formative years on film. Revisionist tendencies abound when the artist turns the lens inward. Many surrender to that hubristic urge to fabricate and modify their origins casting nary a dispersion on their rose-tinted memories. Meadows shows no such habitual flaw. For him, growing up English was neither prim nor…