Ken Loach S/D

Yes - it's a good companion piece to The Kid With a Bike.

Probably the funniest Loach.

anyone seen /The Angel's Share/?

Clio Barnard's follow up to The Arbor, The Selfish Giant looks very promising and is picking up rave reviews. She has utilised local non-professional actors Loach style. I love that bit from the trailer, angry mum: "You have been excluded from school" "Sick!".

I worked on some of the most deprived estates in Bradford for 4 years and as someone who grew up on a council estate I was still shocked at the extreme poverty I saw; as in rooms that smell of raw ammonia, houses without furniture, carpets or bedding that children lived in, houses without any heating because tenants had ripped out their own heating system as scrap.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/24/the-selfish-giant-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tEgcpTbvJ8

Anyone who has seen Jimmy's Hall yet? It's not a good film, but it's pretty funny for a last film for a political filmmaker. A story about an old fighter returning one last time to fight the battle, does exactly the same thing he did before, and loses all over again. I'd read Jimmy Gralton as a standin for Loach himself, not because it's necessarily true, but because it makes it all bleakly funny. Older, but non the wiser. If only the filmmaking didn't trap it all up constantly, never ever selling what is going on as having any kind of significance whatsoever.

It's an interesting period in Irish history (mid 1930s) that's never really been covered in film before. I found it slightly average though, something lacking or too pandering to mainstream tastes which has hampered some of his later work. Jim Norton is excellent in this though.

Just watching The Price Of Coal tonight, it is so good and on youtube in it's entirety.

Thought revive would be Barry Hines related.

It absolutely is, it was someone mentioning this on two different RIP threads, one of them on a different board that made me want to watch it.

Lol the "SCARGILL RULES OK" graffiti; "Some Vandals, some pillock morelike"

No issue with the politics or the message of "I, Daniel Blake" but the movie, as a piece of art, has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Its realism is contrived, "Clunky, bolted together" as Tom D said above.

This is more to do with Paul Laverty's script rather than Ken Loach imo

I can't shake how much Dave Johns looks and sounds like Phil Collins.

How can he sound like Phil Collins, he's from Wallsend?

Collins has faked northeastern accents before to make himself sound "local."

He has?

http://www.brandalert.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/nonce-sense-social-media.jpg

Collins has faked northeastern accents before to make himself sound "local."

I'm perhaps not as au fait with the corpus of collins' forays as a thespian as i could be but I've never heard him do anything but a london accent

Maybe he means Romford.

i liked the angel's share

rewatched kes a year or two back and found it harder work than i expected -- perhaps because i'd over-invested in my memory of it (my mum took me to see it when it came out, when i was 9 or 10)

No issue with the politics or the message of "I, Daniel Blake" but the movie, as a piece of art, has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Its realism is contrived, "Clunky, bolted together" as Tom D said above.

It wasn't at all clunky, wtf?

Art = stuff. Don't worry about it.

Good movie, and it wasn't a sledgehammer.

Alfred, you still haven't answered the question

About Phil Collins and Johns? I was thinking of Collins when he talks in 'Miami Vice' and his videos and tries to be the American idea of a Funny Local. It was a dumb point and I retract it.

The Angel's Share was basically Pride, but with whiskey instead of gays and the old ladies who love them.

this film was wonderful

i watched land and freedom last night as part of barcelona trip prep and loved it again

yes loach doesn't do "character" the way we expect film characters to be but in land and freedom it's actually very appropriate. the political was indistinguishable from the personal for a lot of the utopian collectivists who took up arms for the POUM. there is a moment in a barcelona pension when the lover of our liverpudlian hero says "i took a 7 day leave.. for a few days i don't want politics, no fighting, no trenches, i just want to feel human" and well i could not help peanut-gallerying "i regret to inform you are in a ken loach film my dear". the next morning she wakes up, discovers our liverpudlian hero has abandoned the POUM and is joining the regular communist-led brigades. she instantly disowns him, disavows her love, is off. they were so close to being "human", to being "characters"! but she gives it up in an instant when she discovers it might involve any sort of compromise. to me this feels extremely apposite to what people in that war were wrestling with.

the most interesting "character" to me by far is the granddaughter sorting through the clippings. up until the very last moment we think we know her story, and we think she's alone at the funeral, the only one who knows or cares about any of this. but she's found the old guy's buddies from the brigade! she's invited them! and she believes in the struggle! it's absurdly over the top and i loved it

One of his very best. I vividly remember long and loud applause at the Gft when it finished and that was not a special screening or a premier or anything. Need to revisit it.

Up the Junction is amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wvGbwwWBXI

hi plax! xo

(send me your email, i've lost it again)

Haven't seen any TV stuff that early, just Cathy Come Home, which is the next year. Carol White is also in that, and Poor Cow.

The Price of Coal is still on youtube. It has really cracking, angry class-war dialogue, but also mixes it with genuinely funny shit. And I think generally, Loach is very bad at doing humour. But some of the cast playing miners + middle management were Northern comedy circuit/WMC type comedians and made the best of the funny stuff. Also I only just noticed Bobby Knutt died last month (RIP), he is really good in this.

that song is awesome.

plax, i sent you an email through ILX, did you get it?

saw Ladybird Ladybird (35mm) for the first time in ~25 years yesterday; what a punishing scorcher. Glad to see Crissy Rock has had a career, albeit little that's made it to the US apparently.

Sorry We Missed You is tremendous, their best since The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Rarely has a film insisting on the on-the-nose been this empathetic and worth the on-the-noseness.

is 'their' Loach's pronoun?

Didn't even notice, a result of writing an email to a student at the same time.

He should really put that on his Twitter profile.

Assumed you meant Loach and Paul Laverty.

Loach and the working class

lol

The Them That Theys The Theirsly

yeah this is good, but I do find it a little too easy to click together the various news reports on austerity that make up its factual basis as I'm watching the film. As *films* his laverty stuff comes nowhere near the wednesday play stuff, particularly cathy come home where the documentary and narrative strands come together to make something far more polyvocal but as aggressively agit-prop. i saw it at a nearly empty screening at the barbican and the only people i heard comment afterwards were rich american gays who thought it was "depressing and boring"

i know this is a boring opinion btw

seconding the excellence of Cathy Come Home

Thanks, plax and morbs. I’ll steer clear (like I wasn’t already going to).

Bleh.

Has anyone seen the documentary about Carol White, The Battersea Bardot?

Also just found this song by a band I've never heard of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhU3HoBNiqo

Which song and video are pretty good upon first listen. Can't say the same for another, different song I found with the same title.

Reading up some, I didn't realize Loach was 87 (should have, or at least close) or that he says this will be his last film (something he's said a couple of other times, evidently). I won't withdraw anything I say above, but if he does follow through on that and walks away, I expect this will be remembered whenever the subject of greatest final films comes up.

Director's Final Films

I have a nutty story about Ken Loach. Back in the late '00s, I went to see a schoolmate of mine who had returned home to London. He knew how much I loved films so he took me to the BFI, and as we walked around, he ran into a woman he knew who was with a much older man. He and the woman started talking, and it was one of those things where you end up withdrawing because it's clearly a private moment between two people that doesn't involve you. So as I'm just hanging about, I make eye contact with the older guy and I'm just like "how you doing?" and he's like "all right" and we proceed to have a polite, cordial but thoroughly bland chat since we were complete strangers who on the surface didn't remotely have much in common. Finally my friend wraps up his conversation and we all part ways. He immediately apologizes, explaining that not only was that an ex-girlfriend (with whom he had a recent break-up) but she was now working for Ken Loach, and that was the guy I was talking to. I 100% knew who he was, I just had no idea what he looked like before. And he would've said something but it was just a terribly awkward encounter to see his ex. Totally understood, but still, ugh...

Anyway, there's a massive Ken Loach retrospective that starts at Film Forum this week. Highly recommend it because so many of those films aren't easily found in the best quality here in the U.S. (They may not stream or they may only have old SD transfers available for home viewing, in which case seeing it in 35mm will be a real treat.)

https://filmforum.org/series/ken-loach