Ken Loach S/D

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.

Ah, the band is slightly misnamed on that video. Still hadn't heard of that, although now I can find mention in the archives.

Also, although this probably not the, um, thread for it, I recently watched the Barry Hines-scripted Threads on MUBI, which lived up to its reputation. “The night the country didn’t sleep" indeed. Perhaps one day will read my copy of A Kestrel for a Knave as well.

his Spirit of '45 doc was such enraging, execrable rose-tinted claptrap I didn't last long with it. I don't know if I was just in a grumpy mood, but it seemed unbearable at the the time.

I'm getting so pissed off my typing is stuttering

ran across this spirited attack

https://letterboxd.com/phk/film/sorry-we-missed-you/

His own political history – the Workers' Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers Party, George Galloway's RESPECT Coalition – is like a timeline of the most vacuous, posturing elements of Britain's bourgeois celebrity Left. Any real causes he may have aided can be chalked up to the stopped-clock principle.

lol ... totally otm!

A bit offside to have a go at his petite bourgeoisie roots, there is plenty enough to criticise about his movies or his predilection for crank left political wasters!

lol harsh but broadly fair, not a critique of his film-making tho so

i'd like to think about *why* most of the films are so unconvincing, such bad cinema. his politics are connected to that - they're missionary work, mostly, which accounts for some of the glaring duffness of tone, but i'd like to read a more complete account of their failures as movies, without running a rote "avant-garde vs realism" take. i mean yeah of course he's shit compared to Godard, but it'd be more interesting to think about why he's shit compared to say the Dardenne Bros

Some good points in that attack/rant. I for one found some of the absolutely shit 'acting' in "Sorry We Missed You" did more to ruin the film than the ott piling on of tragic events. "Kes" rules forever, though.

I'm not saying Brizé's The Measure of a Man (2015) is classic, but I did enjoy infinitely more than My Name Is Joe and as heavy handed as it is, it does touch on the theme that we are all bad and should all feel bad, not just the tories or dead eyed bureaucrats dishing out human misery, we are all a bunch of bastards!

I have read reviews where people Loach has coaxed some good performances from amateur actors. I always think the exact opposite, rather he has indoctrinated them into the ways of hack acting and it will take some work to undo that damage!

loved the last film

i feel like the point of using non-actors is not to have them "ACT"

tbf Alfred if i watch a whole new Loach film now it's by accident/against my will