Ken Loach S/D

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

The non-actress is the heart of the film, a bit like Chrissy Rock in Ladybird Ladybird.

The only non-actor who appeared in a Loach film that I can remember going on to have any k inf of acting career was, er... the guy who played Les Battersby in Coronation Street! I stand corrected if there are others.

... and kind, that is, not any k inf.

Martin Compston has had a very successful career.

Oh forgot him, better than Les Battersby for sure.

I enjoyed "I, Daniel Blake" despite myself. was the best of his 21st century films (that id seen) but still mawkish and hamfisted.

lol I meant I, Daniel Blake above not My Name Is Joe

my name is Joe at least has a bit of moral complexity

The 60s films and wednesdays plays were a total revelation to me when I saw them. Cathy Come Home, Up the Junction, Poor Cow. The didacticism of the kitchen-sink narrative sections are disrupted and often contradicted by the polyvocal audio documentary elements. They're good documents of postwar youth culture: music, dancing, teased hairstyles and leather jackets.

I tend to find the criticism of his films more tedious than anything I've come across in the films themselves: the purported bleakness feels humane and with more humour than critics let on, the purported hysteria and exaggeration disregards the scale of human cruelty in the real world and the insane baroquely nasty situations that people seem to be trapped in, day after day. There are certainly far more noxious figures in the british politico-media aristocracy and at the very least he's made a film world that is recognisable and means something. I'd definitely take him over Mike Leigh with his nastily misogynistic morality plays. I daniel blake was mawkish yeah but felt legitimate and urgent when 'austerity' had completely ossified into a journalistic bookmark with no referent. If he's as shit as people say he is, it really is a testament to what a cesspit the establishment press is.

Anyway, it always makes me laugh when broadsheet newspaper critics try having a go at films for being simplistic when you see the lists of shitty films that get acclaimed year after year.

Great posts, plax. I mostly agree but you've explained why I agree, which I wasn't quite sure of until I read it, tbh.

"If he's as shit as people say he is, it really is a testament to what a cesspit the establishment press is."

I don't really get this plax, are you trying to say I've been brainwashed into thinking he's shit? No probably not , but I still don't quite get it! I've come to this point after watching something close to a dozen of his post Cathy Come Home, Kes, The Price Of Coal era movies. And I wouldn't draw attention to the humour in his movies, it really isn't his strong point and usually is about as funny as a stale Chris Williamson fart. He hasn't put anything out in the last two decades even half as good as Leigh's Turner or Peterloo movies if you are pitting him against him. I'm not opposed to the idea of some lefty type director putting the spotlight on austerity, but he is a boring grinder, with no flair and no real anger tbh.