TV/Movies Megathread

[Valmy]

Sheilbh, what did you think of Wind that Shakes the Barley?  I found it extremely effective emotionally but ultimately a bit repulsive.  Loach's anti-Irish Protestant/English sentiments are near self-hating.

Repulsive how?

Maybe he finds the notion that all Protestants are barbarians with an never-ending appetite for blood, oppression, and violence repulsive.  The rest of us just know it as a self-evident truth.

[garbon]

Best adaptation of a classic greek work until O Brother.

Love that one.

Ugh.

[The Larch]

Best adaptation of a classic greek work until O Brother.

Love that one.

Ugh.

To The Warriors or to O Brother?

[garbon]

Best adaptation of a classic greek work until O Brother.

Love that one.

Ugh.

To The Warriors or to O Brother?

The latter.

[Valmy]

What is wrong with O Brother?  I mean besides the fact it has only the loosest of ties to the Odyssey 

[celedhring]

O Brother is a very fun flick. Great music, inventive scenes and charismatic actors all over the place. Yeah, the plot is loose at best, but so was Big Lebowski's.

Also, it got me laid so I probably have a higher appreciation for it than it deserves 

[Razgovory]

Sheilbh, what did you think of Wind that Shakes the Barley?  I found it extremely effective emotionally but ultimately a bit repulsive.  Loach's anti-Irish Protestant/English sentiments are near self-hating.

Repulsive how?

Maybe he finds the notion that all Protestants are barbarians with an never-ending appetite for blood, oppression, and violence repulsive.  The rest of us just know it as a self-evident truth.

They may not have had an endless appetite for blood  and oppression but it it was several hundred years worth.

[Valmy]

O Brother is a very fun flick. Great music, inventive scenes and charismatic actors all over the place. Yeah, the plot is loose at best, but so was Big Lebowski's.

Also, it got me laid so I probably have a higher appreciation for it than it deserves 

Somebody was really turned on by cows on roofs?

[celedhring]

O Brother is a very fun flick. Great music, inventive scenes and charismatic actors all over the place. Yeah, the plot is loose at best, but so was Big Lebowski's.

Also, it got me laid so I probably have a higher appreciation for it than it deserves 

Somebody was really turned on by cows on roofs?

The girl I took was a big fan of grassroots music. Wine did the rest.

[CountDeMoney]

Hillbilly folk and cheap wine.  Yeah, that's the one you bring home to Mom.

[celedhring]

Hillbilly folk and cheap wine.  Yeah, that's the one you bring home to Mom.

She was Spanish. Wine+grassroots music = hip in Spain.

[CountDeMoney]

[gunnysgthartman]
Battle for Los Angeles was silly and it was stupid, but it was fun, and fun was enough.
[/gunnysgthartman]

B+

[CountDeMoney]

Hillbilly folk and cheap wine.  Yeah, that's the one you bring home to Mom.

She was Spanish. Wine+grassroots music = hip in Spain.

No wonder they took so long to kick out the Moops.
Yeah, the card says Moops.

[Capetan Mihali]

McNamara is a very smart guy and he did have a number of interesting thing to say.
I think it was intention that the movie be received in the way that Mihali describes it was received by some at the time and that is why he did the project.
But he just can't help himself.
What I don't know is whether Morris was intentionally (if subtly) trying to frame the message that McNamara didn't really learn from his mistakes.  It really doesn't matter though, because it succeeds in that sense, at least it did for me.

Here's a good interview with Morris on the topic:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/31/errol_morris_interview/

On the "lessons"--

My lessons are ironic, although many viewers somehow don't notice this. But to me, they're endlessly ironic. "Get the data" – but what if the data's all wrong? "Maximise efficiency" – what if the efficiency in the end produces 100,000 deaths in one night from napalm? And, of course, the last lesson: "You can't change human nature", which tells us that perhaps the other ten lessons are meaningless.

[Sheilbh]

Sheilbh, what did you think of Wind that Shakes the Barley?  I found it extremely effective emotionally but ultimately a bit repulsive.  Loach's anti-Irish Protestant/English sentiments are near self-hating.

Repulsive how?

Okay anyway, I've thought this out.

I think it would be difficult to find sympathetic English characters in a film about the Irish war of independence and civil war without tokenistic reaching. There's probably a baker's dozen of sympathetic Englishmen (in Ireland) in the entire history of English colonialism there. It was, in my view, the first and the worst of the English empire-building. On Protestant Irish I think it would also have been difficult in a film of this type which is local and rural, obviously if you're making a film about Irish nationalism in general then you include the urban and you have the great heroes like Parnell and Yeats. But the more common experience was the conservative, fearful and fearsome local gentry.

This film is also the most pretty I think Loach has ever made.  I think he's always suspicious of prettiness and style so it never goes totally overboard but this is his nearest to a normal film and is, at moments, beautiful. He doesn't deny that beauty to characters who betray the IRA to the British or later to the pro-treaty forces. We see them play hurling too, we know them and we know they're not evil it's circumstance and life that places them where they are. I wouldn't actually be surprised if Loach could make a moving film about a demobbed unemployed socialist soldier who ends up a brutal Black and Tan.

I think that maybe Loach's great theme is how structures force a sort-of self-betrayal. We see it in the Navigators which is a really moving film about rail privatisation (and who but Loach would think that were possible?) and in It's a Free World where these ordinary people trying to get on in their lives are forced through economic circumstance to betray themselves and others. We see it again in his grander films like Land and Freedom and this one which are both, in different ways, about the betrayal of a revolution. In this case it's about the moment a revolution starts to ask questions not just about political and national but social and economic freedom.

The truth is that in Ireland the Irish Civil War caused more death than the War of Independence and the Free Staters were backed by the British. It's that lingering, often slightly collaborating divide and conquer legacy the British left all over the world in microcosm. (Also as an aside if it weren't entirely unlike the films he actually makes Loach is the one director I'd love to see do something set in the English Civil War - that radical tradition is his and I think he'd get it perfectly minus the religion, which is also missing in this film.)

But as ever with Loach that self-betrayal has an individual face. Remember our hero who is a doctor, and was meant to go to London to learn more of his trade and who could have been a great aid for a free Ireland, instead ends up killing traitors to the movement. If he doesn't do it in cold blood he's at least composed and again there's betrayal in that.

I don't personally find it repulsive, but in fairness my grandfather was in the (anti-treaty) IRA in the 20s and my family's pretty nationalist whenever the subject of Ireland comes up - I mean even the area of Liverpool I'm from was represented by the great T.P. O'Connor an Irish Nationalist MP from 1885-1929. In addition, if I think a film (or a book for that matter) is good then I very rarely care about its politics.

Edit:

Maybe he finds the notion that all Protestants are barbarians with an never-ending appetite for blood, oppression, and violence repulsive.  The rest of us just know it as a self-evident truth.

Also this.