Word: loach
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...Wind that Shakes the Barley. What are we talking about here - agronomy? Nor does its narrative - 1920s Ireland in the throes of what we would now call an "insurgency" - provide the analogies to current events that it would have been easy to make. Then there's the Ken Loach problem. He is a mild-mannered English leftist who has been for years making earnest, naturalistic, rather conventionally mounted studies about working-class topics that do not make the cinephile's aesthete spirit leap in anticipation. He's the kind of guy who turns down decorations from the Queen because...
...last year's Cannes film festival and despite its length (over two hours) and some structural problems, it is an absorbing, worthwhile and often passionate movie. Yes, it has a certain medicinal virtue; it is not easy to take. But it also has extraordinary dramatic power and because Loach is an honest and honorable craftsman, it often betrays his own sympathies...
...beleaguered guerrilla group, fighting in the years immediately after World War I for independence from British rule, which was then being enforced by the Black and Tans, vicious and largely undisciplined soldiers recruited from the demobilized English army and functioning in Ireland as terrorist-enforcers of the status quo. Loach's film, written by Paul Laverty, focuses on a Sinn Fein (or revolutionist) "flying column" operating in County Cork, with special emphasis on a gentle young doctor, Damien (Cillian Murphy) and his more hot-headed brother, Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who is the group's leader. Theirs is a life...
...between these two insurgencies, that Loach's film encounters its largest structural problem. Basically, he gathers most of his flying column figures in a room and sets them to yelling at one another about whether the half-loaf of freedom offered by the treaty with the Brits can satisfy the national hunger for full-scale independence. He gives the ameliorists a fair hearing, but most decide to return to the opposition. Despite the impassioned rhetoric of the meeting, it is, admittedly, a stage wait. Yet it is also, I think, a measure of Loach's high intentions that he gives...
...competition, boldly depicted the Tiananmen Square revolt of 1989 but was more concerned with the sexual politics of its heroine (the sulkily charismatic Hao Lei). She and her sex scenes were hot stuff, but the movie's critical response was tepid. Three war movies also failed to astound: Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a predictable rendering of the 1920 Irish battle of Catholic peasants against the Black and Tans; Bruno Dumont's Flandres, a horrifying but uninvolving study of Belgian farmers committing atrocities in an African war; and Rachid Bouchareb's Indigènes (Days...