Blood Ties.
From this year or last (I think) and based on a French original, this 1974 set film could easily have been made in that year. At first, I thought it was going to be a fairly straight-forward of how clean-cut, straight-shooting cop Billy Crudup persuades his rough-diamond ex-con brother Clive Owen to infiltrate a criminal gang that's wreaking havoc in '74 Noo Yawk. Things quickly took a different turn. Owen's character turns out to be much, much darker than I had assumed, and Crudup's character, meanwhile, turns out to be very much a mixed-up kid. The story kept surprising me, put it that way. Zoe Saldana, Mila Kunis and Marion Cotillard play the long-suffering women in their lives. Not bad at all - I'd give it 6.5 out of ten, but a good 6.5.
Good Vibrations.
Now this I would give 9 out of 10. A Glenn Patterson scripted story of the life and times of Belfast scenester Terri Hooley. Very good indeed, this little story of punk rock versus the troubles. Of course, that could be exagerrated - as someone I know who lived through that chapter of the troubles told me, 'in them days Belfast was too scary, so we used to go and hang out in Bangor'. And while there was a 'hands across the barricades' angle to NI punk rock, those people would have found each other anyway, and while they deserve credit for refusing to participate in sectarian shit, their example was always going to be an eccentric one.
Some random points, in no particular order:
I was going to write that the recreation of 70s Belfast was very well done, before I realised that a lot of Belfast still looks like that to this day.
The utter, utter, absolute complete shitness of the conflict is strongly outlined, but not to the point where it takes over the whole movie. It did confirm my intention to never, ever, watch Steve McQueen's Hunger mind.
The portrayal of the army was maybe a bit too soft, but the peelers came in for some well deserved stick, as did the various brands of paramilitary. Adrian Dunbar makes a pretty unlikely Provie godfather, though, the most unlikely I've seen since Gabriel Byrne.
At times it was 'spot the Hiberno-luvvie', with the guy out of Game of Thrones as a hippy mixing engineer.
Did Hooley's Da, a lifelong deposit-losing anti-sectarian socialist candidate really look like Tony Benn?
The lads who played the Undertones did the job very well - with one caveat. Look at the original photos of that group, and you'll see that they were no strangers to 'facial acne as a weapon of terror', while the lad who plays my distant relative Fergal Sharkey in this one looks as if he bathes every day in asses' milk, or the blood of young virgins.
They evidently didn't get the memo about John Peel. . .
Why didn't Rudi and the Outcasts make it big? Their songs were just as catchy as the 'tones, on this reading.
Jodie Whitaker was the long-suffering wife in this one, and she was very good indeed. . .
