Except for the theme, you can't really recognize it's a Ken Loach film. It's over sentimental, well completely cheesy, horribly Manichean, it has some the most terrible and stiff acting i've seen in years.
The scene where Jimmy's old love try the dress he has given her and where they dance together is awkward and disgustingly lit, the least subtle thing in a film that walks with big heavy wooden clogs.
The end is a pastiche of Dead Poet Society's ending, some young smiling idiots are chanting for him while cycling behind the police van that is taking our failed hero back to America where he is deported, thank god for us.
For a director that has done so much for English cinema, Riff Raff, Lady Bug Lady Bug, Poor Cow ... that made the most political and original films with economy of dialogs, bright and clever scripts, to be reduced to do a ultra conventional period drama, that sometimes over explain things to us like we're complete morons and sometimes is so historically or even narratively so vague to the point where it becomes laughable more than understandable is not only a shame but a waste of talent. It's meant to be all deep and political but in the end it's just a tower of clichés and a competition of bad acting belching a compilation of debilitating dialogs.
He said he wanted to stop cinema after doing this atrocious crime against cinema, he should have stop before doing Carla's Song and save us from suffering in front of those boring films that resembles the most soporific history classes of our teenage hood, save THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, is only decent film in the last 20 years of his career.
To see a Director sabotaging his legacy is not only appalling but depressing.
The scene where Jimmy's old love try the dress he has given her and where they dance together is awkward and disgustingly lit, the least subtle thing in a film that walks with big heavy wooden clogs.
The end is a pastiche of Dead Poet Society's ending, some young smiling idiots are chanting for him while cycling behind the police van that is taking our failed hero back to America where he is deported, thank god for us.
For a director that has done so much for English cinema, Riff Raff, Lady Bug Lady Bug, Poor Cow ... that made the most political and original films with economy of dialogs, bright and clever scripts, to be reduced to do a ultra conventional period drama, that sometimes over explain things to us like we're complete morons and sometimes is so historically or even narratively so vague to the point where it becomes laughable more than understandable is not only a shame but a waste of talent. It's meant to be all deep and political but in the end it's just a tower of clichés and a competition of bad acting belching a compilation of debilitating dialogs.
He said he wanted to stop cinema after doing this atrocious crime against cinema, he should have stop before doing Carla's Song and save us from suffering in front of those boring films that resembles the most soporific history classes of our teenage hood, save THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, is only decent film in the last 20 years of his career.
To see a Director sabotaging his legacy is not only appalling but depressing.