Movie: Route Irish

The new movie by Ken Loach, Route Irish examines the effects of war on both the local populace, and those involved in the fighting. The main characters are all from Liverpool, and in keeping with most Loach movies, accents are to the fore - and probably the most prolific use of the word 'fuck' that I've heard for sometime. the main character, Fergus, is a hard-man, ex-SAS and now ex-private security in Iraq - and the movie opens at a funeral for his best friend Frankie. Nice touches of homoeroticism in there too. The only character I identified who didn't have a regional accent (remember, this is Loach), is the very PR savvy commander of the private security firm. He pisses Fergus off, and so Fergus embarks on a quest to find out what happened.
This revolves around a cellphone.
The script is, as you'd expect, extrememly tight, and the cinematography flits between Liverpool and Iraq seamlessly (same DoP as 'Kes' apparently). It's a thriller, but not in the Hollywood style, everyone has failings, some more obvious than others, there are agendas hidden within agendas, but by god was it engrossing.

I'll admit I'm a Ken Loach fanboy. But this one, far more of a thriller than we're used to from Loach, is superb. It doesn't rock along, but it sucks you in from empathy with apparently sympathetic characters to almost understanding why you'd do the incomprehensible. Brilliant.

Frankie, who is, generally, a likeable, genial chap (while alive anyway), is played by John Bishop, the Liverpudlian comedian. It may seem overly-calculated to engage with the viewer, but it works nicely, making his flaws more real.

Go see this, one of the best movies I've seen for some time.

Those of you in the UK, Curzon Cinema's are offering it on the OnDemand service. I used this, I had some initial problems which, after looking at data logs, suggested our exchange here (at 7pm) was getting overloaded - although download speeds were floating around 3-6kbps, and according to Curzon all they require is a 1kbps connection. Anyway, we filled in a couple of hours then watched it later when things seemed more stable.
In Curzon's defence, when I emailed them to say this - they responded within 12 hours with useful info, and asked me to run frame analysis script for them. So kudos to them.

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