Belfast

Year 15, Day 76 - 3/17/23 - Movie #4,377

BEFORE: Judi Dench carries over from "Blithe Spirit", and realized too late that I could have just taken a couple days off and come STRAIGHT here from "Endings, Beginnings", with Jamie Dornan carrying over.  That is, if I hadn't typed up his name as "Jamie Donovan" on my cast list sheet - I'm paying the price for my typo, because it turns out I didn't NEED to watch "Villains" and "The Bling Ring" and I could have saved "Blithe Spirit" for October, because, well, it IS a ghost story and I could have linked to "The Sea Beast" with the voice of Dan Stevens in it.  Now if it turns out I can't make my proper connections this October, and "Blithe Spirit" could have helped me do that, I'm going to be very pissed off.

But hey, Happy St. Patrick's Day, I did get here to a movie about Ireland, JUST in time.  And tomorrow's film will be another Irish film, it's a holiday two-fer.  It was about 13 months ago - February 19 of last year, that I worked a screening of "Belfast" during the previous Oscar season, and Kenneth Branagh was on hand to do a Q&A session after the film.  I got to stand out in the lobby next to him, and I got to cue him to take the stage while the credits rolled.  (OK, so I cued his handler, who cued him, same thing...). And I got to take a candid photo of the back of his head while he stood in the theater lobby during the movie.  I didn't watch the movie then, and that turned out well, because I saved it for today's holiday, I figured that would be very appropriate. 

It's Day 17 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Medical Movies" (before 8 pm) and "Romantic Comedies" (8 pm and after). Here's the line-up: 

6:30 am "Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet" (1940)

8:15 am "The Hasty Heart" (1950)

10:00 am "The Citadel" (1938)

12:00 pm "The Story of Louis Pasteur" (1936)

1:30 pm "Sister Kenny" (1946)

3:30 pm "Not as a Stranger" (1955)

6:00 pm "Johnny Belinda" (1948)

8:00 pm "It Happened One Night" (1934)

10:00 pm "Pillow Talk" (1959)

12:00 am "The Philadelphia Story" (1940)

2:00 am "The Lady Eve" (1941)

4:00 am "The Goodbye Girl" (1977)

"Medical Movies" is a terrible theme, I think, because I haven't seen any of them.  If these files were any good, I probably would have seen at least one of them.  My record is better on the romantic comedies, I've seen all of them except "The Lady Eve". That gives me only 4 out of 12 today, and brings me to 89 seen out of 192, so down to 46%.

THE PLOT: A young boy and his working-class family experience the tumultuous late 1960s. 

AFTER: Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and, BEFORE checking, say that this story is largely autobiographical, based on the life of young Kenneth Branagh.  The young blond boy is so prominent in the film, the story is largely told from his point of view, and I'm guessing that little "Buddy" grew up to be the director of this very film.  Yes, Branagh, has a sole screenwriting credit, fine, but let me check his bio.  "Born in Belfast December 10, 1960" - yes, that would make him 9 years old in 1969, that checks out.  His father was a plumber and carpenter, and he's got two siblings, an older brother and a younger sister (born in 1970, therefore not appearing in this film).  "When he was nine, his family escaped The Troubles by moving to Reading, Berkshire, England" - and at the close of this film, the family that's central to this story (with no last name mentioned in the film) does move to England.  

There you have it, another case cracked - there were just so many details here about the various family members, I felt it sort of HAD to be based on somebody's real life.  And a lot of extended family members depicted without really any explanation about how they were all related - the director didn't see fit to explain this, because he already knew, so it was either a bit too obvious to him only, or he didn't feel this all needed to be mapped out.  And then there are so many scenes of Buddy watching Western movies on his TV, or the family going to the movies to see "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", it makes sense that the child who loved watching movies as a kid would grow up to become an actor and film director.  (This kind of puts "Belfast" in the same category as "The Fabelmans", which is about Spielberg's young family life, and explains his budding interest in making movies.  But screw Spielberg, he's already got the acclaim and the awards and now he made a movie about HIMSELF?  What a narcissist.  Do I want to watch two hours of Spielberg explaining where he came from?  NO thanks.  He revealed in a recent interview that he never officially got hired at Universal, he just took the studio tour, hid in a bathroom and then found an empty office when the tour left without him. He totally cheated.)

"The Troubles" are a euphemism for religious conflict in Ireland in 1969 - Protestants vs. Catholics.  Guys, come on, it's a big island, can't you guys just split it in half and share it?  Wait, that's what they did?  OK, so what's the trouble, then?  The Catholics get regular Ireland and the Protestants get Northern Ireland.  Wait, are Protestants and Anglicans the same thing?  Look, I'm originally from Boston, where the words "Irish" and "Catholic" are nearly always together, they're one and the same.  I don't know Irish Protestants, I only know Irish as Catholics, maybe I'm behind the times or something.  Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland, and that's part of the U.K., so they're...Protestant?  The other terms like "nationalist" and "unionist" don't mean much to me, either, so I'm out of the loop on this one.  "The Troubles" started back in 1969, as seen in the film, but I grew up in the 1980's, so I remember Ireland back then as a dangerous place, with the IRA and Sinn Fein and car bombs and all that. (This was before an "Irish car bomb" was a drink where you drop a shot glass of whiskey in your Guinness.) 

I just read the whole article on Wikipedia about "The Troubles" in 1969, and I still don't understand it. It's got something to do with civil rights, and the Catholics in Northern Ireland protesting their treatment as a minority, and then those protests getting suppressed.  Again, guys, come on, you're ALL IRISH - you've got different religions, but more in common with each other than you think.  And I think somehow this is all Henry VIII's fault, for breaking up with the Catholic Church way back when.  But the other problems that the Catholics encountered were job discrimination, housing discrimination, and gerrymandering, while people were calling for police reforms because of bias and brutality.  Wait, wait, this is all sounding so familiar somehow, if you just replace "Catholic" with "black" and "Protestant" with "white" it sounds so very much like modern-day America.  I guess in the U.S.A. we've got our own version of "The Troubles", and as we can see, it ends with a line drawn somewhere geographically and all the people who think one way moving north of that line, and all the people who think the other way moving south of that line.  

While the riots and fighting take place in the streets of Belfast, the families hunkered down in their houses and waited for things to be over - or if they were Catholic, they were more likely to pack up their things and move away.  Buddy's father works on construction projects in England, and can't afford to fly back every weekend, so he comes back whenever he can.  Buddy's got a crush on a female classmate, but she's a Catholic and he also is afraid to talk to her.  But he gets some advice from his grandparents, Granny and Pop.  Buddy also gets caught up in a "gang" when his female cousin uses him to help steal chocolates from a candy store, but this leads to the police coming to his house to question him about the Turkish Delight he grabbed. (Again, the details are so specific, you have to figure this all happened to Kenneth Branagh when he was a boy.)

Meanwhile barricades are going up in the streets to separate the nationalists from the unionists, and again I couldn't really keep track of who was who, because they all just seemed Irish.  The head of the Protestant gang keeps trying to recruit Buddy's father for "the cause", but he's never around and he doesn't much like the idea of anyone threatening his family in order to gain his support.  Pa dreams of moving his whole family to Sydney or Vancouver, but Ma keeps nixing the idea because she's lived her whole life in Belfast - but the relationship is getting strained by so much time apart, and realizing that the family is in danger if they don't move away.  Pa gets offered a bigger apartment if he can move his whole family to England, but it's harder to convince the kids that their life will be better if they move.  

The film opens with beautiful color footage of Belfast, and then turns to black and white when the time-frame moves to depict the events of 1969.  I get that the sudden removal of color symbolizes the traveling back to the past, but I don't really associate 1969, a very colorful year in history, with black-and-white footage.  I mean, we've had color movies since the 1930's, sure there were black-and-white films made in the 1950's and 60's, but by then MOST movies were in color, there was color television, colorful fashions, etc.  When I see a film in black and white, it calls to mind the 1930's or 1940's for me, not the hip, swinging Sixties.  I don't know, maybe Kenneth Branagh remembers his childhood in black and white?  But then splashes of color appear in the later parts of the movie, like when the family goes to see a movie together, and the movie is in color while the rest of the world is colorless?  Again, it's a bit of an odd choice.

Anyway, this film was nominated for SEVEN Academy Awards - at last year's ceremony, obviously, not the recent one.  That's how far behind I still am on movies, despite my best efforts to catch up.  It only won ONE Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay (take that, Spielberg, you hack...) and Branagh became the first person to be nominated in seven different categories - similar to how Guillermo Del Toro is now the only person to win Oscars for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Animated Feature.  

Still, too many Van Morrison songs here.  I'm not a fan. 

Also starring Jude Hill, Caitriona Balfe (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Jamie Dornan (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Margot at the Wedding"), Lewis McAskie, Colin Morgan (last seen in "The Huntsman: Winter's War"), Lara McDonnell (last seen in "Artemis Fowl"), Gerard Horan (ditto), Conor MacNeill (ditto), Olive Tennant, Josie Walker, Turlough Convery (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Vanessa Ifediora, Drew Dillon, Victor Alli (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Rachel Feeney (ditto), John Sessions (last seen in "Filth"), Sid Sagar (ditto), Freya Yates, Nessa Eriksson, Charlie Barnard, Frankie Hastings, Malread Tyers, Caolan McCarthy, Ian Dunnet Jnr, Michael Maloney (last seen in "The Young Victoria"), Chris McCurry, Elly Condron, Olivia Flanagan, Samuel Menhinick, Leonard Buckley, Estelle Cousins, Scott Gutteridge, Kit Rakusen, Oliver Savell, Orla McDonagh, Serrana Su-Ling Bliss, Ross O'Donnellan, Mark Hadfield (last seen in "Tristram Shandy")

with archive footage of Raquel Welch (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), John Wayne (ditto), Jimmy Stewart (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Lee Marvin (last seen in "Becoming Mike Nichols"), Gary Cooper, Grace Kelly (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Dick van Dyke (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Sally Ann Howes, Adrian Hall, Heather Ripley and the voice of William Shatner (last seen in "Betty White: First Lady of Television"). 

RATING: 6 out of 10 matchbox cars