Hope you've had a good half term. Interestingly I notice that not one of you has been on your blogs over half term. This tells me that you are not taking it seriously enough! You MUST update your blogs with interesting things you see, but especially things to do with your case study.
I had a quick think about a film that represented class; a film called The Angel's Share. Below are my findings from 12 minutes of work. Yes I may be a Media Studies and English teacher, but you don't need to do much to find info on films! You must get this sorted ASAP as I am expecting to see all of your films posted online in the next week, with resources and information about them and some analysis of the resources that you have chosen.
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Here is a review from The Observer website. Because the observer has a higher class of readership, and is aimed at middle and upper class people, the review is very much targeted at them. It contains a mixture of information about the director, which suggests that the audience might already know who he is, and it also contains information about the film itself. It promotes the film in a favourable way with sentence such as 'warm hearted' and 'deft' suggesting that the Observer enjoyed the film.
The Angels' Share – review
Ken Loach expertly combines comedy with politics – and a drop of the hard stuff – in a warm, deftly-plotted heist movie
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'We fervently wish for their caper to succeed': the heist crew in Ken Loach's The Angels' Share.
Though not generally considered a comedy director, Ken Loach has made films that have contained some of the funniest moments and sequences of the past 50 years, and he has regularly employed club comedians in serious roles (Crissy Rock in Ladybird Ladybird, John Bishop in Route Irish) and developed the talents of people such as Ricky Tomlinson not previously considered comics. It's just that Loach is a master of sudden, disturbing shifts of mood, and the comedy is embedded in works that are often deeply sad or tragic. The football game, for instance, that Brian Glover referees in Kes is at once hilariously funny and a brilliant study of bullying, bad education and humiliation that illuminates the film's larger context.
The background of The Angels' Share, his latest collaboration with the leftwing Scottish lawyer turned screenwriter Paul Laverty, is the widespread, seemingly permanent youth unemployment and the despair and communal erosion it engenders. But the realistic and humanistic tone is bracingly optimistic, and it's one of the 75-year-old Loach's sprightliest films, made at an age when most directors have hung up their viewfinders, entered a period of terminal decline or settled for repeating themselves.
The movie begins with a group of criminals brought together by chance in the manner of The Usual Suspects and gradually modulates into a heist comedy that combines two classic Scottish films, both directorial debuts from different eras, Alexander Mackendrick's Whisky Galore!(1949) and Bill Forsyth's That Sinking Feeling (1980).
The young offenders, played by non-professional actors who perform brilliantly under Loach's sympathetic direction, are introduced at Glasgow's City Court when pleading guilty to a variety of crimes. Their demeanour is playfully contrasted with the solemnity of the bewigged judge, and most of the offences are quite minor – petty theft, defacing public statues, drunkenness in a public place. However, one of the defendants, Robbie (Paul Brannigan), is up for grievous bodily harm, and he's only saved from another custodial sentence because his girlfriend is eight months pregnant.
All of them are given community service and are fortunate to come under the supervision of Harry (John Henshaw, a familiar face from TV drama and the occasional movie), a middle-aged, working-class Mancunian who forges a bond with Robbie. He's as sympathetic a figure as Colin Welland's teacher in Kes and Peter Mullan's soccer coach in My Name is Joe and brings a wealth of unpatronising understanding to his charges' lives and problems. The unemployed Robbie, determined to go straight and be a good father, appears to have everything against him – a history of violence (there's a revealing razor scar on his left cheek) and his girlfriend's brutal father, who's determined to get him out of Glasgow and away on his own, whether by force or bribery. Harry could be his salvation.
At this point a major dramatic and thematic device appears to link the action, the humour and the ironic morality, and it's whisky. Harry is a connoisseur of fine single malt. He pours a dram to celebrate Robbie's fatherhood. He takes the group of offenders, who are doing public service, painting old community centres and cleaning cemeteries, on a tour of a distillery and then to a whisky tasting in Edinburgh. These occasions constitute a delightful documentary on scotch, its history, production and consumer appreciation. By revealing that Robbie has a natural nose for the hard stuff, it also leads to his discovery of a vocation, his return to crime and his ultimate redemption.
In Whisky Galore! some Scottish villagers help themselves when a whisky-laden merchant ship is wrecked on their shores. In That Sinking Feeling some unemployed teenagers in a desolate late 1970s Glasgow plan the robbery of a warehouse containing stainless steel sinks. Crime is not new in Loach's work, and characters in past films, though not explicitly here, clearly believe in the dictum of the French anarchist and social reformer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon that property is theft. They rustle sheep, rob a sporting goods van to equip their football team with strips, make away with the grass from the bowling green of (naturally) a Conservative club.
In The Angels' Share, Robbie and the companions hear of an extremely valuable old whisky being auctioned at a Highland distillery and plan an ultra lo-tech heist to give them the nest-egg they need. You might infer here that the thieves believe whisky is part of the Scottish legacy that the boys' ancestors were robbed of when the Highland clearances took place. The unwitting participants in their plot are Harry, who has encouraged Robbie's newfound passion, and a sophisticated broker who deals in rare whisky (the excellent Roger Allam who, coincidentally, has a strong resemblance to Alexander Mackendrick).
So there is politics underlying every aspect of this funny, warm-hearted, deftly plotted film, and we fervently wish for the caper planned by this endearing quartet to succeed. We care for them in a way we don't for the cool, cynical confidently smirking George Clooney in his slickOcean's Eleven heist movies. The film's title, The Angels' Share, is apparently the term used to refer to the 2% of whisky that evaporates in the cask each year. An interesting item of distilling lore, it's initially a joke about capitalist exploitation that turns at the end of the film into a metaphor for generosity and gratitude.
The stills from the film suggest a defiance against authority, and represent the characters as willing to stand up against the law, and as quite rebellious. Additionally, the trailer represents Scottish people as fond of a drink, and as people who get into trouble with the law. This could be seen to be a little stereotypical by some audiences (would link with reception theory here).
Audiences would feel an affinity to this film because it is, like the Observer reviewer noted, 'warm hearted' and the feeling within the trailer is similar to that of the trailer to the Full Monty. The Full Monty ....(go on to detail some of the info about this).....similarly The Angel's Share (info about what it took at the box office)....
Because the institution that made this film made it with a fairly low budget (info about the budget), the film's setting is fairly local and obviously didn't cost a lot of money.
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