Angels With Dirty Faces and Blitz
May. 13th, 2013 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redfiona99One of these is a very good film. The other is Blitz.
Angels With Dirty Faces is one of the many things my mother and grandmother disagree about. My Nan loves it and my mother loathes it. Of course, I'm quite fond of it. (There was a BBC sitcom about three generations living in the same house called Dad [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad_(TV_series)] and while it was never a hit, me and my Nan thought it was hilarious.)
I mean, it's very much of it's time and I'm not sure you could make it nowadays, because it's so sincere. And a large part of it's success is down to Pat O'Brien as Father Connolly, in the tradition sense of it's harder to play good than it is to play charismatic bad. Not that Rocky is ever evil or bad. To me, that's another of the brilliant things about it, that there's a different between someone who does bad things and someone who is evil.
I'm in the camp that says Rocky is faking turning yellow at the end. Because otherwise it makes no sense. The scene where Father Connolly asks him to do that is even more amazing, because he knows what he's asking and how much your appearance is to a crook.
Blitz meanwhile is at best, a muddled mess. Paddy Considine is brilliant as Porter Nash and Aiden Gillen manages to top even his usual fine line is high energy crazy.
Jason Statham and Zawe Ashton do their best with severely under-written characters while Mark Rylance is pretty much wasted as Roberts, and he's one heck of a talent to waste.
The film seems to be torn between being a very dark procedural, which I could live with, where Brant does get held responsible for his actions and being a straight forward bad Dirty Harry take off, where he doesn't. And Brant is so exceptionally obnoxious that I want him to get a comeuppance. And then he'll do something lovely, and I assume that they're going to dark procedural, and then something flamingly unrealistic occurs and I realise that whoever wrote the film had no idea what they were doing.
Angels With Dirty Faces is one of the many things my mother and grandmother disagree about. My Nan loves it and my mother loathes it. Of course, I'm quite fond of it. (There was a BBC sitcom about three generations living in the same house called Dad [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad_(TV_series)] and while it was never a hit, me and my Nan thought it was hilarious.)
I mean, it's very much of it's time and I'm not sure you could make it nowadays, because it's so sincere. And a large part of it's success is down to Pat O'Brien as Father Connolly, in the tradition sense of it's harder to play good than it is to play charismatic bad. Not that Rocky is ever evil or bad. To me, that's another of the brilliant things about it, that there's a different between someone who does bad things and someone who is evil.
I'm in the camp that says Rocky is faking turning yellow at the end. Because otherwise it makes no sense. The scene where Father Connolly asks him to do that is even more amazing, because he knows what he's asking and how much your appearance is to a crook.
Blitz meanwhile is at best, a muddled mess. Paddy Considine is brilliant as Porter Nash and Aiden Gillen manages to top even his usual fine line is high energy crazy.
Jason Statham and Zawe Ashton do their best with severely under-written characters while Mark Rylance is pretty much wasted as Roberts, and he's one heck of a talent to waste.
The film seems to be torn between being a very dark procedural, which I could live with, where Brant does get held responsible for his actions and being a straight forward bad Dirty Harry take off, where he doesn't. And Brant is so exceptionally obnoxious that I want him to get a comeuppance. And then he'll do something lovely, and I assume that they're going to dark procedural, and then something flamingly unrealistic occurs and I realise that whoever wrote the film had no idea what they were doing.
