'Hunger'

[Doire abú]

When's it in the cinemas?

[gerry]

available hear to watch



http://www.ninjavideo.net/video/10429

[The Gs Man]

Thanks for the link Gerry.  Just finished watching it there.  As Donagh says, superb piece of filmmaking.

[fred the red]

would rather watch it in the cinema than by download myself.

[Main Street]

If you have that choice then do it.

Thanks for the link Gerry.

[Main Street]

Observer article  on McQueen and his film Hunger.

McQueen and country

[lfdown2]

well many more of you seen it?

thoughts? looking forward to seing it myself not a pile of cinemas showing it here in london but a few

[lurganblue]

i saw a good quality copy of it about a month ago. i was very impressed.  there are some very powerful scenes in it... well worth a watch.

[Main Street]

I put off watching Hunger until last weekend.
It's not for the feint hearted.
This is not a Film, it's something else.
It's like an exercise in method filmmaking.
But once you start watching, it just grabs you in a way that  you have never/rarely experienced before in filmmaking.
The camera is a neutral witness, there are no superficial emotions manipulated here.
If you are that way inclined you will walk away from it after 5 minutes.
Most things have been stripped away, drama, dialogue, romance, colour, smiles, light, furniture
and we are left with basic raw savagery and the defiance of the human spirit in the face of that savagery.
The dialogue between Sands and the cynical Priest is central and defines Sands and his decision.
There the camera succeeds in taking you from watching that dialogue from an onlooker to being confronted face to face by something indestructible.
The medical orderly acted by Lalor Roddy succeeded brilliantly in capturing an understated human warmth.

Overall, a superb piece of Filmmaking

[passedit]

Surprised this review made it past the standard's editorial policy 


Horror and bravery in Hunger
By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard  30.10.08
More reviews by Derek Malcolm
  Derek Malcolm
Hunger

Virtuoso: Michael Fassbender gives an uncomfortably brilliant performance as Bobby Sands in the Maze


IT TAKES a brave man to make a film about Bobby Sands, who was committed for 12 years to the Maze prison in 1981 for the possession of firearms and was the first of those who starved themselves to death because the Thatcher Government refused to treat them as political prisoners.

But clearly Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen is such a man. Making his first feature film, he is assisted by a virtuoso performance from Michael Fassbender as Sands that entails a physical representation of death by starvation.

This is not a comfortable film to watch but it is a consistently powerful one which justly won the Camera d'Or for the best debut at Cannes. McQueen hasn't made an ordinary docudrama but a film which attempts with its varying styles to push out beyond a tough and uncompromising realism.

He is as much concerned with the weaknesses and strengths of the flesh as any moral or political statement. We see, often in minute detail, the excreta smeared on the walls of the IRA prisoners walls, the urine forming puddles in the jail's corridors, abandoned food alive with maggots, naked men with badly beaten flesh with police in riot gear bearing down upon them and Sands's own body gradually succumbing to his fast.


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McQueen clearly wants to show us exactly what it was physically like to make such a stand. But he also shows us the perils of being a warder in the Maze, endangered in the prison itself and threatened with death in a grey and fraught world outside.

He does this through the stoic character of Raymond Lohan (very well played by Stuart Graham), whom we first see painfully bathing his bruised hands in a bathroom sink after an encounter with the prisoners. Lohan is an ordinary man with a family who, because of the situation, is drawn into excess. He is not a villain but a pawn in increasingly horrendous circumstances, his personal fastidiousness failing to ward off the filth and stink and moral turpitude of the Maze.

The other notable performance is from Liam Cunningham as the Catholic priest who, in a 22-minute sequence when the camera never moves, argues with Sands about the sense of his martyrdom. Some have found this long scene, however well-played, a distraction from the main matter in hand, which is how humans behave towards one another in extremes. But it is essential to the argument and there surely has to be one section which is not purely relaying the terrible events of the time.

This is where Irish playwright Enda Walsh, co-writer of the screenplay with McQueen, comes in and we realise for the first time how divorced from contact with the outside world, including the Republican leadership, Sands and his fellow prisoners have become.

Hunger is far and away more discomforting than most horror movies. The mind inevitably comes forward 30 years to the present day when events have occurred in Iran and in Cuba that are not so very different. McQueen has not just made a striking film. He has forced us to see how we might behave in strained and unfamiliar circumstances when those who rule us lead us into the mire.



Read Derek Malcolm's latest film reviews every Thursday in the Evening Standard

[Main Street]

There was a long spot on RTE the Pat Kenny show about the film with Lawrence McKeown, Bic McFarlane and some whiney voiced fella of falluted importance.
Started off with discussing the flm, the 2 ex prisoners talked about the film and their reality of their experience.
It was an excellent piece of radio and went on for at least 30 minutes.
Most of time was taken up by McKeown and McFarlane.

Can be listened to by opening this page http://www.rte.ie/radio1/todaywithpatkenny/
click  on  <Listen Live>  above the picture of PK
and select the show  <Today with Pat Kenny>

[Donagh]

The "whiney voiced fella" was Eamonn Mallie the journalist. Not a bad fella and as  far as I can tell, one of the few that's trusted by all sides. Spotted him in a good Irish language programme on TG4 the other night about the Vallely family from Armagh. 

[The GAA]

Malley is from silverbridge.

when is hunger on general release?

[Donagh]

Today in the south. Already showing in the north.

[corn02]

Whilst flicking trying to find the Ireland match on the radio this morning, I cam across an English station debating the film. A few clallers on saying it was like a film gloryfying Osama Bin Laden. Seemed to be the mood that the critics were far too symphatetic to Sands.