Warning! Forty-two Films That Are Completely Full of $%^

If you saw this film and had no real understanding of history or ethics you would get the impression Che Guevara was a morally upstanding humanist, and an intellectual & military strategist par excellence. When in actuality he failed miserably to export his radical politics abroad, ordered the execution of political 'enemies of the state,' and ingratiated himself with Mao Tse Tung (perhaps the most incompetent and embarrassing major world leader of his century). For the sake of his reputation and box-office receipts, the years between Cuba and Bolivia have been wisely omitted. He is an icon whose legitimately interesting flaws & personality (and very life) have been sanitized in order to fit a preconceived and easily digestible ideal. For that reason as much as any, this film is a failure.

Most of the evidence in the Loose Change series is largely observational and scientifically unqualified, but five editions in five years hardly implies credibility anyway. Even more inexplicable is the introduction of the 'definitive edition,' which director and writer Dylan Avery feels a need to include fifteen minutes of allusions to other unsupported conspiracy theories. Most damning, is the simple fact that every issue presented is from only one angle. Which is precisely the point. Some of the 'facts' Avery presents have been in truth refuted by experts, while many other examples of 'evidence' offered as proof of a massive CIA conspiracy are anecdotal or unverifiable at best. In nearly 100 minutes there are only two genuinely significant examples given that may imply a need for further investigation. Over six years the film has been whittled down as experts have debunked many of the conspiracy's various minutia one by one; at this rate there may not be enough unexplained anomalies to even warrant a sixth edition. Far from the most bungled 'Truther' documentary (an honor that goes to the even more annoying 911: In Plane Sight [sic]), it is the most persistent.

Lars von Trier achieves the bad-art-house-movie trifecta: too long, too pretentious, and obnoxiously political. Von Trier's made no effort to hide the fact he dislikes American culture; the sarcastic closing credit illustrates he has an axe to grind. The narration, spastic camera work, and artsy-fartsy set design are also rather horrid. (To paraphrase Roman Polanski, the camera operator appears to suffer from Parkinson's or is busy masturbating.)

Provoking responses via the most over the top melodrama and pseudo-artistic finger wagging, America serves as the effigy for all humanity's worse tendencies and moral crimes. It is an apparent political statement that can't be bothered to pick an issue or contain an actual idea. Only von Trier could manage to make the Mondo Cane guys look subtle and objective. Maybe that figures, after all, this is the same guy who is more renowned for his awkward sense of humor and grating personality than his body of work. Though Von Trier, a pioneer in the genre of avant-garde shlock, at least had the good sense to leave out the Bjork songs this time. This is a mash-up of several styles and cinematic philosophies, but none of them really work, it's just a mean-spirited, repetitive, ugly piece of $%^*.

This 'documentary' can be described as such only in the loosest sense of the definition. There is certainly concern and enough material to make a worthy doc on the effects of political correctness, confirmation bias, and groupthink in academia out there, but this film is too inept to find it.

Aka 'Reefer Madness.' The moral of the film is that it is sometimes worth blatantly lying to your children and fellow citizens in order to protect them. Though in the long run the only real dangers of excessive Marijuana use is short term memory loss, orange Cheeto-fingers, and possible infatuation with jam bands. For the most part, almost every young person in America smokes pot at some point, and few become addicted, and nobody ever turned deranged who wasn't already seriously mentally defective. The funniest part is fact the quality of pot from the Sixties is generally laughed at today by potheads, in the Thirties they must have been smoking dog crap.

David Lynch's Inland Empire might be the most frustrating, futile conceptual film ever made. With an indeciperable plot, undetectable character development, pointless surrealist scenes, grainy and ugly cinematography, a built-in niche fanbase, and the tiresome meta-narrative, this was surely designed with only Cannes judges in mind. For everybody else it is a chore and a cruel joke. And all this is compounded by the fact it is three hours long and probably has to seen at least three times before it makes any semblance of logical sense. Even the cast admitted they had no clue what the film was about (never a good sign), as did most honest critics and viewers. Disguised as deep and innovative 'high art,' Inland Empire is really more a cautionary tale of artistic hubris from a mind out of ideas. Dune didn't end Lynch's career, but this should. Whereas Dune was the story of a naïve, adventurous filmmaker pitted against impossible odds and corporate obligations in an epic production that he was doomed to fail to meet, IE is what happens when a man has too much power, too much freedom. To rate a film this low one must consider its redeeming features, but here one is obliged to ask the question, 'Is there any reason this film needs to exist at all?'

It is hard to believe that this movie was based on any kind of fact, but it is supposed to represent the perils of the Reconstructionist period in southern America. Interesting if only for it's technical innovations, this movie is clearly racially motivated. If you watch carefully you can hear (and by that I mean read the intertitles) one of the characters proudly exclaim the phrase 'Aryan birthright.'

This documentary is generally inauthentic in its insinuation that Palin's credibility problem is anything but self-created. She is depicted as innovative and clever during her reign in Alaska (supposedly 80% approval rating), yet somehow the majority of Americans, even many Republicans, increasingly judge her abilites lacking. This discrepancy is conveniently never adequately elucidated. Furthermore, she is famous for using 'socialism' as an epithet, but in the documentary the main commodity of Alaska (oil) is proudly declared state property by law. Which seems hypocritical to put it mildly.

The stock footage is so generic looking, and musical score & camera work so overly dramatic the whole movie looks like a cheesy Alaskan tourism/campaign advert, which I suppose it is. Even the chapter titles (eg: Act 1: The Servant's Heart - The Seed) are pretentious and cornball. The title itself is especially illogical, for she was defined politically for her defeat then resignation, and all in one year. While perhaps a good fit for Alaska, this documentary seems unable to admit the obvious, Mrs. Palin was just a wide-eyed rube caught in the national headlights for a few months.

Politically it is muddled. As social commentary it is naive and stupid. As art it is derivative and inane. Originally an Orwell rip off for the Eighties, it was revived twenty years later, hoping to feed on anti-war attitudes and the constant kind of unfocused rage that typifies youth and conspiracy buffs. This film is too dumb to realize it is still only the product of an overrated comic book writer and the producers of the even worse Matrix series. The film disregards the successes of non-violent protest for the utterly failed and reprehensible tactics of The Black Panters, KKK, and Baader Meinhof as means of political recognition. The hackneyed film can only comprehend and best articulate the idea of 'fascism' as a vaguely Nazi-esque red and black color scheme, men with facial hair gesticulating wildly on a dais, and police in riot gear -- which is just juvenile and lazy. This is not Bakunin or Goldman, it's fodder for a breed of self-professed 'anarchists' who are essentially illiterate. Even the comic's creator disowned it. Aside being boring and already dated, the film validates its credibility by including Bruce Lee in a halloween mask, and a domino gag that is easily one the dumbest allegorical scenes ever filmed. The real life Guy Fawkes was a bumbling, amoral, religious zealot (part Timothy McVeigh, part 'Underwear bomber') looking to replace one monarchical tyrant for another, a fact likely lost on the majority of the audience and probably the filmmakers. Though, thankfully, I doubt most viewers took it seriously anyway.

It aspires to a cinema-verite like form, but is actually a rather depressing geek show. It obviously is not a straight forward docudrama, or even sincere fiction, since all the non-actors are picked for their eccentricities and coached to seem as absurd and hillbilly as possible. The townspeople are cartoonishly crude, ignorant, racist, repulsive, or otherwise defective, and all are uniformly comical as they wallow in their backwardness, oblivious they are on the outskirts of civilized society. And no mater what defenders may claim, yes, we are meant to pity them and even despise them. They might as well be lemurs in the monkey house their uncouth strangeness is emphasized so stridently. They are uneducated, unself-conscious poor people, a curiousity for the intended audience of hipsters and film nerds. This is avant-garde slumming at its worst.

A quick look at its wikipedia page should tell you everything you need to know. This is preachy, poorly written, right-wing dreck. I refuse to even write another word or expend any more mental energy on its existence.

Notable for its climactic interview with a likely Alzheimers-striken Charlton Heston, Moore fails to even capture a worthwhile interview. Instead he tries to paint the same man who risked his career participating in civil rights marches with MLK as some kind of cold-blooded racist. Moore casts himself, yet again, as humble crusader. Truth is, he is a lot like Fox News; he hampers rational discourse and distorts reality. The sheer amount of pandering, diversions, and false humility is evident in scenes meticulously staged and edited for maximum effect. Though his aims are admirable and he makes a few good points, his premises are often faulty. His example of Columbine as representative of gun crime in the US is grossly misleading. His 'culture of fear' theory doesn't explain the bulk of gun crime or correlate with homocide statistics, and actually convienently ignores real social factors behind criminal behavior that can easily be found in a Criminology 101 textbook (which do not include Eisenhower's foriegn policy decisions, Colgate ads, or Dick Clark as factors). I could have placed a few other of Moore's self-centric, logically-oblique movies on this list, but this is the worst. Moore is, and always has been, a poor man's Adam Curtis.

Saving you a history lesson, I'll admit Thomas More was in fact a devout Catholic martyr, who stood up to his king on principle. He was also a fanatic, self-mortifying hypocrite. He censored books, despised free speech, and did little to stop the cruel imprisonment or burning of heretics. He himself was executed by his former master, and later canonized by a grateful Catholic Church. His deeds are far from saintly, however.

I'll take abuse for this, but this movie is dumber than it thinks it is, and if you like it you probably are too. Avoiding a debate on the validity of the 'Savanah Principle,' I'll just say this movie is based on casual assumptions and junk logic. Worse, Idiocracy implicitly panders to a narrow audience and condescends toward others, not really a good combination if you have pretentions towards being a 'biting satire.' Basically everything that is associated with the lower or working classes is considered subhuman. The fact that the film unintentionally paraphrases Francis Galton while attempting to criticize mainstream American society, albeit without actually taking a stand against anything concrete, pretty much says it all. It is arguably one of the more judgemental movies ever made. That Shakespeare stooped to writing plays for the 'groundlings' is also probably a fact that escapes these film makers' attention. The fact they would equate pop culture with low I.Q. is lazy. The fact they do it it with such oblivion, worse yet.

I like unapologetic political incorrectness but considering its cliched criticisms of consumerism and assumed (?) support of eugenics (limiting the overbreeding of 'dumb people' while advocating more 'smart breeding') I'd say the writers raised ethical and sociological questions they are frankly too ignorant and out of their depth to adequately address in depth.

You have to give 'The Duke' credit for trying, but no amount of effort could save this movie or the public's support for The Vietnam War. Informed it is no longer cool to shoot Indians, Wayne switched to another minority. The overall atmosphere of the Vietnam conflict is lost; there is no rampant drug use or any subtlety related to the nature of guerilla warfare. The film doesn't fully explore just how much the South Vietnamese population resented their own government and the US presence. Hell, even McNamara admitted we were interfering in a civil war. The enemy wears matching uniforms, their general lives in a mansion, and the US bombers are always precise with no indiscriminate napalm carpet-bombing. In the end the cynics are converted by witnessing the compassion of the US military. The last thirty minutes are ridiculous.

Like Bob Dylan himself, this movie ambles self-assuredly and with disregard to conventional thinking. That strategy made Dylan an enigmatic legend, but I'm Not There is instead intensely annoying. Some of the troupe of actors, who depict him throughout his life, do a clownish impersonation of Dylan, and the others don't feel the need at all to even attempt a convincing Dylan act, all of them spouting referential, throwaway lines and utter nonsense. I am less sure who the man truly was (and is), and I actually find him less interesting after watching this slick but forgettable mess. Its failed, cryptic profoundity and chic, meaningless allusions to Dylan's most superficial affectations render this movie less an explorative biography than a hollow experiment, or worse, pretentious Oscar-bait.

A film so hacky it can only suggest genius through mathematical equations, blue-collar drudgery through mopping floors, and emotion through yelling or weeping. Matt Damon plays Stephen Hawking in James Dean's body, but the most irritating part is that the genius of the title character is noticably equated to his supposedly profound progressive politics. The character played by (and written by) Matt Damon, himself a Harvard student, spouts platitudes from academic Howard Zinn, while he disses students who 'regurgitate' their professors and political jargon. Just one example of the movie being dumber than its own premise. The character arguably operates as an idealized version of Damon himself (a Mary Sue if you will). He broods sexily and intimidates professors with his intellect.

The character never says or does much that would show giftedness, he's just a hunky, know-it-all jerk who apparently has the inexplicable abilities of an autistic savant (but, of course, none of the negative attributes because that would be too difficult to write). He has a complete breakthrough in just a handful of Dr Phil-like therapy sessions despite a lifetime of severe psychological & physical trauma and a possible personality disorder. Yes, only Patch Adams himself can cure the troubled genius that is Matt Damon, I mean Will Hunting.

And this won an Oscar for writing over Boogie Nights.

Morgan Spurlock has built a career on making films about fairly benign issues. The only thing worse than his local newscaster approach to investigative journalism is his shameless self-promotion. Fast food is unhealthy, yeah, no kidding. His work, while honest, never fails to elicit a resounding 'duh.'

Gandhi should be respected for preaching tolerance and peaceful resistance, but the man's life was a little more complex than what you read on a plaque. Richard Attenborough's film is so reverential and deferencial that you would think he actually was a demi-god. He had demons, some of which are not so easily glossed over. Where are they? Various critics have argued with some persuasiveness, he was a hypocrite regarding racial issues, impractical regarding WWII, an embittered social-climber turned oppurtunist, a luddite, a naive political amateur, a cultural chauvinist, a sexual 'weirdo,' and a fanatical, vain ascetic. Whether they fit in with the Gandhi myth or not, these are valid, ethically amibiguous aspects of the man's life raised by noted writers and historians which shouldn't be ignored. This film is just politically correct hagiography, it was never intended to be anything but.

Though the John Travolta speech falsely promises a whip smart movie unlike typical 'Hollywood trash,' Swordfish is only mildly more clever than the aforementioned glut of mass-produced, Hollywood, star-vehicle bombs. And in retrospect, no less indistinguishable. The movie features some of the most irritatingly stupid cliches known, among them multiple scruffy yet hip hackers (the main one played by a ripped, tatted-up, shirtless Hugh Jackman) and a plot that involves an out-of-luck felon who only takes 'the toughest job in his life' to be reunited with his long lost daughter. The film doesn't realize how stiflingly pretentious it comes off, but that's the least of its problems. This is not to mention the most memorable scene (or perhaps second most memorable) which apparently takes place at the Roxbury club from the SNL skit circa 1995. The painfully hackneyed hacking montages decimate whatever credibility the film retained.

If I didn't sound like a cynical jerk already, I definitely will now; someone has to state this. Upon a closer look, Rudy's goal is petty, his acheivement is hollow and insignificant, and he really only reaches it through a mixture of convoluted karma and collective pity. This is reminiscent of disabled players who are allowed to play and even score meaningless points in HS sports, with the tacit acceptance by both teams that the final minutes are inconsequential anyway. I personally find this mentality demeaning and counterproductive, but Rudy is not a movie about dignity, afterall (nor apparently historical accuracy). In real life, the annoying title character has gone on to make a career shamelessly selling his inflated moment of notoriety. When Joe Montanta, himself a third-stringer on that same team (who later became a HoF QB) debunked the myth as an exaggeration, he was attacked. Which seems to confirm the bizarre lengths people will go to not just to believe but also perpetuate nonsense and feel-good stories.

Perhaps those of you that don't believe in karma will take note that Notre Dame lost nine straight bowl games after this dorky, self-aggrandizing film was released. A sardonic warning to any potential recruits inspired by this Disney-fied story of mediocrity, and the habitually overexposed football team that spawned it.

The most celebrated piece of propaganda ever made. Politics (and radical politics in particular) has a tendency to kill art when not busy killing real people, however the worst part is the fact that this movie is actually legitimizing a reigme that perpetrated massacres much worse than the pro-Czarist one memoralized here. The film bears little similarity with the actions that actually happened in Odessa, despite the insinuation this is a docudrama. I personally believe the film's true motivation and purpose was to obscure and overshadow an embarrassing anti-Bolshevik, naval uprising at Kronstadt. The fabled montage technique would help the USSR's cabal co-opt history, unscrupulously re-editing and reappropriating a revolution they had hijacked. ('Potemkin' coincidentally is a euphemism for a politically motivated sham to hide uncomfortable truths dating back to the era of Catherine II... a funny aside now, but a bleak irony then.) Any film that crassly cashes in on bloodshed to support one of the most gory governments in the 20th Century is vile, especially when the subtext reads: Joseph Stalin is your savior. Unlike the hare-brained pro-collectivization Earth, which had the bad luck to precede one of the worst state-induced famines of all time, BP was even less unethical. This 'masterpiece' is pseudo-journalistic p.r. Goebbels could drool over.

Neither creepy nor interesting nor innovative, this is a true turd. Indulgent and silly, this shlocky, trippy horror short by Kenneth Anger is evidence experimental short films as a rule should be ignored as anything but novelties. The 'film' (really just a lot of scrap footage from an earlier satanic-themed short) capitalizes on Mick Jagger's vain rebel self-image (and desperation to branch out into film) and Anger's presumed laziness and adolescent obsession with the devil. Up to this point, Satanism might have actually been frightening, but after, it looks like a rather cheesy fad. This is a home movie, a film project for undergraduates, but not a proper piece of art. The sad part is that Anger has actually made several decent short films before this one. In any case, avoid this at all costs, which considering its obscurity is actually quite easy.

While the film exposes the banality of the contemporary art scene (a movement illustrated by Shepard Fairey, a liberal dove who hawks $120 branded sweaters and framed posters of a president who keeps Gitmo open and uses robots to kill people never convicted of any crime -- the cognitive dissonance in this film is rich indeed) well, it's the fact that everyone involved in this film is either too disingenuous or clueless to admit that art is and has traditionally always been a luxury good more than a tool of expression that is more notable. Only in modern times has it been appropriated as culture by society at large, usually in the form of kitsch. But 'important' art is still dictated and anointed by elitist tastemakers, whether that is the Medicis, Clement Greenberg, Charles Saatchi, or Christina Aguilera (I wish I was joking).

Avant-garde art is no less capitalistic than tradition art, but with a distinct aura of 'authenticity,' encapsualted here by a fawning LA hipsters and an angelic choir heralding the arrival of Banksy, himself more a persona than a person. More obnoxiously, he is reluctant to admit street art had long been just another marketable fad complete with pr agents and coffee-table books, hardly a medium of social protest. The 'documentary' is also too up its own ass to bother to tell you that all art today is essentially performance art. The march toward demolishing the line between art and lifestyle branding is complete. We are intended to admire savvy guys like Banksy because he casts himself as the voice of reason and political consciousness. Yet as we are compelled to hold Mr. Brainwash (aka MBW) in contempt because he's a naive poseur, MBW's art so flawlessly imitates the modern pop/street art aesthetic it actually functions as a worthy parody. In the end no one could tell the difference, though to Bansky's defense, this film at least aspires toward subtext unlike most of his work. To decry Banksy --- as a betrayed naïf, as the film would like us to view him; a bitter rival, as he more approximately resembles; an insincere hoaxster, as he probably is; or a sell out or a philistine lumpenintelligentsia, as his harsher detractors insist -- is beside the point. He's a hypocrite for criticizing the same snobs, the same soulless industry, and the same brainlessly conformist fanbase that made him the rich and world famous brand he is.

This film earns a spot on this list for the months of (ultimately) disappointing hype and a cynical marketing campaign. A campaign that continues to this day, flaunting this unwatchable piece of crap as a cult film. While cult films are legitimately eccentric, well-meaning but doomed labors of love, Snakes on a Plane is exactly the opposite. It is a custom cult movie, that is to say a glossy, corporate hoax built around an A-list actor.

Realizing it was utter $%^&, it repackaged itself as a medium-budget satire of real indie horror films, capitalizing on a maligned genre to recoup losses while basically mocking those types of movies. SoaP hyped itself as a postmodern and interactive film experience, downplaying the desperate, viral dupe it turned out to be. In the end, it was a soulless, stupid bore. The basic cable re-dubbing actually captures the hokey cult aesthetic precisely because it's so defensive and random. Even SoaP's celebrated and supposedly 'redeeming' signature line is infinitely inferior and less clever than the worst throwaway puns of a bureaucratic network censor.

As much an ode to Orson Welles' skill in hucksterism as Nostradamus' fabled charlatanism, this film is one of the final in Welles' career. Which is a shame, because it is one of his most embarrassing, or perhaps, mercifully his last, if you want to look at it from another angle. Several of the sixteenth century seer's famed predictions featured prominently are blatantly wrong (a catastrophic world war in 1999 is just one), the others merely coincidental. Many of his celebrated 'bullseyes' are less convincing when inspecting the quatrains in full detail. If vagueness isn't enough to condemn them to the ash bin, mistaken predictions should be. The now infamous quatrains that many modern fans claim predict Sept. 11 are omitted, naturally because they were so nonsensical and inaccurate they were useless in predicting anything. Only a small handful of his thousand or so quatrains are actually considered accurate predictions by his supporters, and even those quatrains are striking only out of some base humans desire to seek patterns and make sense of chaos. I think I can make sense of this mess, Orson needed some rent money.

Ingmar Bergman's Persona, unfortunately seems to validate many a casual viewer's belief that art-house films are merely stiflingly pretentious, post-modernist babble. There in lies the tragedy, Bergman gave into the unnecessary fad of ungainly symbolism and experimental gestures popular in the late sixties when he had been churning out conventional masterpieces for decades. Apparently he doesn't realize he doesn't need to remind us of the 'artifice of cinema' when ninety percent of his audience will be forced to read subtitles all while ignoring the Scandinavian-tinged gibberish in b & w. The film is dense, despite its length and sparse design, it's practically as subjective as a rorschach inkblot. As a rule, anytime you need to read a twenty-page Susan Sontag essay to really make sense of a movie, it is probably too academic or too muddled for its own good. All Bergman's films are 'serious,' but this is one of the few that shouldn't be taken seriously.

Unlike its predecessor Power, also based on the novel of the executed Eighteenth-Century 'court Jew' Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, Jud Suss is noticably less politically correct. That's an understatement; this film was made in Nazi Germany and likely shows the fingerprints of Mr. Goebbels himself (what are the odds I'd mention that man's name twice in one list). You can decide for yourself since it's free on Youtube. But be warned, besides being anti-Semitic it is also largely devoid of artistic merit. I'll spoil the ending anyway, the Jew did it. The Jews always are to blame.

In retrospect this is the most morbid black comedy ever made. The pathetically delusional, and likely mentally unhinged subject, Tim Treadwell, proudly took little or no precautions to protect himself or his girlfriend. And as one might expect, inevitably was eaten by the bears he claimed to have 'befriended.' It appears in his decades spent in the federal reserves of Alaska, 'protecting' animals, he learned quite little. A self-aggrandizer and animal rights advocate, he ironically helped reinforce a negative image of bears as ruthless, scary killing machines, and nature as a whole as nothing but an egoistic, barbaric game of survival. Werner Herzog arrives shortly after to up the absurdity of the debacle, exploiting the pointless and avoidable carnage, but depriving the audience of the rubbernecking pleasure they surely paid to see, ie the audio recording of the attack. Arguably, there is more to be learned in the lessons of his untimely death than the many wasted living years. This is a tragic farce with ample shame for all, including the director and viewer. I told you this was comedic, didn't I?

This gem is probably among the greatest of all propaganda films. A 'breast fetish' among American men, really? Who knew? Perversion for Profit, narrated by George Putnam, and financed by a man who later went to prison for selling junk bonds, manages to link skin mags to nefarious conspiracies involving communists, gays, pedophiles (back then considered synonymous with homosexuals), crossdressers, and sadists, all within a brief thirty-minute running time. The narrator's dire warnings, backed up by the presumed expertise of a Harvard professor, 'Dr Sorokin,' attributes almost every negative behavior imaginable to stag pamphlets and muscle magazines. Comical, and sometimes horrifying, this documentary actually does a decent job chronicling the primitive pornography industry and puritanism of a pre-sexually liberated era.

Produced by Amaru Entertainment, a company founded by Shakur's mother to distribute his unreleased material, this documentary was surely only designed to rehab Tupac Shakur's image and inflate record sales. Though he claims, as posthumous narrator, redemption and social awareness are major themes in his life and work, real life contradicts that delusional, self-serving assertion (hours before he died, he initiated a gang-related fist fight over jewelry, and then bragged about it).

His life's philosophy was fatalistic and convoluted, his justification for his immature & hypocritical lyrics were not convincing. He thrived on the same stereotypes he claimed to transcend, and he fomented one of the most inane & deadly feuds in music history purely out of ego, but also probably money. And while we see he was a charismatic guy with an introspective side and great backstory, he is largely a fictional creation. Admirers literally build monuments to him, but his legacy is dodgy.

Checking off every leftist talking point from the prior two decades, this film nonetheless grounds itself in bitter, immature, conspiratorial fantasies to explain how a politician the filmmakers didn't vote for could possibly get elected. Worse, the film depicts the IRA (the same IRA that killed five people trying to assassinate said elected official five years prior) as mostly innocuous freedom fighters, while painting the British and Unionists as murderous gangsters. Lost amid the thinly-disguised pro-Republican sentiment is the fact the populace of Northern Ireland overwhelmingly voted to remain British, thus, rendering the IRA foreign-funded terrorists. Unable to justify the IRA's violence, or more importantly, Republican claims to a united Ireland, Loach can only discredit a British govt to score political points. It's the type of movie where we know the 'good guys' are good because they are constantly shown being harrassed minding their own business, and the 'bad guys' bad because they admit they are corrupt, torture, and kill people. The mingling of deadly current events with a plot this narrow-minded and glib is a little sickening. The core subject matter is complex enough as it is. The film is not even really about 'The Troubles' as much as it is UK politics, as even the director would admit. Invoking the worst Swiftian cliche, there appears no more convenient political fodder for British intellectuals than dead Irish.