One of my favourite films of all time is Peter Mullan's Orphans. In fact I love the film so much I can be a bit of pain in the arse about it - proselytizing and preaching at people, urging them to check it out, in the same way your average SWPer tells you that every Respect campaign is really, really brilliant.
I guess people put me love for the film down to some sort of atavistic Glasgow thing or a bad case of the lapsed Catholics: at a push I can plead guilty to the former, but the latter don't apply in my case. I come from a *cough* mixed family (roughly translated as one side of the family are left footers) of professional don't knows, don't cares, and the "hedge your bets on your death bed just in case - get them all in to say a few words to make sure your name is on the guest list if there is a trip upstairs. The Priest, Vicar, Iman, Rabbi and the woman with the crystals" brigade
It is just a really, really brilliant - shit, I'm coming down with a case of the 'SWPS' now. I'll be breaking out the petition next - film. A mixture of tears in the eyes humour, lump in the throat family drama and the best use of Billy Connolly in a film ever (Sorry Billy, the quality of your jokes are now in inverse proportion to the size of your ego)which confused the hell out of the Joshuas and Jemimas in the Marketing Dept of the film's financiers, Channel Four, when they saw the final cut of the film. Rest assured the Joshuas and Jemimas quickly recovered their composure and did what they do best when faced with a film that they can't shoe horn into a soundbite on a poster: they fucked up its distribution and let it disappear to the bottom shelf of the video section in your local library. (You couldn't find it in Blockbusters - there was not enough room on the shelves for a single copy of the film alongside the 50 copies of 'Notting Hill'.)
I'm getting off the written track of the post as per usual. My reason for the post is 'cos when reading an old Peter Mullan interview I came across the following admission from Mullan about a key scene in the film that made me smile. I always wondered how traditions start:
Peter Mullan: "In a way, the four main characters in Orphans are the way I felt after my mother died divided into four. So each of those characters represent elements of how I felt, but what happens to them in the course of the film is completely fictional. The only thing in Orphans that really happened is the opening. My eldest brother, as we stood around our mother's coffin - we had no ceremony to fall back on even though we're working class Irish Catholic and we didn't know what to do. Well, he had a pair of scissors and he made each of us clip off a bit of hair - and I thought, "Wow, this must be some ancient, Celtic thing". And when it came to him, he took this big, fuck-off chunk from his head - it was like the opposite of De Niro in Taxi Driver - this big lump of alopecia and he threw it at her coffin. And it was so irreverent but we were all thinking "This must be something from Donegal". So I asked him about it later if it was some family tradition, and he said "Nope, I just made it up. I thought it sounded really good". We were thinking that we'd connected with death and life and the universe and this wanker had just made it up. God forbid that he had found a pair of garden shears - he might have told us to cut our ears off, and to be honest I'd probably have done it."
5 comments:
What a hilarious quote.
In fact, I have a petition here for those who support such comments.
Would you like to sign it?
Just realised something re the Rangers Ad at the top of my page. It didn't come from me ha ha but from you! It's the weird way blogger ad works. You followed the link to my site from yours. It picked up something from your to put in the ad. I've tried this before e.g. go into:
www.thenewleaf.blogger.com
Then look for the link to my site (3rd bottom) Then I bet you a pound to a pinch of shite, your ad at
the top has some burberry shit on it.
Same goes for any other link you follow via blogger. Whichever site you were on sends an advert weird or what.
In case you haven't seen the Orphans DVD, I can't recommend it highly enough - especially Mullan's commentary, which kicks off with "Welcome to the world of DVD, ya sad anorak bastards" and continues in a similar vein for the full running time, with tons of anecdotes and hilarious self-flagellating about bits that didn't work. It's worth the price for that on its own, but there are loads of other extras, including two of his early short films.
Michael wrote:
"In case you haven't seen the Orphans DVD, I can't recommend it highly enough - especially Mullan's commentary, which kicks off with "Welcome to the world of DVD, ya sad anorak bastards" and continues in a similar vein for the full running time, with tons of anecdotes and hilarious self-flagellating about bits that didn't work. It's worth the price for that on its own, but there are loads of other extras, including two of his early short films."
O.K - who wants to buy a kidney? One careful owner and only 32 years of age. Nearest offer to the tune of $22.49. Promise to send it via second class post with a few ice cubes in a jiffy bag.
Hi Street Ingrate. Many people are worried about the welfare state--and so they should be. The Labour government, like so many governments around the world, is attempting to cut back on social spending because the capitalist class can no longer afford to pay for it at its previous levels. In times of economic difficulty welfare spending is always the first element of state expenditure for governments to look to cut back. For the last two decades in particular governments across much of the industrialised world have been trying to cut back social spending--indeed, this was a project of the Tories in Britain when they were elected in 1979.
Cutting welfare spending, however, hasn't been easy. Restructuring of the economy to bolster a sagging rate of profit has taken place alongside an ever growing welfare budget which government after government has pledged itself to tackle. Within weeks of his election Tony Blair made it apparent that his government was in reality (despite the rhetoric) further to the right than both Thatcher and Major because it was this government which was prepared to "think the unthinkable" and make the necessary "hard choices". From a materialist point of view this simply meant that as the economic difficulties of the period have progressed, the austerity measures required to deal with them have also progressed, and that Blair is aware of this.
This reality is already filtering home to many of the working class. If they are unemployed, disabled, a pensioner or a single parent (in other words, a huge swathe of the population) it is difficult for them to rest in their beds easily. Government talk of the "stakeholder society" and of the "new deal" fools few of them now--workers do not even have to be very interested in politics to appreciate that the government is embarked on a classic austerity programme.
In France recently there have been riots over unemployment, and in Germany a few months ago angry steelworkers clashed with the police. As France and Germany prepare for the Euro (which will be used as an excuse for more austerity cuts, that's even if it doesn't directly lead to any) we can expect such expressions of class struggle to increase. And it is indeed a class issue. For however the capitalists and their mouthpieces try to divide us--employed against unemployed, the nuclear family against single parents--a united class struggle within capitalism but against it my our only answer
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