Manthast Absolutely amazing

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

wordsmiths_communication For me, there are two things at work here. One is the movie itself, and the other is the message in the movie. You can have an important message present in a less than brilliant film. This film is very good, but it's message is even greater. Now, in February 2016, Bernie Sanders is campaigning for president on the platform of ending Wall Street and banking abuses. He's campaigning for a decent livable minimum wage, and for universal health care. It has always been a struggle between the haves and have-nots. Jimmy is a symbol of all who strive to survive while living in the midst of oppression by the 1%. The photography in the film is first-rate, with many scenes full of rich side-lighting reminding me of Vermeer. The cast is flawless and their daily struggles very true to life. There is no scene chewing, and most performances are quietly real and effective. It was a moving and rewarding experience. On a side note, I came away with tremendous respect for the Irish character. In the midst of hardship in Jimmy's hall, the poor celebrated their true culture, their music, poetry, and dance. It's really a human tragedy that we must play out the same struggle in America 84 years later. Only now it's the conflict between the poor who must drink poisoned water in Flint, while the "Lords" scheme to get more money and power in the Koch brothers boardroom. It will always be so.

Paul Allaer "Jimmy's Hall" (2014 release from Ireland/UK; 109 min.) brings the true story of what happened to Jimmy Gralton upon his return to Ireland in 1932. the movie's opening titles are accompanied by archive footage of New York in the late 20s/early 30s. As the movie opens, we are told it is "County Leitrim, Ireland, 1932", and we see Jimmy coming back to Ireland after 20 years in New York (presumably because of the Depression and related unemployment). It's not long before Jimmy and his friends decide to renovate the Pears-Connelly Hall, so as to give young people and the community a place to gather for dancing, reading, drawing, singing, etc. (we would call it a "community rec center" these days). This does not sit well with the local priest, who claims 'exclusivity' for all things that could be deemed educational, nor are the local landlords pleased. At this point we are 15 min. into the movie, but to tell you more would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.Couple of comments: this is the latest movie be legendary British director Ken Loach, now a crisp 79 years young (and similar to Woody Allen in his never-ceasing output). Loach is well-known for using his films as social commentary, and "Jimmy's Hall" is no exception. For me, that is not an issue, and Loach has made a number of stunningly beautiful and captivating movies over the years. Hence I was ready to like "Jimmy's Hall" very much. Alas, it was not to be, for several reasons: first, the movie is not very helpful to let us understand why certain factions take a particular position (we are never told what beef the landlords have with Jimmy and his friends) or why the issue of the land ownership matters initially, and then a bit later on it doesn't. But the biggest disappointment I have with the film is that at no point did I become emotionally invested in any of the main characters. Yes the local priest is easy to loathe, and we all do, but we are not given a chance to really buy in to Jimmy, or his friends, or his romantic interest. It all just happens, for seemingly no reason. If this was a fictional story, I'd have walked out an hour into the movie, but since this movie is "inspired by the life and times of Jimmy Gralton" (as is announced at the beginning of the movie), I wanted to find out how it would all unfold. There are some fine performances, but I found the chemistry between Jimmy (played by Barry Ward) and his romantic interest (played by Francis Magee) completely lacking and unconvincing. Last but certainly not least, there is a very nice musical score to the movie, featuring both traditional Irish music and jazz from the 20s and 30s.I had seen the trailer for "Jimmy's Hall" a few times and was really looking forward to this. "Jimmy's Hall" finally opened this weekend at my local art-house theater here in Cincinnati. The early evening screening where I saw this at was attended okay but not great (I counted 12 people, including myself, of which one walked out halfway through and didn't come back). As much as I like Ken Loach, this is not none of his best, I'm afraid. But I certainly encourage you to check it out, be it in the theater, on Amazon Instant Video, or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray, and draw your own conclusion about "Jimmy's Hall".

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU Ken Loach is playing on our nostalgia and with his own not to regret or make us regret the past he is describing or the misery he is depicting but to make us feel relieved that all that has disappeared. Over and over again. Film after film.Back to Ireland in the 1930s with flashbacks to the 1920s in a countryside rural parish that is entirely dominated by the catholic church under the responsibility of an old priest who is a fundamentalist. The area is also controlled by one clan of a family of landowners who owns everything and pretends to control the life of everyone. The priest does not hesitate to call the names of those he considers are doing some evil deed directly in the pulpit: he exposes his own parishioners if he disagrees with some of their actions. The landowner has a whole gang of guards and wardens that can use violence to impose the control of their boss. And finally the nazi party is developing in Ireland and trying to impose their rules. In fact on this point Ken Loach is very nice: during the Second World War, the Republic of Ireland and the press there, including some intellectual or writers, decided to remain neutral in the conflict between Great Britain and Germany because of their hostility toward Great Britain: let Hitler give them a lesson, was the idea. This pro- German nazi ideology was quite common and was of course founding itself on a strict fundamentalist approach of the Catholic religion as the compulsory unique unifying element of the whole of Ireland.The film tells the story of a young man, James Gralton, when he comes back from the USA and New York in the 1930s after having been forced to expatriate himself in the 20s by the same people as those hostile to him when he comes back: the catholic church, the landowners, the politicians and all those who have a little bit of authority or power. His crime was in the 1920s to have constructed a community hall where people taught poetry, painting and drawing, music, dancing, etc, freely and where he had balls every week on Saturday nights. He cut a very narrow escape in the 1920s. When he comes back ten years later, the young people ask him to reopen the Hall, and he does. Then the conflict is clear because James Gralton has connection with the Irish Communists and so he is considered as persona non grata from the very start. They are just looking for the good excuse to get rid of him. The occasion comes when one night in the dark some fascistic Ku Klux Klan imitators burn the hall to the ground. James Gralton becomes a menace to public order and he is banished from Ireland for life and sent back to New York on the simple excuse that he has an American passport and hence is a foreigner. In other words he is denied his native Irish nationality.When we watch that film and try to think about the period it depicts, the poverty and the exploitation it paints and the suffering it represents for simple, poor, ordinary working people, we feel the nostalgia about this period where courage existed and where the communist ideology was bringing some hope to the poorest among "us." But the nostalgia is not meaning "That was a good time and it is a shame we have lost it!" The nostalgia is progressive: "Thanks God we have gone beyond that and left it behind: today we can enjoy our life without the constant control of the catholic church, without the dictatorship of landowners and politicians. We are relieved and reassured: that good old time is gone and gone for good and the incestuous, mostly pedophile relation with the catholic church is finished, terminated." You can get the message.Probably Ken Loach should maybe start moving forward to the approach of social, cultural and religious problems in the present context because at the time of the Internet no organization will ever be able to prevent me to learn something and will reduce my learning to what they want me to learn only and nothing else. And yet exploitation, dictatorship and control exist more than ever. Maybe Ken Loach should start working on that theme.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rodolphe Fleury Except for the theme, you can't really recognize it's a Ken Loach film. It's over sentimental, well completely cheesy, horribly Manichean, it has some the most terrible and stiff acting i've seen in years. The scene where Jimmy's old love try the dress he has given her and where they dance together is awkward and disgustingly lit, the least subtle thing in a film that walks with big heavy wooden clogs. The end is a pastiche of Dead Poet Society's ending, some young smiling idiots are chanting for him while cycling behind the police van that is taking our failed hero back to America where he is deported, thank god for us. For a director that has done so much for English cinema, Riff Raff, Lady Bug Lady Bug, Poor Cow ... that made the most political and original films with economy of dialogs, bright and clever scripts, to be reduced to do a ultra conventional period drama, that sometimes over explain things to us like we're complete morons and sometimes is so historically or even narratively so vague to the point where it becomes laughable more than understandable is not only a shame but a waste of talent. It's meant to be all deep and political but in the end it's just a tower of clichés and a competition of bad acting belching a compilation of debilitating dialogs. He said he wanted to stop cinema after doing this atrocious crime against cinema, he should have stop before doing Carla's Song and save us from suffering in front of those boring films that resembles the most soporific history classes of our teenage hood, save THE WIND THAT SHAKES THE BARLEY, is only decent film in the last 20 years of his career. To see a Director sabotaging his legacy is not only appalling but depressing.