The Angels’ Share (***1/4)

“Comedic” is not  a word one would generally apply to the films of Ken Loach, whose films spotlight the struggles of working-class Britain (or Los Angeles, in the case of 1999’s Bread and Roses). Like Sweet 16 (but with older teens), the setting here is (primarily) Glasgow, and, like that movie, it’s helpfully subtitled. The variety of English is both distinctively accented and filled with delightfully unfamiliar lingo, and that’s even before the plot’s oddest and most unique element, which is its central character’s newfound interest in high-end whiskey, comes up.

Why, it’s just like Sideways, if instead of California wine snobs the central characters were a Scottish trying-to-reform teen thug and his “community payback”-serving friends. He has a family vendetta against him, a newborn son, and a scar on his face that further dims his job prospects, yet this film is indeed a comedy. Its sympathies lie, as always with Loach, with the underdogs, and he has collaborated with his frequent screenwriting partner Paul Laverty (who also wrote Sweet Sixteen), yet the approach is a touch lighter, more likely to appeal to a mainstream sensibility, especially the second half, wherein the group of friends embarks on an unlikely caper. And, yes, some of it is pretty funny.

IMDb link

viewed 3/21/2013 7:30 pm at Gershman Y [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22–4/28/13

Stone of Destiny (***)

In 1950, Glasgow University student Ian Hamilton (Charlie Cox), hoping to stir up Scottish nationalism, led an effort to steal the venerated titular stone from Westminster Abbey in London. Hamilton’s account of the adventure is the basis for this straightforward accounting of the event.

Writer-director Charles Martin Smith (an American-born Canadian) doesn’t attempt to depict the history of Scottish nationalism, or the reasons for it. Instead, this is simply a lightly comic rendering of an interesting footnote in the history of a movement that continues to have force today. Robert Carlyle plays the university head who inspired Hamilton.

IMDB link

viewed at Prince (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/31/09