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talktoolooseThe weekend turned into a Michael Fassbender festival. After watching him as Magneto on Friday, we saw him play jailed IRA terrorist, Bobby Sands in the riveting movie, Hunger. The movie takes place in the Maze prison in Belfast in 1981, where IRA inmates were fighting for the right to be treated as political prisoners instead of common criminals. The movie deals with the period leading up to and including Sands' hunger strike and death.
"Hunger" is an astonishing movie which, instead of taking sides in the depiction of "The Troubles," showed the devastating effects on all involved, from the abused IRA prisoners to the prison officials, suffering panic attacks as they check daily under their cars for bombs.
The movie had an audacious tempo! The first 50 minutes are loud and violent with a dense mise-en-scène, and all of a sudden, all is silent. Sands meets with a priest to use him as a sounding board for his reasons to go on the hunger strike. The scene begins with a 17-minute, unbroken two-shot with the two men mostly in silhouette. It is an unbelievable dialogue, a play within a movie. It leads to the almost wordless final 20 minutes which take place during the hunger strike. Sands drifts into a memory from his childhood that gives a new context to the movie, and offers the only images of nature and freedom we see in the film.
One more thing: we need to organize a film festival called "Margaret the Monster." All movies showing the devastating effects of her war on the poor and disenfranchised, her stiff-upper-lipped condemnation of "pity." Her clear-headed glee at the prospect of the neo-con world to come in which all that wasteful humanism would be swept away from the clean, steel surfaces of market economy.
"Hunger" is an astonishing movie which, instead of taking sides in the depiction of "The Troubles," showed the devastating effects on all involved, from the abused IRA prisoners to the prison officials, suffering panic attacks as they check daily under their cars for bombs.
The movie had an audacious tempo! The first 50 minutes are loud and violent with a dense mise-en-scène, and all of a sudden, all is silent. Sands meets with a priest to use him as a sounding board for his reasons to go on the hunger strike. The scene begins with a 17-minute, unbroken two-shot with the two men mostly in silhouette. It is an unbelievable dialogue, a play within a movie. It leads to the almost wordless final 20 minutes which take place during the hunger strike. Sands drifts into a memory from his childhood that gives a new context to the movie, and offers the only images of nature and freedom we see in the film.
One more thing: we need to organize a film festival called "Margaret the Monster." All movies showing the devastating effects of her war on the poor and disenfranchised, her stiff-upper-lipped condemnation of "pity." Her clear-headed glee at the prospect of the neo-con world to come in which all that wasteful humanism would be swept away from the clean, steel surfaces of market economy.
