Throughout his career, Ken Loach has made a number of movies focusing on class issues in the United Kingdom. His "Poor Cow" and "Kes" are examples, while "Hidden Agenda" and "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" showed the British government's brutal treatment of the Irish. His "Sweet Sixteen" could probably take place in any country, but in this case the setting is Scotland. The protagonist is a teenage boy whose mother is about to get out of jail. The boy has no apparent future, so he hangs around with criminals. The inevitable result of a society that ignores entire segments of its population.
I recommend watching the movie with subtitles. Due to the Inverclyde accents, I couldn't understand what they were saying half the time. That of course emphasizes how these are the common people. The majority of the UK's populace doesn't live like the characters on "Downton Abbey". Most of them are working class folks; it's a safe bet that the Brexit vote, damaging as it was, came about because large swaths of the population felt that successive governments had sold them out.
I recommend this movie, as I have ever Loach movie that I've seen. It's a hard-hitting look at the plight of working-class people. It's like a Martin Scorsese movie with a more naturalistic feeling. One scene reminded me of the movie "Shopping" (which made England look like a war zone).
PS: After Margaret Thatcher died, Ken Loach proposed that her funeral should've been privatized, since she would've wanted it that way.
I recommend watching the movie with subtitles. Due to the Inverclyde accents, I couldn't understand what they were saying half the time. That of course emphasizes how these are the common people. The majority of the UK's populace doesn't live like the characters on "Downton Abbey". Most of them are working class folks; it's a safe bet that the Brexit vote, damaging as it was, came about because large swaths of the population felt that successive governments had sold them out.
I recommend this movie, as I have ever Loach movie that I've seen. It's a hard-hitting look at the plight of working-class people. It's like a Martin Scorsese movie with a more naturalistic feeling. One scene reminded me of the movie "Shopping" (which made England look like a war zone).
PS: After Margaret Thatcher died, Ken Loach proposed that her funeral should've been privatized, since she would've wanted it that way.