The Last Bus Home

This has to be one of my favourite films of this year(1999), and one of the best independent films ever made in Ireland. It features highly commendable performances, most notably from Barry Comerford's portrayal of the band's bass player, Joe. It is certainly not as funny as the Commitments and anyone expecting a punk commitments will be sorely disappointed, but if you are looking for an energetic anarchic piece of comedy/drama then I reckon that you should see this film.

This movie offers an original twist on the well-worn garage-band-trying-to-make-the-big-time genre, but doesn't really execute it as well as it could have done. Crass is the name of a punk band by which the 70's Dubliners in the film are influenced, but it's also a word that colud be used to describe some of the film's metaphors, like the pope's 1979 visit to Ireland and the eponymous metaphor, which symbolises the lead singer's unwillingness to change his life. He's a potentially interesting character, who looks like a raw, unpolished talent until we here him perform and realise he's just raw and unpolished. The kids he plays to lap up his mixture of punk and Irish rebel music and attract the attention of a record agent who seems to interested in his girlfriend.... One of the things the film has going for it is, despite the odd glaring anachronism, an assured sense of time and place. The acting is patchy and the films attempts at absolute naturalism are often embarrassing. I thought a shaky, grainy hand-held camera look would have been a more suitable aesthetic for this sort of film, but it's far from being a complete failure nonetheless