Kings

Overall this was an excellent film, the story was good, and so was the acting. the only thing that I found difficult was the fact that it as in a language I didn't understand, so I had to read the subtitles. Don't get me wrong after a while you get used to it, and you can still enjoy the film 100 percent. other than that it is a very good film, that I would recommend!

Also another aspect of this film was that the characters were very, very real. they all had different personalities. the only thing was, being from a very different country couldn't get their names until we were halfway into the film, so it did get a little confusing, but never the less I stand by what I said in the first paragraph, that this was a very well done film.

And although it was a story that was sadder then most, it did have parts that were happy, even funny! it wasn't all sad and depressing.

so yes, this is a good, very good film to see, so I recommend it!

Saw this at the Stony Brook Film Festival last night and was amazed to find (a) a nearly full house and (b) the audience got it. As an Irishman who lived in London in the 1960's I am well aware of the characters and their sad, difficult lives. (The years were a bit off as the film claimed they emigrated in 1977 - more like 10 years earlier). I had also seen the play it was based on "The Kings of the Kilburn High Road" a few years back. The play, if I recall correctly, is set entirely in the back room of the bar. The acting is first rate and while most of the dialogue is in Irish, with subtitles, it really works. This was a strange experience, to see a film about Irishmen and needing subtitles to understand everything being said. Not surprisingly, Colm Meaney lends heft to the film and the part of Joe. He always does. Well worth seeing although I wonder who the audience is for such a film? There are thousands of Irishmen still in England who lived lives like these poor unfortunates.

Kings is a very fine film. It is a haunting, melancholic portrait of lost souls, the people on our streets who once belonged to some place, somewhere in another time, but who have fallen out of touch with the world around them. Director Tom Collins seizes on this feeling of loneliness and misplacement and forces us to confront it, as we immerse ourselves in the lives of Git, Jap, Máirtín, Shay and Joe. The haunting, ghostly memory of Jackie makes us also mourn his passing, as he appears to his friends between sleeping and waking, between day and night.

Indeed the film itself feels caught in time between dusk and dawn, as the characters let the world pass by in the final third of the film, when an ominous, creeping awareness invades on their drunken reverie. The atmosphere is one of a suspended moment – the group of friends toast their lost companion in an eerie, empty back room, whilst muffled noise just creeps in from the bar outside. The Irish language they speak amongst themselves reflects the otherness of their lives, their misplacement in this world. As they leave and come back, it is as if they move from one world to the other, and when they finally go, they could be gone forever.

With excellent performances and a taut script, the evocative cinematography and soundtrack make this an achingly sad and beautiful work that is timeless in it's relevance.

Kings plunges its viewers into the harsh reality of five Irish immigrant's lives in London. The men are separated not only geographically, but psychologically, from their homeland. They yearn to return, but are consumed with a sense of their own failure and fear rejection from loved ones at home. Instead they immerse themselves in alcohol and unfulfilled dreams. The acting is superb; the characters true-to-life; the theme universal. The use of Gaelic is a dramatic tool that serves to emphasize their alienation again in their adopted town of Kilburn. It is a story of sadness and regret and how individuals deal with pain. Tom Collins's movie challenges the audience to question their own relationships with fellow human beings, especially those from whom they are estranged, and especially those who were forced to leave these shores. It challenges us to question our views on this lost generation and to look at an era in our history that allowed such mass immigration. Hopefully, Kings will open up a national debate on how a Government could have failed its subjects and allowed a land to be bled of its inhabitants; hopefully,it will inspire us to welcome them home with open arms; hopefully it will encourage the present Government to continue to provide the means to do so. Go and see Kings. You will not be disappointed.

The future of home-grown Irish cinema seems safely in the bag for the time being. We have just had John Carney's "Once" which was a breath of fresh air as well as being a critical and commercial smash. Now we have Derry's own Tom Collins' superb screen version of the play "The Kings of Kilburn High Road" and it may turn out to be the best film yet about the Irish diaspora. It's a stunner and could see Ireland short-listed in the Best Foreign Film category at this year's Oscars.

The plot is simple and there is nothing new in it. Five friends, all immigrants from Ireland's Conemara, gather for the wake of a sixth killed by a train in the London Underground. During a long night's drinking, regrets and recriminations rise to the surface together with ghosts from their pasts. There is a touch of Eugene O'Neill here certainly, (Irishness and alcohol figured largely in his work), but as the night wears on and drunkenness breaks down the men's bravado, the film broadens out into a more universal study of machismo. Although a painfully accurate record of both the Irish way of death and drinking these could be any group of old friends in any bar anywhere in the world.

The bar-room setting of the film's second half exposes its theatrical origins but Collins opens it out superbly and the flashbacks to earlier days never seem intrusive. He keeps it briskly cinematic throughout and the performances of the whole cast can't be faulted. This is a superb ensemble piece and at a festival the performance of the five principals, (and of Peadar O'Taraigh as the dead man's father), would be worthy of a joint best actor award. However, I am inclined to single out Brendan Conroy as Git. Git may seem at first the weakest of the group but in Conroy's extraordinary performance he proves himself the strongest. Like the film itself, Conroy deserves the highest of praise.