O Lixo e o Sonho

I recently saw this movie & found it quite powerful. The acting was very good, especially the young boy playing the lead. Everything was very realistic, probably more than I would have wanted to see. I guess foreign art films show a lot more skin & shocking scenes than do American movies. Regardless, I found the movie very interesting & did enjoy it to a degree. But I do think I would have trouble recommending it to some of my friends.

this is my favourite film. it was like watching a mirror of what being a kid was all about, which i guess makes it harder for those with a carefree childhood to identify. i loved ramsay's ability to create intense and harsh situations without slipping into the provocative manipulation that is characteristic of many similar child starring films (think harmony korine). the characters are subtly built through their actions and their treatment is compassionate - this could have easily turned into one of those films lacking a single likable character, but instead the amoral approach shows off their beauty and humanity through their flaws. the cinematography is easily one of the best i've seen and its tones perfectly serve the substance, merging the poetic and stark realism. the actors and non-actors can hardly be distinguished from each other, it's the type of film where everyone just seem to be themselves, and lynne ramsay is truly a master of releasing the most meaningful expressions from her actors.

the ending as someone else mentioned can be taken both realistically or symbolically, but the scene resolves james's guilt whichever way you take it.

this film is not an easy watch and one should be prepared for an intense emotional experience or else it could get intolerable.

Well it's hard to say I loved a film like this, with so much darkness in the scenes and darkness in the script. And yet I did love this little dusky descent into childhood.

The waters of the hungry canal, ominous and omnipresent are set off nicely against the clearer, redemptive waters of baths throughout this film. William Eadie as James is tremendous throughout, most especially in his scenes with young John Miller's Kenny.

Unlike Mike Leigh's "All or Nothing" which I recently saw, this film I think had more than a little leavening in its bleak peak at the underclass. Despite rarely going ten minutes without a strong feeling of apprehension washing over me, there were enough warm flashes of affection to make this feel more like we were seeing people, and not statistics brought to life.

I'm not sure how Lynne Ramsay did it, but whenever the kids laughed, it felt genuine. It would have been interesting to be on the set. The interchanges between James and his Da made me think of animals, like a pack of lions and the eldest male just cannot do right by his father. Of course the father is flawed here, but thankfully it is not one of those television sitcom Dad's...devoid of any redemptive features.

The whole cast was tremendous really...from Tommy Flanagan's scarred sweet Da to the four schoolboys of the apocalypse to Lynne Ramsay Jr's transparent purity. Through the murkiness of the film, we can see the hope glimmering just below the surface, you only hope those characters in the film's flow can see it as well.

If you feel like I do that sorrow is an inescapable element to this world, but not one to be rinsed off and left far away from our dreams, cinematic and otherwise, I highly recommend you see this film. From the trajectory of Ramsay, Sr's shorts included on the DVD (and her take on Morvern Callar) I look forward, albeit with apprehension still, to her next work.

8/10

Who are these people saying that RATCATCHER is "pretentious art-house crap" ?? I suppose what they want is just good IL' downhome Hollywood swill? Don't they pay any attention at all to things like lovely cinematography, fine writing, and careful pacing? RATCATCHER is a beautiful movie, though hard to watch because of the desperate conditions of its main characters. It's full of worrisome situations and a complicated storyline that sticks with you for days. It has qualities of both compression and mystery, much like well-crafted poetry has compared to prose. Don't believe the whiners about this movie - it's NOT pretentious, it's inclusive and generous, and though it doesn't provide us with an easy let's-have-popcorn-and-watch-Schwarzenegger-blow-things-up kind of entertainment, it's well-crafted, well-written, beautifully shot, and worth watching and thinking about.

This is the most beguiling British film about childhood since Kes (1969), a slowburning look at days in the life of a small boy on the brink of adolescence. He has adolescent encounters, including an uneasy bath with an unpopular older girl, but he's very much a pre-adolescent child, with all the helplessness and vulnerability that that means. Lynne Ramsay's great strength as a filmmaker is an ability to recreate the world as seen through her characters' eyes. From with the deprivation, the film is set on a housing estate during a binman's strike, she finds moments of real beauty - a joyfully filmed tumble in a hayfield - and strikingly surreal moments, such as a backward boy's pet mouse flying to the moon on a balloon. If Ratcatcher has a forerunner, excepting Ramsay's own award-winning shorts, it is not The Bill Douglas Trilogy, a semi-still life of a Scottish slum boy, which it eclipses completely, but the great hand-crafted films of Lindsay Anderson: This Sporting Life; If..., and O Lucky Man!