The Old Oak is more "I, Daniel Blake" than "Sorry We Missed You". Those films were both new-peak Loach, I, Daniel Blake with two strong roles as in The Old Oak, and Sorry We Missed You, with a handful.
Like I, Daniel Blake, in The Old Oak, the local person aids strangers with whom he has no connection through his strong moral bearings. In both films, an older man helps out a younger woman, dispensing with the need in movies for a love story, and dealing instead with feelings of community.
The Old Oak is a melancholy tale, but these are the twists and turns of ordinary, real lives described and the results in how people act, shown, rather than dumb show. Loach's films offer a different kind of uplift, that of getting a little more insight into humanity, the insight that few filmmakers are capable of.
The strangers are Syrian refugees. How their story is depicted is the disappointment of the film. It's as if the film was made 10 years ago rather than today in the sense that in 2013, Wikileaks hadn't revealed the damning evidence for what the Syrian war was and why it was depicted as it was.
The film unfortunately even talks about "Assad's regime." A pity to put the phrase into the mouth of a Syrian refugee in a film by a leftist. The chemical attacks the character talks about have been debunked by Seymour Hersh and Aaron Maté among others as having been committed by the Syrian government.
Wikileaks with Grayzone "leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria's political and armed opposition." Of course, the character in the film relating her story can't be expected to know this. But a leftwing filmmaker, the same as any informed leftwing person has known this for a few years now.
This review has become political because Ken Loach is a political filmmaker. Such a filmmaker you'd think would know better and have learnt 3/4 years ago that British intelligence services ran training from the ground up for propaganda units to provide "evidence" to all the major news networks from Aljazeera to CNN and the BBC. Even the Washington Post wrote that the Syrian War cost the US as much as a $1 billion annually. The US funded the Al Qaeda offshoots being portrayed as moderate rebels.
It turns out that Loach took the cowardly route, surprisingly, with this film, as he simply echoed the Western propaganda produced by UK government contractors of the Assad-devil regime and what people faced from him in the war rather than dealing with the actuality of extremists funded by the US warring on Syria to overthrow its non-compliant government on behalf and under the pay of, the United States.
It's all very well showing the difficulties of culture clashes, how relations are strained but can be mended through common humanity, but to get overtly political and not by now see through the concerted propaganda campaign and fall for those lies and get it wrong as if this was 2013, well, there's really no excuse.
Like I, Daniel Blake, in The Old Oak, the local person aids strangers with whom he has no connection through his strong moral bearings. In both films, an older man helps out a younger woman, dispensing with the need in movies for a love story, and dealing instead with feelings of community.
The Old Oak is a melancholy tale, but these are the twists and turns of ordinary, real lives described and the results in how people act, shown, rather than dumb show. Loach's films offer a different kind of uplift, that of getting a little more insight into humanity, the insight that few filmmakers are capable of.
The strangers are Syrian refugees. How their story is depicted is the disappointment of the film. It's as if the film was made 10 years ago rather than today in the sense that in 2013, Wikileaks hadn't revealed the damning evidence for what the Syrian war was and why it was depicted as it was.
The film unfortunately even talks about "Assad's regime." A pity to put the phrase into the mouth of a Syrian refugee in a film by a leftist. The chemical attacks the character talks about have been debunked by Seymour Hersh and Aaron Maté among others as having been committed by the Syrian government.
Wikileaks with Grayzone "leaked documents show how UK government contractors developed an advanced infrastructure of propaganda to stimulate support in the West for Syria's political and armed opposition." Of course, the character in the film relating her story can't be expected to know this. But a leftwing filmmaker, the same as any informed leftwing person has known this for a few years now.
This review has become political because Ken Loach is a political filmmaker. Such a filmmaker you'd think would know better and have learnt 3/4 years ago that British intelligence services ran training from the ground up for propaganda units to provide "evidence" to all the major news networks from Aljazeera to CNN and the BBC. Even the Washington Post wrote that the Syrian War cost the US as much as a $1 billion annually. The US funded the Al Qaeda offshoots being portrayed as moderate rebels.
It turns out that Loach took the cowardly route, surprisingly, with this film, as he simply echoed the Western propaganda produced by UK government contractors of the Assad-devil regime and what people faced from him in the war rather than dealing with the actuality of extremists funded by the US warring on Syria to overthrow its non-compliant government on behalf and under the pay of, the United States.
It's all very well showing the difficulties of culture clashes, how relations are strained but can be mended through common humanity, but to get overtly political and not by now see through the concerted propaganda campaign and fall for those lies and get it wrong as if this was 2013, well, there's really no excuse.