grantss Engaging bitter-sweet movie.Based on Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name, the movie details the childhood years of Frank McCourt in Ireland. Hardly the childhood anyone would wish for: abject poverty, three siblings die, father is unemployed and an alcoholic.Shows the conditions some people were, and are, forced to live in. Is pretty much a roller-coaster of misery. Every positive event is followed by a negative one. Very sad.Yet, between these harrowing episodes there's levity and some quite funny moments. If there wasn't, it would probably be too depressing to handle.Most importantly, you empathise with the characters and share in their ups and downs, as all good dramas should cause you to do.On the negative side, the ending feels a bit rushed and incomplete. But then again, the ultimate ending would show the rest of McCourt's life and how it turned out. That would be whole new movie... It certainly was a whole new book, as McCourt wrote a sequel to Angela's Ashes, "'Tis: A Memoir". This has, as yet, not been made into a movie.

Gloede_The_Saint Angela's Ashes is a moving drama by long time and now retired director Alan Parker adapted from Frank McCourts Pulitzer Prize winning book about his childhood. Already in the opening scene we are informed by the narration from the main character that "I had a miserable childhood", and wow what an understatement that turned out to be. In the very same opening we are introduced to most of the main characters, the mother Angela McCourt (played by Oscar Nominee Emily Watson) and the somewhat loser father Malachy McCourt (played by Robert Carlyle), as well as his younger brother Malachy (jr.), the twins and his little baby sister. Just to set the tone for the rest of the movie his sister dies in the very next and devastated by the loss Angela moves her family back to Ireland. His baby sister dieing also makes us understand a lot about his drunk and no good father who disappears for several weeks. As the poor family arrives in Ireland we are introduced to his mother's side of the family, Angela's brother, sister, the sisters husband and the strong overly judging grandmother (played by Ronnie Masterson) who besides her roughness makes the perfect comic relief. You might get the idea that most of their problems are over now but your soon drawn back into their miserable surroundings as the father, crushed by the fact that he neither can get or keep a job picks up his drinking habits again and the rest of their family keeps fading away. In the film Frank McCourt is played by three different actors (Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens, and Michael Legge) without counting the narrator voiced by Andrew Bennett and contains for the most part different peaces of his life kept together by the wonderful narration. The story itself is a heart-warming and honest look at how hard and dangerous it were to grow up in Ireland in the 30's and 40's and deals with a boy's fight to get out of his terrible and miserable surroundings of hate, poverty and religious conservatism. Personally I think the film works beautifully in making a harsh and true look at the events and Frank McCourt himself has apparently praised the movie for a correct portrayal of his life. The actors all give marvelous performances, especially Emily Watson who is the perfect dramatic actress and as for Robert Carlyle's performance he makes the makes father more sympathetic than most other actors ever could. Even the child actors give strong performances as innocent and blue-eyed children in the transformation of becoming adults and as the main character grows up we learn to love him, even at his most sinister at the end. I can with one hand at my heart state that I could not find anything wrong about this movie and that it moved me more than most other movies has ever moved me before. The acting is strong, the narration is perfect, the direction is wonderful and the cinematography is probably one of the most beautiful things you will ever see in your life. The music is also very lovable and as a whole I would say the movie is a extremely strong 9/10.

T Y If you pitched a movie about historically accurate misery and poverty to any Hollywood exec, none would endure it for more than twenty seconds. So how did this get made? Well, when you present the same dreary idea with the words "It's based on the best-seller," things tend to get green-lighted. You know, there's a ready audience to extract admission fees from. Without that, this project had no possibility of being made. There are exactly zero people in the world clamoring for a generously long, depressing movie.This movie really needed an adaptation that found (or manufactured) some engrossing throughline in the episodic material. Making it filmic instead of a slavishly, literal depiction of the books imagery would have been just dandy too. But no. Rabid fans tend not to like that. They want the book filmed as if the imagery they supplied while reading it were merely recorded. This is the limp task we ask of filmed novels in this era. It's not compelling. Rarely does a movie survive a books fan base.They must have devised special life-sucking camera filters to make this. Everything is grey and torpid. But if there's one thing this story didn't need is to have it's misery overdetermined by ponderous direction, a ponderous script, ponderous production design, a ponderous poster of a scowling child and that ponderous Misery-Vision camera work. As my Irish relatives might say "Oh for f***'s Sake!" Didn't a colored piece of broken glass occasionally end up in their hands that didn't get painted grey by the gloom patrol? Even the fruit is grey in McCourts world.When I first heard his reading of the first page or two of this on NPR it made me laugh out loud. I thought it was going to be a moderate view of his bad childhood relieved by a little humor. Instead I discovered the book to be an exercise in troweling misery upon misery without edification, and I never made it; neither could some of my friends who wanted to open a vein after just a few chapters. It was like paddling upstream through oatmeal (grey oatmeal) wearing a blindfold (grey also). I don't know what this book did for the readers who made it a best-seller, nor did I realize that there were such enormous audiences in the entertainment age hoping to feel seriously miserable. By page 50 I was shouting "We've got it, Frank!" I don't know how I got the tone so wrong from his reading. There's barely a sentence that survives the all-pervading clutch of gloom and death.If this material weren't already exhausted in just two iterations, it could be spoofed perfectly with the figure of death and his scythe gleefully chopping people down mid-sentence every couple of minutes, and extras in the background painting entire fruitstands grey.

brennerp I won't begin to repeat or re-hash the numerous excellent comments on this movie. I'm in the camp of thinking it is a masterpiece, with excellent performances. I watched the movie just this week, and am starting the book now; I'll be interested to see what I think after I read the book.The one comment I'd make is that the movie could have been shortened. I was surprised that it was nearly 2 1/2 hours long. I think that, as sometimes happens, there was a feeling that the entire book needed to be captured; some judicious editing would have been desirable. For instance, as has been pointed out, fewer scenes with the chamber pot would still have conveyed the point. (Not sure if this is a true "spoiler", but better to be safe than sorry...) Notwithstanding that, the movie never "dragged" for me; and in spite of the obviously dreary nature of much of the movie, I was not depressed by it at any point. I guess that this is partly due to the fact that the resilience of the human spirit shown through the entire story.