There is power in a union.

[commodorified]

The Public Service Alliance of Canada (those nice folks who helped bring you the weekend, the long weekend, paid sick leave, paid parental leave, etc), also brought to Ottawa a free screening of Pride this afternoon.

So, after riding to Elgin Street and dropping in on The First Annual Majestic Family Fun Day: A Celebration of Family Diversity in Recognition of International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia (IDAHTB) & Victoria Day for a bit, we rode down to the Mayfair and, in the company of many other people both willing and able to sing along with Solidarity Forever, watched a brilliantly acted, powerful, funny, defiantly unironic, shamelessly touching movie about urban queer kids in the UK in the 80s and the striking miners in Wales.

It was completely awesome, more due to than despite the fact that if it hadn't all happened pretty much exactly as the movie portrays it your suspension of disbelief would snap somewhere between the time Bronski Beat show up to play a benefit called Pits and Perverts and the point where the Miner's Union shows up en masse to march in the London Pride Parade in '85. (These days, unions - and everyone else - lines up to be in Pride Parades as a matter of community engagement/targeted marketing. Those days were not these days. This was three years before I began to come out, and five years before my first Pride, and even in 1990 in Toronto marching in the Pride parade involved equal chances of heatstroke and having to dodge small missiles.)

So, yeah, Pride. Go see it. it's awesome.

“You have worn our badge, ‘Coal not Dole’, and you know what harassment means, as we do. Now we will pin your badge on us; we will support you.

Comments

[legionseagle]

Oh, good. I really was put off by Kermode's review. I don't know if it's Kermode, who's usually pretty sound on that sort of thing on his Wittertainment podcast, or if the Guardian thought mentioning socialism too often would freak their advertisers and so subbed him to death, but it's full of the sort of phrases that make the blud thik etc:
"the unlikely union between striking Welsh miners and out-and-proud gay Londoners "
"George MacKay is Joe, a just-turned-20 mummy’s boy on the brink of coming out"
"gobby Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) and his friends at London’s Gay’s the Word bookshop"
"Onllwyn, a mining village in the Dulais valley, which seems to view “gays” and vowels with equal suspicion."*
"Cue much La Cage aux Folles-style culture-clashing between the macho miners and metrosexual activists, mediated by theatrical luvvie Jonathan (Dominic West), who busts some outre disco moves with oddly unifying results."

And so on and so forth.



*I have a particular hatred of journalists who make that particular joke about Welsh vowels; it's an official language of a component country of the UK and how fucking difficult is it to remember "w" is pronounced "oo" anyway?

[lexin]

I dunno, it's clear Kermode loved it - and there's a lot to love in this movie. It's a really good, feelgood movie about left wingers with a great sound track. And there aren't enough of those, IMO.

[legionseagle]

Oh, I know the love comes out -- there was just something about how he kept banging on about "London" and "metrosexual" that didn't make me imagine Militant kids from Southwall or Elephant.

[legionseagle]

Perhaps I'll take a look in Fopp & see if they do a Blu-Ray.

[commodorified]

I hope you'll post a review if you do! As you know, we go hard for both the queers and the unions around here, but Canadian labour history and UK labour history have, I think more divergence than GLBT history does, and there are a lot of things I sort of took on faith, watching, because what I know about The Strike isn't nothing, but it's fairly broad strokes. So I'd very much like to see how it all seems to you.

[commodorified]

Do you, by chance, wish to own said soundtrack?

I am being extremely frustrated by the fact that it's in the UK iTunes store but not the Canadian one, and I can't seem to find it anywhere else.

I would be more than happy to cover the 5.99 GBP purchase price if you wouldn't object to putting it in my Dropbox for me. We would then both have it.

[lexin]

I bought it; I'm more than happy to share it with you if you can give me some kind of hint where the files might be hiding. I'll then drop copies in my dropbox and you can download them. No charge.

omg UR BEST

[commodorified]

If you bought it on the apple store it should be in your iTunes, once it's downloaded.

ETA: or, possibly, I don't understand the question. is it "where's my soundtrack?", or "where are the copyable files?"

In the second case, you can drag them from iTunes to a desktop folder for upload, which will copy rather than move them so you don't lose them yourself.

Otherwise there should be a folder in your iTunes system files marked 'music' and then it's probably under Compilations or Various Artists.

[commodorified]

It's been 1985 in this living room all night!

[commodorified]

One of the characters does make a vowel joke. Only once, and while he's very nervous about meeting the miners, and also has gotten everyone lost by misreading the map, but it does happen.

Welshness is not a running joke.

[lexin]

There is one other Welsh joke, but it's about the issues that the North and South Welsh people have with each other. And it is funny.

[commodorified]

Oh Lord, I'd forgotten that one. I spat popcorn.

[amazon_syren]

But there *are* a tonne of Welsh Tropes in it. The singing. The fact that there secretary is a straight-up Bard (not officially, but a poet-historian? Bard). It's not treated as a joke, but the stereotypes are still in there, right along with the flaming theatre fag and the dyke drama.

[commodorified]

I just had to come back to go "buh?" at 'metrosexual', which I must have blown past originally.

Kermode doesn't know his history. That is not metrosexual anything: it is straight-up blatant political faggotry of the highest order.