Kneecap - Irish language hiphop biopic

Saw this tonight at a preview screening and one of the funniest, raucous, gloriously anarchic films I’ve seen in a while.

Went in knowing virtually nothing about the band and am a convert, not least for their performances which had me convinced they were played by professionals.

Plus there’s a cameo from Gerry Adams which has to be seen to be believed.

Saw the trailer two nights ago and it looked very strange.

Director clearly loved ‘Trainspotting’, as the style is deeply indebted to it. One scene I half expected to be a copy of ‘the worst toilet in Scotland’ , but didn’t quite go there.

I liked this! Energetic and fun all the way through. Follows a standard music biopic narrative to some extent but enough cultural details to make it refreshing. The lads are pretty great for non-actors. I doubt one movie can save the rep of the Irish language but fair play to them for attempting to inject some counterculture energy into it

5 Star Buckfast movie this one, saw it tonight and had a great time.

A 10/10 from me. Loved it. The electric atmosphere in the cinema definitely enhanced it and I'll be very interested to see how it fares beyond Ireland & Scotland. I do feel it has the potential to blow up big time.

Saw this today, conversely I was the only person in the cinema but that's not unusual for my local. Did find it a little contrived that JJ managed to keep his involvement secret from his missus but otherwise a solid 4/5, if the two main guys had been played by professionals it wouldn't have had the same energy at all.

not seen the movie but find the band fairly cringe-inducing. a massive room of people chanting 'up the ra' or whatever in jeans and a t-shirt is no different to their parents or whatever. feels a postscript to the wolfe tones, another absolutely shit band, drawing a huge crowd at electric picnic in ireland a year or two ago. the uk is an absolute bag of shit country, and people expressing themselves is good, but even sinn fein/ira people are deeply embarrassed by the absolutely bleak behaviour of sinn fein/ira. there's no irony in it, kneecap fans are no different to wolfe tones fans forty years ago. it's depressing that the political situation has tipped music back to this, yet again, in ireland.

it's become fashionable to talk positively about sinn fein and it has felt easy to me also but i suggest anyone who has drifted in that direction read this book, for one example. absolutely horrific clarity about how sf just mirror existing patriarchal abusive structures north and south, written by someone who grew up an activist in that regard: https://noalibis.com/product/rough-beast-my-story-and-the-reality-of-sinn-fein/

i know the retort here is somehow 'but it's a joke' but my retort is it isn't. don't know what 'irony' means as regards kneecap or whatever. it's just eat your vegetables mostly for guardian or irish times journalists where supporting what appears to be politically divergent is always some kind of multivitamin.

tldr the more political irish music gets the worse it is, always

I was of this mind too regarding them and found their schtick a bit cringe but the film actually won me over. Theres a romantic subplot with one of the lads seeing a Protestant girl...also another subplot featuring the hypocrisy of anti-drug IRA dissidents..I think theres a bit more nuance to them than oo ah up the ra tbf...but yeah I wouldnt let them off the hook entirely either - Gerry Adams guest appearances and so on

Yes, there is a worrying trend amongst younger generation to see The Troubles through rose-tinted Che Guevara shaped sunglasses

Wolfe Tones will always be shite

i've not paid attention to them as a band but the film seems to make it clear they are definitely not glamourising sinn fein/ira. if there is any message it seems to be learn Irish, fuck the Peelers, Brits Out and let's have a party, which seems fair enough to me.

not seen the movie but find the band fairly cringe-inducing. a massive room of people chanting 'up the ra' or whatever in jeans and a t-shirt is no different to their parents or whatever. feels a postscript to the wolfe tones, another absolutely shit band, drawing a huge crowd at electric picnic in ireland a year or two ago. the uk is an absolute bag of shit country, and people expressing themselves is good, but even sinn fein/ira people are deeply embarrassed by the absolutely bleak behaviour of sinn fein/ira. there's no irony in it, kneecap fans are no different to wolfe tones fans forty years ago. it's depressing that the political situation has tipped music back to this, yet again, in ireland.

it's become fashionable to talk positively about sinn fein and it has felt easy to me also but i suggest anyone who has drifted in that direction read this book, for one example. absolutely horrific clarity about how sf just mirror existing patriarchal abusive structures north and south, written by someone who grew up an activist in that regard: https://noalibis.com/product/rough-beast-my-story-and-the-reality-of-sinn-fein🕸/

i know the retort here is somehow 'but it's a joke' but my retort is it isn't. don't know what 'irony' means as regards kneecap or whatever. it's just eat your vegetables mostly for guardian or irish times journalists where supporting what appears to be politically divergent is always some kind of multivitamin.

I mean, Get Your Brits Out is about partying with members of the DUP. It’s really not that at all!

My sister is raving about this film and so are all her friends. She saw it with her best friend, who learned Irish to get back to her roots, but she couldn't understand much of it, I suppose because it's Ulster Irish?

My understanding is that it is some kind of Irish native to Belfast which basically has an English-influenced phonology and pronunciation. I don’t suppose your sister told you which dialect she was learning, did she?

She just learned some kind of standard Irish, ironically because her family is from Donegal (as are most people I know with Irish relatives).

It’s kind of complicated apparently. Someone told me to watch this recently, if possible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08630kq

it's prob not their fault but to me it will always just play out as the same vague nationalism, among people who praise them or at the gigs or whatever.

maybe not itt but that's just inevitable more widely. for me, politics is a cul de sac for irish artists. shrug.

Naturally a blueshirt would say that ❤️

Tom D, I haven’t seen it but that would sound right to me. Used to dread when I was doing Irish exams in school and the accent on the aural exam test was an Ulster one, completely incomprehensible to me. This video explains it well (it’s the second segment lol): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMBPuE9Wt4Y

i share most of lgs kneecapjerk mistrust of barstool irish nationalism as it manifests in football chants or popular art/public persona/twitter politics

ive stayed miles away from these lads, tho not necessarily for the above reason.

fairly and accurately or not they occupy (easy now) the same space in my head as yerman from rubberbandits and I honest just could not be fucked

im willing to believe that they could be knocking out great stuff musically or cinematically but the gimmick is keeping me away until i discover the truth via simple inevitability or chance

refer you to the first line of previous comment

well

at least you didn’t get upset by my attack on Donnegall Irish

That’s fair enough!

The one thing I'd add and I mean this in peace, is like, as someone who has spoken Irish most of my adult life and was very involved in Irish language radio in Dublin, I would relish it being just a normal activity you do rather than tied into political stuff.

That may seem a bit like milquetoast or whatever but I'm as tired by the wooly jumper and hurleys stuff as by the lazy republicanism, the latter particularly irritating in the south.

I sort of resent and have always resented the Irish language coming with the assumption that I like traditional music or am a republican or something.

I actually am a republican give or take but not in a traditional sense, idk. Raidio Na Life in Dublin used the licence that the Irish language gave it to become a home for alternative music and I used to absolutely love playing and saying the names German techno records with the Irish language around them.

That's more of why even tho I'm sure Kneecap have a radically different experience to me as someone from the south, I find it a bit musically uninteresting or it puts me off culturally.

As for the movie, Gerry Adams being in it is kinda disturbing.

i have more reason to fear snd hate ulster irish that you, flah xp

He's redoing the leaving cert Irish exam as a hobby.

xps yeah I hear what you mean. Unfortunately for them, the language is politics, look at the shit they have to put up with to get signs in Irish & so on. I used to feel the same as you until I made friends with a woman from Down & she told me stories that really put a new spin on my understanding of the language. Also frankly made me wish I’d got past my distaste for the way you learn it in school to learn more, because it is a really important part of the culture and we’ve allowed it to become marginalised to to the point Nuacht, TG4 and idk the winning captain’s speech are the only places you hear it regularly outside school without specifically seeking it out.

My understanding of THE PLACE of the language

I keep intending to join Conradh Na G in London as they do pints once a month at London Irish Centre. But (a) I seem to always be away when it's on and (b) slight fear I'll have nothing in common with anyone cos idk, all my friends hated Irish and failed it.

xp i agree with a lot of that too, i do think you have to think of what it means to be 6 counties irish

As for the movie, Gerry Adams being in it is kinda disturbing.

Hated learning Irish in school. Never saw the point in it. But yknow POINTS

xp i agree with a lot of that too, i do think you have to think of what it means to be 6 counties irish

good for posting, as flann would say

“The shite people post on ilx is beyond me” - Edna O’Brien

And then I thought about the way it’s covered over here (the UK), you know the whole “oooh the Paddies have shut down the Assembly AGAIN cos of the Irish language Act or whatever, it’s like they think it’s their country.”

tbf I'm not sure it is covered that way, more like both sides are as bad as each other with the attempt on the other side to pretend misspelling English adding some words from Ayrshire, i.e. Ulster Scots, is a proper language. Though, of course, no-one takes a blind bit of notice or cares either way anyway.

flann would also have an interesting angle on the irish, the northern irish, the irish art in irish as irish and as a kickstarter for the sort of inorganic irish (fortu shades of astroturf nest pas) you describe well above that was anathema to him i think, as well as the same type of approach to popular catholic nationalism in art he was always very quick and i think most piercing in lampooning with his takedown of yeats gaeity schmáltz or sean o caseys coddle

It's so badly taught in schools, shit literature whether modern or older. It should just be fifty per cent oral or more, keep it alive.

I only got into it by going to a Gaeltacht summer course that was deep IRA vibes, you had to stand attention and salute the flag every morning, singing the national anthem.

Not joking either, the headmaster would roar at ease and attention in Irish as you stomped in response.

If you said a full sentence in English you got sent home, that includes "excuse me" after sneezing.

fifty shades of gaelic wha

it has to be said that the Gerry Adams scene (which is literally blink and you'd miss it) is very, very funny. i reckon even Ian Paisley Jr would be giggling if he saw it.

xp

go mall, go mall, go mall

GO TAPAÍ GO TAPAÍ GO TAPAÍ

Saw this today as had some time to kill. I'm kinda amazed it's been praised as much as it has, even beyond being initially sceptical?

Firstly, it's similar in the way it's shot, its themes, the tone and lots of other elements to almost any Irish indie movie of recent years, Sing Street, Killing Bono, etc etc etc. Just seems weird to me so many of these films feel the same.

Secondly it's a bit weird having a film that's about how censored they are by the establishment which begins with a list of the many, many sources of public money that paid for the film to be made.

Thirdly just not particularly funny? Nobody laughed p much at any point in the screening I was in, so it wasn't just me. The Gerry Adams bit was the funniest moment for me tho it is weird how even a fifteen second cameo is a nice little laundering moment for him.

Beyond that I just found it incredibly weird, tonally. Like one minute it's total farce, the next someone is getting shot. The characters of the dad and the PSNI... inspector? Chief? Detective? Who was she? Just extremely weird characters that added to a strange sort of cartoonish feeling, which would be fine except I think this film wanted to say real things.

I think ultimately, like a lot of art at the moment, the gap between fiction and fact or fiction and biog is exploited p heavily and you're left with a lot of questions. Like clearly much of this is sort of fictionalised but without discussing which bits it can't be taken in any way seriously, politically.

The drugs stuff is like... besides the fact taking drugs is fun or whatever and someone has to sell them, I can't really get a sense of why that's such a big part of the band and what they do or rap about, I mean beyond just like trolling people? There are interesting things to say about drugs, even in jest. Like this is compared to Trainspotting and that at least has a p clear series of beliefs about drugs stated throughout.

Like I didn't even hate this but it just sort of drifted along. Another weird thing is how nineties so much of the music is, like Orbital and The Prodigy and stuff.

On their own music, I thought it was less bad than I expected but a lot of it reminded me of that viral tune by Irish schoolchildren from earlier this summer, except less good.

I could say more, I don't know. I honestly went in trying to have an open mind.

I am certain loads of my friends would absolutely hate this in more visceral terms than me also.

Also lastly, a big part of the film seems to be saying these men are saying things others won't say and thus are censored for it.

But as the film itself says, this just makes them more popular. A few rebukes by ineffectual bodies who in an internet age have basically no power is just a thing to use to boost your career, as they have done.

It'd be more interesting to examine why people still rush towards the idea that anything that offends xyz group of people must be good art.

It's not hard to offend reactionary people, or to offend in general.

I mean they did have funding cut by the British government due to the laughable reason of them objecting to a tour poster from several years ago because the tour was called “Farewell to the Union”.

Says more about the British government than it does about the work or the band.

Beyond that I just found it incredibly weird, tonally. Like one minute it's total farce, the next someone is getting shot.

If it was gallows humour that'd be different but I mean basically just totally unconnected scenes or vibes. You'd have to see it.

the infamous gaire uladh i always preferred connemara humour meself