Oh Danny Boy!

Do We Get to Kill Englishmen?

By SCOTT CUNNINGHAM

published: December 20, 2007

Irish films are not that dissimilar from Irish pubs. When you walk into one, you pretty much know what you’re going to get: car bombs, sexy accents, fiddle-and-pipe music, rampant nationalism, pints of Guinness, and likeable underdogs. The difference is that within the first hour at the pub, you’ll find someone too drunk to speak English. But within the first hour of an Irish film, at least one Englishman will get his wig split. Ken Loach has finally taken that formula and added some historical complexity in his 2006 Palm D’Or-winning film, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, showing at the Miami Beach Cinemateque at 8:30 p.m.

Logan’s film begins in 1920 and dramatizes the civil war that erupted in the wake of the Irish War for Independence,, when Pro-Treaty and Anti-Treaty factions pitted neighbor-against-neighbor and brother-against-brother. You likely won’t see this in any other South Florida theater, so don’t sleep.
Sat., Dec. 22, 8:30 p.m., 2007