Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

Fantastic!

An Exercise In Nonsense

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This is one of those films that as you watch through it, you find yourself expecting a lot. It set's up a really powerful friendship, that has strong love connections between the two.The characters are strong, they have strange personalities that compliment each other. You do begin to feel the intense need for each other between the two, but for me that is when show it has no other real aspects of enjoyment.For me it felt like the emotion got to a level very fast in the film, the build up in this sense was very intense. The problem was i found that the story never really kept up with this. The characters grew, but without any real reason.I'd also like to pick up on pig's accent, which was a little confusing at time. I know Cillian Murphy is Irish, but honestly what was happening with the accent? he sounded Jamaican on numerous occasions. I guess it's just a regional accent thing.Finally, I have to comment on the end ending. What the hell was that? It made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Maybe i had drifted off at points in the film or something, but really, from what i saw it was an attempt at a powerful upsetting ending, but in my opinion it had no real substance.

OK if you as the viewer live 24/7 in some sort of fantasy land. Also to claim this film as some sort of ground breaking form of realistic acting is preposterous.A seriously flawed storyline too, not even in the real local in which it is set would you find two supposedly clever 17 yr old kids, with such a childish sense of humour. I'd put their behavioural age at around 8.On the whole 2 totally unbelievable characters who wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes in the real world. I was waiting for some diagnosis of mental illness, or ADHD and bi-polar disorder at the very least. Total nutters the pair of them.And as for the bar scene at the end, do large beefy Irish adults just stand around whilst a scrawny pathetic weakling of a child bashes some poor innocent (knocked out cold lying helpless on the floor,) with an iron bar for 5 minutes, 2 blows would have been enough to kill the average human. Overdone and very well overrated by the viewers, most of whom on this site must surely be under 25.

Apparently I'm one of the immature teens mentioned in another comment, because I enjoyed this film very much--as did the dozen reviewers, doubtless shallow teens also, cited on the DVD case as having rated it at four stars. It reminded me of early Jane Campion and Vincent Ward in the insular, almost hermetically sealed world it portrays; and I wonder if it's only coincidence that it too comes from an island culture. The story is a variation on Les Enfants Terribles in which two young people, telepathically bonded from birth, create a secret society--which in essence constitutes their entire life--consisting of only the two of them. They communicate in a strange private argot which I assume is taken from the novel (it sounds like the product of a novel writer rather than a scriptwriter), vernacular speech elevated into near-poetry. The characters' monologues are quite remarkable, as delivered by the two principal actors. So are the actors themselves: Cillian Murphy, who has the looks to make his fortune as a soap-opera antihero, shows he's much better than that portends, and Elaine Cassidy, who has made rather a line of playing Miranda-like heroines sidetracked into unfortunate attachments, can clearly do more, too: some day I'd like to see her as an equally single-minded Lady Macbeth. The film is strikingly shot, uniquely scored, and held me absorbed all the way through. It has only one large fault, which is the flip side of its biggest asset: its simplified, clarified style, which is much like that of The Piano or Vigil, and in this case parallels the simplified reality of the leading characters. It has this inherent drawback, however: it leads the film away from more complex, messier motives and situations lest they disturb the neatness of the pattern. In a story like this they necessarily arise, and increasingly so as the story goes on, because the subject ultimately is the characters' emergence, kicking and screaming, into the larger world. And so in some respects the transition confuses. For instance, in the early scenes the bonded characters are shown as living in identical houses side by side and coming and going symmetrically, in the Peter Greenaway manner; but this kind of fairy-tale fantasy disappears as the film progresses. True, in the course of things the characters move from a private reality to one more generally shared; but their houses are part of the latter, something they have no control over, and should be pictured in the same way as the rest of the outside world. Or, if the houses were meant to be seen from the point of view of the film itself, everything should have been shown as equally fantastical. Similarly, the script is clear as long as the characters confine themselves to their two-person bubble, from which everybody else is excluded, but then, after they're separated, it never clarifies what exactly happens to their telepathic bond. Does it snap as soon as they're parted? does it weaken with distance? Since it's been the dominant force in their lives, the one secure thing that they've never been without--and the thing the film has been presenting to us for an hour--we should have seen clearly the moment at which each of them lost it and what that loss did to him or her. Following the separation, the structure of the story makes it clear that the girl escapes the boy's influence, so that when they reunite she's no longer a willing partner in what he does; but her turning point isn't shown and her changed attitude isn't defined or explored. Finally, though less importantly, the climax of the story is incredible the way it's staged. Let it pass that seventeen-year-olds are able to buy drinks without question (perhaps on the Irish club scene they can); in the big club to which the couple ultimately find their way, the boy commits an act of battery, probably of murder, and then leaves, with nobody but the girl trying to stop him. I would imagine that in the novel it was described as happening briefly, on a crowded floor where nobody could see quite what was going on; but in the film it's the show in the center ring, it goes on for a very long time, and there are no bouncers anywhere--or, failing bouncers, a few sturdy lads of the type in which Irish stories abound--or for that matter, a single sturdy lad armed with a blunt object in hand. I can't think why the director would have done something to incur disbelief so strongly so near the end of the film: this is it like, eh?Still, in spite of a few missed notes, Disco Pigs is the most interesting film I've seen in a while, and probably the most interesting Irish film ever (though I confess I've not seen many).

Much is made of the violence in Disco Pigs, reviewers saying that it's mindless, but I think this is a much subtler film than they are giving it credit for. Pig and Runt are surrounded by constant violence - this is a society that brutalises it's children, is it any wonder that they then become brutal? Runt, especially, is the victim of violence, it's not surprising that she becomes complicit in the violence Pig meets out. And as for Pig, he's a bright boy, but one caught up in his own world, how better a way to express his love for Runt than by doing to others what is done to her, but on a far grander, more nihilistic scale? He is never anything but gentle and tender with her.Girls are drawn to borderline psychopathic men, look at Myra Hindley and Maxine Carr. And Runt doesn't stay passive, ultimately she is sickened by the violence and realises she has to make the break and discover her own personality.This is definitely a film to watch. Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy give stellar performances, and are definitely stars of the future. Look beyond the surface apparently mindless violence, see what's really going on underneath.