Watch Kes For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Kes is not a great film, nor even a near-great one, but it is a good film- at times very good (even with brilliant flashes), and shows how political art can be of quality when the art trumps the politics. That Kes, the bird, has so little screen time in its titular film is merely a recapitulation of Billy's reality that shows that the bird, while not the main part of his existence, is certainly the best part of his existence- at least for the duration of the film. It's odd, for sometimes when one watches an old film for the first time (especially a film of an emotionally or intellectually resonant quality): there is a tendency for them to sort of backfill one's own past. I.e.- they sort of get locked in to a place in time that seems like it has always occupied in one's own past, as if one had seen it when younger, and always carried an idea or memory of it with one. At least that's the way it is with me, and others have told me similar things. Hopefully, Billy Casper was never so locked in to anything, past or present, and escaped the life in the town's coal mines that he so dreaded. I hope he did. I knew him once.

I remember when we first got a video in the early 80s and we'd only just worked out how to use it. One night Kes came on the telly and me and my brother taped it. We were about 9 and 11 years old. We watched that tape for years over and over again. We knew the whole film word for word from start to finish. My mum and dad are both from Barnsley, My dad went to school with Barry Hines. Eventually that tape either got lost or broken. Years later when I was grown up, Kes came on the telly one night so I sat down to watch it. I couldn't believe it when it came on, it had been dubbed over, the voices were different and the accents were nothing like as strong as the original. In the end I had to turn it off. I was gutted. Since then I have borrowed it on Video and then bought it on DVD and both times on the video and the DVD it is the dubbed version. You can not get the original anywhere anymore but nobody ever mentions this and I really don't understand it because it spoils the whole film. Surely there is somebody out there what remembers the original and realises that the DVD version has different voices put on. In some places it is the same but in most places it has been dubbed and it sounds awful. I just wish I could find the original version somewhere. I know that most people reading this will think that their DVD is the original version and wont have a clue what I am talking about because for some reason nobody apart from me and my brother seem to have noticed which I find hard to believe. If you own the film on DVD then I assure you it is NOT the original voices.

"If black boxes survive air crashes, why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?" - George Carlin Ken Loach's "Kes", now regarded as one of the last classics of the British New Wave, tells the tale of Billy Caspter, a 13 year old kid living in the working class town of Barnsley.Billy, bullied by his mother, older brother, teachers and schoolmates, mopes about Loach's film with a look of perpetual gloom. Haggard and forlorn, Billy sees no hope in his present or future life. Society itself seems to have dismissed him as a "hopeless case", destined to work at local coal mines.Despite the world kicking him down, and despite living in a town which gives him no avenues to creatively channel his energies, Billy manages to develop a passion for birds. As such, he captures and tames a wild kestrel and teaches it to obey his commands. One of the film's best moments involves Billy, a tiny, fragile looking kid, being forced to stand up in front of his school classroom and relate something interesting about his life. Nervously he tells his teacher and schoolmates about his bird. They look at him with wonder and amazement. How can this little kid be smart, patient and dedicated enough to tame a wild animal?And that, admittedly quite naively, is the theme of the film: society doesn't give the poor and the down-trodden the chance to surprise the world and make something of themselves, Loach's kestrel, and its eventual death, symbolising a kind of social predestination in which the individual's wings are clipped before he's given the chance to fly. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: the impoverished and the marginalized are treated in such a way as to become as they are viewed.Loach was known for these types of social realist films, tackling issues like abortion in "Up The Junction" (1965) and homelessness in "Cathy Come Home" (1966). Like most British film-makers of the time (Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger etc), the intention here is to angrily point fingers, give a voice to the working-class and demonize social ills until things change. Whilst Loach's contemporaries would lose this idealism, he's held his ground for over half a century.8.5/10 - A simple tale which seems to resonate across all cultures, every country in the world having an internationally well-loved film like this in their local canon. Consider, for example, France's "The 400 Blows", India's "Pather Panchali" and Iran's "Where is the friend's home?"

Most film-makers who deal with a story featuring a boy/girl and his/her pet go for the heartstrings by underlining both the kid's and the animal's cuteness. The narrative structure holding this picturesque idyll together mainly consists of predictable melodramatic incidents that endanger this relationship.One of Loach's best pics undermines this soapy approach by intensifying the unaffectedly portrayed boy-pet relationship through the unflinchingly bleak description of the boy's surroundings. Kes is not just a beloved falcon, he represents a way to endure social hardships.This earnest, heartfelt drama is a true gem of British working-class cinema.8 out of 10 funny football matches