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Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

There are women in the film, but none has anything you could call a personality.

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

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Watching this makes you feel sad for poor Frank because honestly, the life he had in Ireland was absolutely chronic. His father leaving him and the family was just shocking, the father really didn't try his hardest to keep away from the alcohol. I suppose the only excuse I can give him was that he found it pretty difficult that he experienced miscarriages with Angela. However really, the parents shouldn't have been having dozens of kids because they both didn't look after themselves well enough. It certainly wasn't fair on the children. Sure back then, parents had a lot of children in the family which was ridiculous but at the same time, if the family were hard working enough to support themselves, then so be it.I don't blame Frank to go back to the states. His family and schooling were just not right for him and his lifestyle. Heck, I would be the same if my family weren't supportive enough and the fact there's lack of jobs around (hasn't changed much now in Ireland). I would love to see a sequel to this but I suppose it wouldn't be much good if it was only done 18 years later. Brilliant cast and storyline, it is so worth your time for a 2 hour movie!

This film is truly the autobiographic story of author Frank McCourt and the family of Limerick, Ireland. It does not pull any punches about growing up poor in a family that wants for everything and gets a lot of misery. The portraits of the family and the environment are stark and real.Told through the eyes of Frankie McCourt, there are many events that come through in vivid reality. The backbone of a fine novel shows up here. Everything from innocence of child hood to coming of age are told with a labor of misery, love and coming of age all taken into account. There is so much that it can overwhelm the viewer, yet it does seem to all come together in a very human way.You do not have to read the book to know this all has a gong of human beings and the fragile human condition all written into a long tale. The observations of young Frankie growing up throughout and of the adults in his life are something special.Frankie loves his father, though dad does only very basic human things to earn that love. He loves his mother, though he resents what she has to do to keep the family whole because of dad. He loses 2 brothers at young ages, and the movie gives a loving portrait of both. This story goes through a magnificent circle of life with much more reality than any Disney cartoon could ever portray. Magnificent music punctuates a cold wet miserable family life which only love and determination could get one to live through.

Clocking in at two hours and twenty minutes, Angela's Ashes charts the early life of the real life lead character, Frank McCourt, based on his autobiography. Set in the not so distant past of mid 1930′s Ireland, it looks like a Dickensian tome, with muddy streets, abject poverty and sewage being thrown down the street.It's hard to believe that this was life in the mid 20th Century in a western country, where religion and anti-British propaganda ruled the masses of a country that was more than a little down on its luck. Dingy, realistic and difficult to enjoy, this was a very real take on this dismal period in history.The cast was admirable, with big hitters such as Robert Carlisle and Emily Watson as the titular Angela, but there were no weak links in this department at all. Overall, it was a very well made film but the drama was too loosely constructed and episodic as it simply followed the eldest son and writer of the source novel, Frank, as he grows up and attempts to realise his dream of leaving Ireland and building a new life in America.If you like real life drama set in the dismal surroundings where escapism is nowhere to be seen, then this is a masterpiece, but for everyone else, it's an interesting look into a way of life that should have died out with Queen Victoria. Ultimately, this film failed to make its money back and some would argue, failed to live up to the book and it certainly lacked enough humour to carry the story through what in many cases were traumatic events in such a dire environment.And I must have the missed the point of the title, as what the hell were Angela's Ashes?

If you pitched a movie about historically accurate misery and poverty to any Hollywood exec, none would endure it for more than twenty seconds. So how did this get made? Well, when you present the same dreary idea with the words "It's based on the best-seller," things tend to get green-lighted. You know, there's a ready audience to extract admission fees from. Without that, this project had no possibility of being made. There are exactly zero people in the world clamoring for a generously long, depressing movie.This movie really needed an adaptation that found (or manufactured) some engrossing throughline in the episodic material. Making it filmic instead of a slavishly, literal depiction of the books imagery would have been just dandy too. But no. Rabid fans tend not to like that. They want the book filmed as if the imagery they supplied while reading it were merely recorded. This is the limp task we ask of filmed novels in this era. It's not compelling. Rarely does a movie survive a books fan base.They must have devised special life-sucking camera filters to make this. Everything is grey and torpid. But if there's one thing this story didn't need is to have it's misery overdetermined by ponderous direction, a ponderous script, ponderous production design, a ponderous poster of a scowling child and that ponderous Misery-Vision camera work. As my Irish relatives might say "Oh for f***'s Sake!" Didn't a colored piece of broken glass occasionally end up in their hands that didn't get painted grey by the gloom patrol? Even the fruit is grey in McCourts world.When I first heard his reading of the first page or two of this on NPR it made me laugh out loud. I thought it was going to be a moderate view of his bad childhood relieved by a little humor. Instead I discovered the book to be an exercise in troweling misery upon misery without edification, and I never made it; neither could some of my friends who wanted to open a vein after just a few chapters. It was like paddling upstream through oatmeal (grey oatmeal) wearing a blindfold (grey also). I don't know what this book did for the readers who made it a best-seller, nor did I realize that there were such enormous audiences in the entertainment age hoping to feel seriously miserable. By page 50 I was shouting "We've got it, Frank!" I don't know how I got the tone so wrong from his reading. There's barely a sentence that survives the all-pervading clutch of gloom and death.If this material weren't already exhausted in just two iterations, it could be spoofed perfectly with the figure of death and his scythe gleefully chopping people down mid-sentence every couple of minutes, and extras in the background painting entire fruitstands grey.