‘My moment of glory’: Nicolas Cage lookalikes assemble in London

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To mark the release of his new film, hundreds of people who sort of look like the actor gather outside Prince Charles cinema On a sunny, bustling late afternoon outside a cinema in Soho, central London, more than 100 people have gathered, a number of whom sort of, if you squint, look a little bit like the actor Nicolas Cage. There is a Raising Arizona Cage, moustachioed and with a Hawaiian shirt. There are several Con Air Cages in white vests, one of whom has a toy bunny in a small cardboard box. Several can genuinely claim an uncanny likeness to the actor; one or two others might uncharitably be said to be closer to Cage’s character in Face/Off, who surgically swaps his own distinctive features for the face of someone else – in that case, John Travolta – who looks nothing like him. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/RDlTchw via IFTTT
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The Flats review – a powerful look at the unresolved agony of the Troubles

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Copenhagen documentary film festival: Alessandra Celesia’s urgent documentary about the residents of an estate in Belfast speaks to the lasting trauma of political violence

Alessandra Celesia’s film is part seance, part news story: a documentary about the run-down New Lodge estate in what the BBC news used to call “Catholic west Belfast”. It is primarily about the families who still live with the unresolved agony of the Troubles a quarter of a century on, the psychic residue of political violence coexisting with sexism, domestic abuse, substance abuse and futile rage against drug dealers in working-class neighbourhoods. But there is something else too. Along with TV news stories about the Queen’s death there is the sensational revelation that for the first time, the Catholic community in Northern Ireland now outnumbers the Protestant. The thought can hardly be said out loud; could it be that times are changing and reunification – that concept which caused so much bloodshed – is actually going to happen without another shot being fired?

At the film’s centre, Celesia shows the day-to-day life of Joe McNally, an ageing republican who has done jail time as an “ordinary decent criminal”, that is, for non-political offences. McNally lives like a ghost, an angry wraith; traumatised by the childhood memory of his uncle’s murder by loyalists. He has lived with the despairing sectarian thirst for revenge ever since. Celesia, perhaps inspired by Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, gets Joe to stage a reconstruction of his uncle’s wake in the back room with younger generations of the family, having gotten Joe and a friend to carry a coffin into his flat for this psychodrama. But far from exorcising Joe’s unquiet spirits, it only seems to make them even worse.

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