Brassed Off (1997)

Strong and Moving!

Lack of good storyline.

hyped garbage

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

This film about "Grimley" and its band is loosely based on the experiences of the miners and musicians of Grimethorpe, a small village in South Yorkshire whose economy was heavily dependent on coal mining. Characters in Brassed Off continue to feel the effects of the 1984 strike that tried and failed to prevent the closure of 20 mines. The bitterness that arose between those who continued to strike and those who returned to work still remains. In the period reflected in this movie (1992), most miners were less militant, and were willing to accept mine closure and severance pay, rather than an assessment of the mine's potential profitability as a private venture. After the mine was closed, Grimethorpe suffered from a loss of jobs and hope. All of this is reflected in the movie.The announcement of the mine's closing came just days before the 1992 National Brass Band competition. The fate of the local band after the mine is closed is the central question posed by the film. The Grimethorpe Colliery Band (which plays all the music heard in the movie) was one of many sponsored by various British communities and industries, and one of just a small handful of these bands that have been perennial contenders for national honors. In the years since 1970, the Grimethorpe Colliery Band has won the National Championships 4 times, the ITV Granada Band of the Year title 6 times, and the UK Brass in Concert Championship 14 times. Its success was partly based on recruitment of such super stars as Alan Morrison (its top cornet player) who was deemed the best lead cornet in Brass in Concert Championships in each of the five years from 1990 to 1994. (Morrison has said that his "only regret in life" is that he left the band too early and thus did not appear in the film.) His successor, Shaun Randall (who plays the cornet solo on the William Tell Overture in the movie) was named best lead cornet in the 1995 Brass Concert Championships. Although the Grimethorpe mine was closed, the Grimethorpe Colliery band has carried on. In November 2017, one organization ranked it the 10th best brass band in the world.Apart from the fate of the band, Brassed Off focuses on the personal situations of a few main characters. Incredibly, the publisher described the movie as a "delightfully entertaining comedy." This is emphatically not a comedy—unless you are inclined to chuckle at families being evicted from their homes, victims of black lung collapsing in the street, or an angry man cursing God in a church. The film stresses the tension between Danny, the band leader who considers music more important than anything, and his trombonist son Phil, who seems likely to lose everything with the closure of the mine. There is also the ambiguous romance between Gloria, who has returned to town in a mysterious role, and her old admirer Andy. Pete Postlewaite (Danny) and Stephen Tompkinson (Phil) are especially convincing. Tompkinson's role is perhaps the most challenging in the movie. Tara Fitzgerald and Ewan McGregor effectively portray the on-again, off-again, relationship between Gloria and Andy. (Viewers may recognize "Harry" as Jim Carter who played the butler "Carson" in Downton Abbey.) Although 80 per cent of the miners voted to accept closure of the mine and take severance pay, Brassed Off might lead viewers to sympathize with those who wanted to keep the mine open. But, work in the mines was not an unmixed blessing—like Danny, many miners suffered from various respiratory diseases. The movie blames mine closures on Margaret Thatcher and the Tories. Actually, the reduction in British coal production had been continuous since the 1910s, and cannot be attributed to particular leaders or political parties. The decline of British manufacturing, the development of new home heating technologies, and the switch to cheaper imported coal and to cleaner and renewable forms of energy were contributing factors. But, in a broader perspective, the film relates, not just to miners, but to the plight of all workers who are being rendered "redundant" by modern technology.

BRASSED OFF is a 1996 movie from England - written and directed by Mark Herman - in that tradition of those movies about the working classes attempting to better themselves: THE FULLY MONTY, BILLY ELLIOT and MADE IN DAGENHAM being other prominent examples. At the time it seemed like one of the last nails in the coffin of the outgoing Tory government.It's set in a real-looking Yorkshire mining town a few years after the 1984/85 miners strike, where the local coal mine is about to be closed. The miners (Ewan McGregor, Jim Carter, Stephen Tompkinson and others) find solidarity in their brass band under their conductor - retired miner Danny (the late Pete Postlewaite in his finest screen role), a man for whom music matters above all else. The pit closes, but the band makes it to the national brass band competition final at the Albert Hall. On winning, you expect Danny to make some sentimental speech about how - in spite of everything - music holds the band together. Instead, he delivers probably the explicit political diatribe against the then Conservative government and the devastation unemployment inflicts on people. It's a superb moment in a film with its heart and soul in the dying working class communities of Yorkshire. This isn't a piece of Ken Loach-like realism - it's prettified and sentimentalised for a mainstream audience, yet the movie looses nothing for it.At the close, the brass band play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstace March Number 1 as they pass the Houses of Parliament. It's meant to be ironic but it's also very touching.

Brassed Off is a British film about the troubles of a colliery brass band when the coal mines that sponsored the band was forced to close by the government in 1992, the same week the Grimethorpe Colliery Band won the National Brass Band Championship. The closures killed the coal industry in England and forced many miners out of their jobs. "Brassed off" is a British slang expression that means dejected, fed up, upset, which is what the coal miners were when they were forced into retirement, into joblessness, and some even into suicide when the government closed the mines. Between 1990 and 1997, the party in control of the British government was the Conservatives, who were led by John Major, although the film calls them Tories or the Tory party. When the government decided to replace coal with nuclear power as a source of fuel, approximately 140 coal pits, representing more than 200,000 miners' jobs, were deemed redundant. The government offered the workers "redundancy" – forced retirement with severance pay. The film is set in Grimley, a fictitious town that represents the village of Grimethorpe in South Yorkshire, in the early 1990s. In the late 1970s, the European Union named Grimethorpe the poorest village in Britain. The village, however, is still fiercely proud of their brass band that has been in existence since 1881. The film has been criticized by some as a poor imitation of the Yorkshire dialect and accent, but most American audiences wouldn't know the difference. If you like brass band music, you'll enjoy Brassed Off and you'll learn some history about the British government closing the coal mines at the same time (something the U.S. may be forced to do in the not-too-distant future if the environmentalists have their way).

Grimley Colliery Brass Band has been going for nigh on a century, but as the town's colliery itself comes under threat of closure due to the drawn out miners strikes, so does the bands very own survival. Giving much relief to a very depressed area, the band are hoping to make the grand finals day at the Royal Albert Hall, could the arrival of Flugelhorn player, Gloria, be just what the band needs? Or is she merely the catalyst to something far more critical?Brassed Off is the first of what I personally call the Magical British Trio, three films that perfectly portray the British sense of humour during dark depressing times of unemployment. The other two of course are The Full Monty (1997) and Billy Elliot (2000), of which Brassed Off is essentially an appetiser of sorts, the warm up act for the big hitters so to speak. Not to say that Brassed Off is not worthy to sit alongside those well received pictures (home and abroad as they say), it most certainly is, it's just that its blend of humour and strife doesn't find any easy ground, thus making it hard for the undiscerning viewer to be at ease at the right moments. It is in short, unsure of what it primarily wants to be. The humour does work well tho, but it's in the dramatic core of the miners strikes, and the affects they have on the denizens of this quaint colliery town, that Brassed Off truly works, with some scenes literally tugging away at the old heart strings. Then there be the music itself, The Grimethorpe Colliery Band {on whose real life story this film is based} provide the music for the soundtrack, and its most enjoyable, often stirring, and definitely poignant at crucial moments.The cast are tremendous, Ewan McGregor and Tara Fitzgerald offer up splendid youthful heart, but they are playing second fiddle (or should that be third brass section?) to Pete Postlethwaite and Stephen Tompkinson. As father and son, Postlethwaite and Tompkinson give the film its deep emotional being, each driven by differing needs, Brassed Off's success rests with both men being able to hold the viewers attention from the get go. Tompkinson has made a very profitable and thriving career in British Television, and rightly so, but it remains criminal that he didn't go on and make more well known and profitable full length feature films after his fabulous turn here. Filmed in the ideal Northern English town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, Brassed Off is a film that has evident problems, but to someone like me, a Brit who lived thru those depressing days under Margaret Thatcher's government, it's a film that I love for a myriad of reasons, one can only hope that one of those reasons strikes a chord with yourselves.A completely biased 9/10 from me!