Truly Dreadful Film

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

'Pride' is a simple British film that manages to be about lots of things all at once, all while being charming and quaint, as only the Poms can do! It's set in London (and Wales) in 1984 and follows a small group of gay & lesbian activists who decide to do stand up to the Thatcher government - not for gay rights, but for the rights of the striking miners! It's all handled quite well and doesn't become a full on drama, or a full on comedy - or even a full on "political" or "gay" movie.Sure, there's definitely lots of political messages being explored - and you would like to think the world, in general, is a more tolerant place 30 years later - but the film's really about this group of six friends banding together and supporting another put-upon group, a small mining community in Wales. This is where a lot of the humour comes from - the old Welsh ladies having fun with "their gays" and "their lesbians"!The cast is superb - even though Nighy is probably under-utilised - with Mark (Schnetzer) & Joe (McKay) particularly captivating. The soundtrack/score is also great, although there's obviously some disco! Well-paced and with a great ending, this is a very enjoyable film.

Pride tells the story of a group of U.K. activists that form a group called Gays & Lesbians Support the Miners. They lead the charge in collecting money and materials to support miners during the strike of the National Union of Mineworkers in 1984. In the telling of this true story a good many of the actual people involved are present during some of the march sequences. Good acting all the way around and an enjoyable film.

I watched the Matthew Warchus-Stephen Beresford offering "Pride" just days after media heralded the first week in centuries in which the UK engaged in no large-scale power generation from coal. I use the word "heralded", since - while there were many references to that being "historic", it was hard to see much regret. Today, coal is viewed as a dirty source of CO2. The fact that we might someday need some for strategic purposes - just in case - seems wrongly skimmed over, but should we really mourn the passing of coal as main everyday fuel? This is a first key perspective against which "Pride" can be set, while the second concerns the relatively recent death of Lady Thatcher - a person who receives zero sympathy in this film, as well she might not given the authentic recreation of the circumstances of 1984. However, this is 2014 work that refuses to acknowledge what Maggie knew - that each taxpayer had by 1984 been subsidising the coal industry for decades to the tune of thousands. This is likewise a film ready to simplify Arthur Scargill down into a hero-leader of working miners, and to present police officers as little more than suppressors of rights ready to deploy physical and verbal abuse against strikers. Finally, it is a film largely unprepared to acknowledge that miners lived short, dirty, diseased and unpleasant lives that few would envy, and that many did their level best to escape from. The closest we get to this last recognition is a brief line uttered by Bill Nighy's character "Cliff", who makes it clear that members of his close family have been killed by their occupation.In short, and with the best will in the world, "Pride" is irrevocably pro-miner, decades after the events, showing how opinions on the miners' strike will remain divided - perhaps forever, with black v white, and little nuancing or attempt to present both sides of the argument.Interestingly, your reviewer is not quite like that...While this film cannot persuade me to renounce my admiration for "Maggie" overall, I do find sympathy for the miners' cause evoked in me by "Pride" (just as I find it evoked by "Brassed Off" - the similarly-themed Mark Herman film made in 1996, hence far closer to the portrayed events). I AM NOT made of stone, even if the makers of "Pride" seem to be.Of course, "Pride" goes beyond the strike per se to report the remarkable alliance struck up between young male and female homosexuals and Welsh miners at a time when anti-Thatcher sympathies were NOT enough to bridge gaps of prejudice, even when the L&G community did all they could to raise funds to help the miners and their families. The fact that these were often English city-dwellers from the "soft South" made the divide even more visible!This is obviously then an amazing story worth telling, and it is here told with warmth, insight and humanity, and indeed - in this dimension at least - with the necessary nuancing. AIDS was just getting going then, and potential sufferers and society were both scared, for the same and different reasons. This ensured that anti-gay sentiment gained reinforcement just at a time when sexual-minority rights would otherwise have been making further progress. Even the 21 age of consent for male homosexuals was still in place. It was a quite different world, and one that gains authentic presentation.The aforementioned Bill Nighy plays far from his usual part, and is perhaps the most compelling character - a quiet, poetic soul thrilled by mining history and culture, though not quite blind to its costs, a repressed homosexual himself and a gentle man resorting to the strongest possible language as he spews out his loathing of "Thatcher". His fellows in the mining community include the reasonable, bridge-building "Dai", whose portrayal by Paddy Considine is just right. And, needless to say, Dai's mix of crusading and pragmatism at first gets far more support from the true unsung heroes of every such industrial village - the wives and mothers. Here we get quite superb performances from Imelda Staunton as the gung-ho Hefina, as well as the quieter kindness personified of Gwen, played by an excellent Menna Trussler. On the L&G side there is an absolute plethora of great acting to savour, be it from Faye Marsay as the lovely (in every sense) "Steph" or Dominic West as older gay actor Jonathan Blake - in real life still alive in 2017, despite being among the first people in Britain to be diagnosed HIV+. Then of course there is our hero "Joe", played by George Mackay; Gethin (Andrew Scott) and real-life early AIDS victim Mark Ashton - also a communist (though the film chooses not to go there), who is just superbly played by Ben Schnetzer. On this side of the film, this is an ensemble chosen with care to offer a non-stereotypical presentation of the whole spectrum of types and personalities that the lesbian and gay community (just of course like ANY OTHER COMMUNITY) can muster.Ultimately, "Pride" remained an at-times uncomfortable watch for me, but solely because I believe the cynically manipulative and self-adoring Scargill had an agenda beyond UK pits, while Maggie had a duty (was repeatedly elected) to see the big economic (and even environmental) picture. That is also a story that will need telling someday. In the meantime, here is a film that I still appreciated greatly, portraying an incongruous and priceless situation from history enjoyably, thoughtfully and deftly, through truly classy performances.But concession-making is a two-way process. If I can swallow my "pride", sacrifice political beliefs to see the merit in (and even feel sympathy for) arguments presented by the other side, well perhaps so also can they, one day...

The 1984 Miner's strike caused deep scars in part of the country and there was media manipulation at its best. It is still a shame that both the ITV News and BBC News have not been challenged over their pro government propaganda. For example news footage where Police on horseback attacking protesting miners was edited to show the Miners were provoking the police who then attacked. This was not in the raw footage, the miners only threw things after the police attacked.Thirty years on Britain has a rump of the mining industry. In terms of health and safety it has had its day when the government in the late 1990s had to pay vast amount in compensation to ex-miners for long term health consequences.In what was a divisive strike not helped by the Miner's having a militant leader with little cunning. This film based on true events sees the gay and lesbian community from London raising funds for striking miners. As the Miner's union had their bank assets frozen, it was difficult for striking miners to survive. I remember our family giving tins of food as part of a food parcel and we even did not live near a mining community.The juxtaposition of striking miners with gays & lesbians raises all kinds of issues as it was also an era where the Thatcher government were thinly disguised homophobic and I suspect the world of the mining community were probably not noted for their broad mindedness.The film deals with the initial reluctance of the mining community to deal with this new found support which gradually lead to mutual acceptance. There are of course side plots of someone reluctant to come out, the flamboyant gay man teaching the villagers how to dance and one of the men from the capital is actually returning to his roots. The actors seem to be enjoying themselves and pitch the performance just right and there is good use of period setting and music to evoke that 1980s mood.It is a low budget feel good drama which does sometimes fall into predictable schmaltz. The film touched upon the era of AIDS entering the news cycle. In the end the strike led to a bitter defeat for the miners but the union committed the Labour Party to fight for gay rights which it did when it came into power in 1997.