Tag Archives: Await Further Instructions

A Week In Film #540: First in ages

LBJ title screen
Straightforward, no-frills biopic of JFK’s get-shit-done veep, with Woody Harrelson under all the prosthetics and Rob Reiner directing.

Baby Driver title screenBaby Driver
Flashy but empty extended music video style getaway driver movie from Edgar Wright. Some nice sequences, some good performances (Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Jon Bernthal), but unsatisfying. Looks a dream, though.

The Domestics title screenThe Domestics
So-so, low budget post-apocalypse business written and directed by Mike P Nelson. Hardly the most original, but with the odd nice touch.

I, Dolours title screenI, Dolours
Dark documentary, not least because it is about a secretive PIRA unit tasked with ‘disappearing‘ and executing those considered threats to the organisation; and more so because its focus and main interviewee is a former member of the unit who is herself now dead. The interviews come from Ed Moloney’s ‘Boston Project’, of capturing candid personal testimony from players of all sides in the Troubles on the proviso that nothing would be released until after these witnesses to history themselves died. And so it was with Price, from a multi-generational Irish nationalist family who initially rejected their physical force republicanism for the glimmer of hope offered by student leftist activism in the late 1960s, but who was swiftly sucked back into the maelstrom after brutal beatings by police-backed Loyalist mobs at civil rights demonstrations. Before long she was in the IRA; then at the sharp end of a bombing mission on the British mainland; and then facing life in prison after informers in the leadership betrayed her and her comrades. Seven years of hunger strike and forced feeding, forced feeding and hunger strike passed before she was released early. From then on she moved further and further from the Provisional leadership as it crept closer and closer to accommodation with the British Army. Ultimately she broke very publicly with the movement which defined her life and everything that meant anything. She died embittered, addicted, ostracised and alone. But she may have been right.

Await Further Instructions title screenAwait Further Instructions
Lo-fi, low budget horror that sets up a premise nicely – tensions mount in a family trapped in their house over Christmas when some kind of external force prevents them from leaving, to the point that they are driven otter each other apart – but then pisses away all the goodwill it earns early on in a silly, pointless third act that ‘explains’ everything. Still worth a watch though. Johnny Kevorkian directs from Gavin Williams.