Magical Irish Movie Music Moment

The Kansas City Star yesterday ran a feature on A Dozen Magical Music Moments from the Movies and it included The Commitments at number one, for the performance of Try a Little Tenderness.

Alan Parker's adaptation of Roddy Doyle's first Barrytown book is the closest representation of the Dublin I grew up in you'll see on film. Give or take the soul music, which was the point. Our accents, our words, our roads.

You may well meet tons of Dublin people to which this film represented nothing of their Dublin so they saw it as a caricature of a city. But that's because they never bothered their arses to go out and look at the rest of the city.

It's quite dated now, as it should be, for Dublin itself has dated a lot in the 15 years since. White people in Dublin saying they're black and they're proud is different when there's an actual black population. The Commitments should be ahead of The Quiet Man on your all-time Irish movie list.

See Also: All Movie News on Irish KC