CRITICS have questioned why Ken Loach’s latest film has no chirpy dancing cockneys in it.
I, Daniel Blake has garnered generally favourable views for depicting modern poverty as being like a game of ‘400 Questions’ where even if you manage to answer them all, you starve to death at the end.
But Toby Young, Britain’s most important film critic, said: “I’ve seen Annie, Les Miserables and Oliver! and Mr Loach needs to realise that grinding poverty generally has a chirpy song after ten minutes about how they’ll muddle through.
“I’m not telling him how to do his job, but lots of things rhyme with ‘food bank’ and he could have done a smashing dance routine of them handing out the value pasta to sobbing, hollow-eyed women.
“I go to the cinema to be entertained, not made to feel guilty that I’ve done precisely nothing to stop all this misery.”
Young said Loach’s previous works have similar inaccuracies, with The Wind That Shakes The Barley lacking penny-whistling dancing Irish people like in Titanic and Kes featuring a school with playing fields that haven’t been sold off.
