Popular reviews

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  Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★ 1

  Crock of Gold is perfect for someone who doesn't know who Shane MacGowan of The Pogues is and likewise for his biggest fans as well. However, it runs a little long for the casual viewer at just over two hours (also giving us the whole history of Ireland, no less). Between his heroin abuse and crazy life, it's amazing the guy is still alive. It is sad to see that he has run out of inspiration, but perhaps it'll return one day.

  
  Vegan alert:
  Talking about stabbing geese

  Release date: December 4, 2020

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  Review by Dave Taylor ★★½

  Up until this week I had never heard ‘The Pogues’ and only knew Shane MacGowan from his infamous mouth.

  And in this 124 minute documentary, they didn’t even bother explaining how his mouth got so fucked up!

  Was it bad oral hygiene?
  Was it a specific drug?
  Genetics?
  Too much sugar?

  Yet they spend the first hour talking about Irish history and MacGowan’s life pre-Pogues. The thing is, they talk about the history like everyone watching already knows what happened so they name drop events without clear explanations. I know they don’t want to make this doc even longer, but either give us a couple sentences on context or leave it out. 

  Honestly, MacGowan’s life wasn’t that remarkable. He drank, did drugs and toured. This would have been a fine film if it was 60 minutes, but at over two hours, it was like beating a dead leprechaun with a shillelagh long after you had his gold.

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  Review by Shea ★★★★ 4

  "We literary people, even if we're illiterate."

  Say what you will about Shane McGowan's vast personality flaws, the guy's actually kind of a based legend, something I had never given him enough credit for (all I really had to go on was the anecdote my parents had told me about seeing him perform live back in 2003, where he didn't show up for 90 minutes and when he finally did was so drunk he had to be carried out on stage, proceeded to play one of the best sets they'd ever heard, and had to be carried back off again).

  As this documentary illustrates, Shane MacGowan embodies the Irish folk spirit in more than just his music. He is a…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Incorporating traditional Irish music with a growling punk ethos, The Pogues prevailed as an extraordinary force in music during the nineteen-eighties. This documentary from the veteran punk documentarian and filmmaker Julien Temple shines a spotlight on the tortured frontman, Shane MacGowan. Through unseen archival footage, family photographs and colourful animation from celebrated illustrator Ralph Steadman, the film accompanies MacGowan as he trades quips with his contemporaries and friends as well as sharing more than a few pints and anecdotes.

  In chronicling the ascent of The Pogues, the film naturally becomes jam-packed with some terrific music. He commences with MacGowan's childhood, incorporates the bands crowning accomplishment of Rum Sodomy & the Lash, their third studio album If I Should Fall from Grace…

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  Review by Paul Duane ★★★

  When the news got out that Julien Temple was making a documentary about Shane McGowan, my first reaction was, why now? Shane is in a pitiful state in 2020, in a wheelchair, visibly miserable, hasn't written a song in years, it hurts to see what he's become.
  The film has a very rocky start. The first half hour is basically an unchallenged dramatisation of Shane's self-mythologised version of his childhood. Temple tries to nod to it as 'myth' in the opening sequence, one of far, far too many animated sequences, making up for the lack of other voices - whether because nobody wanted to speak, or because they were ruled out, it's impossible to know.
  It's excruciating to watch Temple…

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  Review by MichaelEternity ★★★ 4

  About time I come to terms with my own shallowness: I felt about the same toward this practically novelistic biography of the lead singer of one of my favorite bands as I did about last year's (more audaciously crafted) "The Velvet Underground" (Todd Haynes), another one of my favorite bands, which is: love all this music flowing throughout, thanks for including my favorite song of theirs (in this case "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn"), seems like you got the sensibility of the artist pretty well captured in somewhat playfully sardonic Behind the Music form via interviews with hard-boiled survivors of the scene as well as reams of archival footage and some animated interludes, aaaaaand yet most of what they choose…

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  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★★ 1

  "He was an Irishman but he wasn't a Paddy" is Shane MacGowan's assessment of WB Yeats. Well, it is my view, that MacGowan (born in Kent and lived in Ireland for arguably the first five of his six years on the earth) isn't an Irishman but he is a Paddy. Though, as he says against accusations of laying it on thick, "You want Paddy, I'll give you fucking Paddy". The accusations aren't necessarily unfounded though, and whilst some view MacGowan's Irishness as an affectation, it does not irritate me personally. What does irritate me is Johnny Depp (one of the producers of this film and an irritating, somewhat pointless contributor) affecting an Irish accent during his bar-room conversations with Shane.…

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  Review by Conchobarre ★★★★ 2

  This is Julian Temple’s look at the life of Shane MacGowan, lead singer of the punky/trad Irish music band The Pogues who were huge in the 80s. It was entertaining for me as a fan, and I imagine it would also be for people who don’t know McGowan and his band. The main reason is the use of animation and filmed recreations of some of MacGowan’s reminiscences and a lot of historic footage of his life but also the society around him – both in Ireland and England. MacGowan’s persona was/is of the out of control drunken “Paddy” who is a literary or poetic genius. He seems to idylicise his early days and family in rural Ireland, although he was…

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★★½

  Shane McGowan has an incredible laugh, I mean that in the literal sense. I've never met the man and don't know what it's like in the room with him, but for all the years I've been listening to the Pogues or watching interviews with him, it's been the same, regardless of his physical condition, a sudden hissing sound, like air escaping from a tire, after a seemingly casual offhand comment, rising to a pitch somewhere between a serpent's death-rattle and the giggle of a schoolboy who's just gotten away with something.

  That laugh is very much on display throughout Crock of Gold, because in a sense (the film isn't just about Shane McGowan, the film is essentially a series of…

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  Review by Gemma G ★★★½

  Torn between appreciating the history and archive and openness and socialism and beardy men and beautiful women and sweary honesty and class system analysis and very specific Irishisms (“We’re literary people, even if we’re illiterate”)... and being devastated by the levels of addiction on display, and how weird and slurry Johnny Depp is.

  If you come for the music, be prepared for a fiercely chronological structure. There is a lot of anxiety and stout and IRA history and private school shenanigans to get through before the punk rock starts. Lol at Shane’s dad blaming Creedence Clearwater Revival for his son going off the rails.

  
  Also features a wild story set in my hometown, Wellington. Hide the blue paint.

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  Review by Luke Nicastro ★★

  A terribly disappointing and lazy film. Turns the story of one of the most interesting bands in the world into ‘Plastic Paddy’ kitsch, complete with cutesy animations. Leans heavily on worshipful celebrity interviews, and concludes with a truly execrable 60th birthday bash in which a wheelchair-bound, vacant-eyed MacGowan receives self-satisfied tributes from people like Bono and Johnny Depp. 

  Ekes out 2 stars because The Pogues still rule.

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  Review by Alan Mattli ★½ 1

  ZFF 2020 #32

  This one really hurts because I care about this topic. Irish music and history fascinate me to no end. I love the Pogues. I think Shane MacGowan is an amazing singer and songwriter. "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn" and "Fairytale of New York" are two of my all-time favourite songs.

  All of these things deserve a proper film, not an incoherent anecdote salad put to embarrassingly tacky Windows Movie Maker visuals. It's fine (if a bit codependent) if Johnny Depp is friends with Shane MacGowan, but I don't need to see a two-hour documentary built on top of those two slurring their words at each other.

  The only aspects that did anything for me here were Gerry…