Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 5, 2014

Note: This film is currently available as part of the double feature 2 by Ken Loach: Riff-Raff / Raining Stones.

Despite a long career that has resulted in several prestigious awards (including this year’s Honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), Ken Loach continues to be oddly underappreciated and in fact largely unknown on this side of the pond. His class conscious social realism would seem to be a perfect fit in a nation noted for its supposed lack of “caste” strata, but Loach’s films have generally been consigned to the Art House circuit over here and have therefore perhaps not had the wider recognition they deserve. Those curious about Loach had a recent opportunity to experience one of his 1970s outings when Cohen Film Collection released Black Jack, and now Twilight Time has released a double feature of two relatively more recent films from Loach’s enduring oeuvre, 1991’s Riff-Raff and 1993’s Raining Stones, both dealing with disaffected lower class folks caught in the vagaries of less than desirable working conditions or in fact unemployment. Both films offer an unsurprisingly dour perspective on the disastrous British economy of that era, but as with most Loach films, there are glimmers of hope scattered throughout the ashes of these lives.

Karl Marx famously intoned that religion was “the opiate of the masses”, as that particular phrase is usually translated into English, but perhaps surprisingly for someone with the socialist tendencies of Ken Loach, there’s an ameliorative effect to belief that can help even those in completely desperate circumstances. That seems to be at least part of the subtext to Raining Stones, a film with a somewhat lighter ambience than Riff-Raff, its sibling in the Loach double feature 2 by Ken Loach: Riff-Raff / Raining Stones. The film follows the hapless escapes of chronically unemployed Bob (Bruce Jones), a well meaning would be working stiff who wants nothing more than to buy his daughter Coleen (Gemma Phoenix) an appropriately celebratory dress for her upcoming first communion. While the hardscrabble lives of England’s working (or in this case non-working) poor are once again front and center in a Loach piece, Raining Stones is surprisingly uplifting, offering at least a few signs that some kind of divine grace might just be available for those who wait (even if they occasionally sin while waiting).

Despite a hand me down being offered by kindly local parish priest Father Barry (Tom Hickey), Bob is intent on providing Coleen with something of her own, a decision which leads to a number of questionable behaviors on Bob’s part and which in true karmic fashion end up biting the poor man quite seriously in the posterior. Still, Bob’s innate steeliness allows him to forge ahead, helped by the support of his wife Anne (Julie Brown). There are some frankly lunatic moments in Raining Stones, with sequences like Bob’s frantic attempts to slaughter a lamb so that he can sell the meat playing out almost like a Keystone Cops comedy.

But the seriousness of Loach’s intent is never really in question. These people have been beaten down to within an inch of their lives, and still they endure. The closing scene, where the church’s healing grace is offered via a communion wafer, which is intercut with the minor but cathartic solution to an earlier problem, seems to hint at the fact that Loach may actually believe that sometimes a figurative dose of opium isn’t all that bad in the long run.

Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Raining Stones is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. This is a somewhat better looking transfer than Riff-Raff, aided by the fact this was shot in 35mm, offering greater clarity and sharpness to the overall image. Things can still be fairly grainy here, especially in darker interior shots, and once again grain just occasionally seems slightly splotchy looking. The color space here is pretty cool most of the time, and nothing pops very vividly, but that perhaps only helps to punctuate the drabness of the lives on display. Contrast is generally very consistent, and the elements offer no appreciable damage to report.

Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Raining Stones' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix offers a nicely vivid soundscape, although Stewart Copeland's scoring choices here are at times quite odd (there are moments when cues approach portentous horror cue status for something as simple as a character walking in a door). Dialogue is cleanly presented, and on the whole the dialects here are much easier to fathom than they are in Riff-Raff. There is no damage of any kind to report on this track.

Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Isolated Score and Effects Track is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0.

Raining Stones Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bob may not always make the right decisions, but it's obvious his heart is in the right place, and he even has the good sense to repent of his sins as the film wends its way toward an almost hopeful denouement. Raining Stones still has the screed like elements that tend to inform a lot of Loach's material, but they're softened here and made part of a compelling tale of grace and salvation. Recommended.