Very Annie Mary (2001)

I settled down to watch this having recorded it some years ago when it was shown in the BBC sign zone, something I had forgotten till the sign language started up in the bottom corner! My sister must have recommended it to me as one of her favourites and that was all I knew of it. I found I didn't know what to make of the film throughout, was it funny or sad, comedy or tragedy? I guess it's both.Some bits shocked me, like her maltreatment of her disabled father, yet it made me adjust the stereotyped view of someone in this situation and remember that she was barely able to take care of herself properly and therefore totally clueless about caring for a disabled person, let alone him being the father who had put her down with his criticism for years.Whether it was the filmmaker's intent, I found the sensation of watching brought alive the situation of life just 'happening' to Annie Mary so that one moment her friend Bethan says she's in remission and the next she's talking about a hospice with no lead up to it either way.Annie Mary felt a very real character in the way that I found myself liking and disliking her, she wasn't all good or all bad as a human as with some of the more 'easy' to watch films from Hollywood where you know who to like and dislike within minutes of meeting them.Overall it has been a film that has made a real impact on me, too soon to say what but waking up having watched it the night before I find it is still vivid in my mind, still making me think... and feel.

You would think a movie featuring an inflatable Pavarotti impersonator, a seventy-year old woman in a Tina Turner costume belting out "What's Love Got To Do With It" and a scratch and sniff bible goes over the top with loud humor. That is not the case with VERY ANNIE MARY. It is a small film, quirky, tender, and funny in a mostly quiet way. Rachel Griffiths is excellent as a homely girl with a tyrant of a father who dresses her in her grandmother's clothes. The Scottish town they live in is determined to raise enough money to send a terminally ill teenager to Disneyland. I won't tell you anything more about it other than to rent the DVD or look for it on the Independent Film channel. You'll be very glad you did.

She has lived in the bakery her whole life and doesn't know how to make bread??? I understand her father probably controlled every aspect of production but to know NOTHING?? I don't bake bread and I bet I could figure it out PDQ if I had to. And really that pathetic closet where she proposed to put her father was just stupid. Anyone with half a brain would see that a dog didn't deserve that treatment. And just who would *bleep* her after meeting her once?? That fat guy at the races??

A joy to watch, Rachel Griffiths, Jonathan Pryce and Ioan Gruffydd should have been nominated for academy awards, a film like this is packed with a unique Welsh humour, that is sometimes hard for those not blessed to have been born in the beautiful country, to understand. Rachel Griffiths, a Welsh name, an Australian actress who made herself live the part, to become Welsh and understand what it means to live in a small community such as is portayed in this classic. If you buy no other film this year, buy Very Annie Mary, you'll laugh, cry, sympathise, and go through a million different emotions, you'll never look at a cabbage in the same light again. Superb acting, fantastic soundtrack, how does Puccini go side by side with the Village People - it does here. 10 /10 amazing film.