The Iron Lady revisited....

Hasn't she rusted yet???

Personally,  I didn't rate the film but it had little to do with her politics or how they were portrayed.   I just thought it was a fairly routine and superficial trudge through the headline events of her career, with the main message being 'you may have disagreed with her but wasn't she a strong woman in a man's world?'.    For me, Meryl Streep was as good as she usually is but she was a bit wasted.  

For the record, she didn't resign (or at least not until they'd practically unscrewed her nameplate from the door).  Her colleagues at the top level of her own party turfed her out - their dirty work (closing mines, reining in powerful unions, defending a hawkish foreign policy, trying to impose a poll tax) was done and they no longer needed the bad blood she attracted.     She was too divisive - very popular with some but actively hated by others.

Just to steer this vaguely back towards the TOS, I can't remember a PM ever inspiring so many 'anti' songs..The Beat's 'Stand Down Margaret', The Specials 'Maggie's Farm', The Crass' 'How Does it Feel to be The Mother of a Thousand Dead?', Elvis Costello/Robert Wyatt's 'Shipbuilding', Billy Bragg's 'Between the wars'..

I can't post the title of the one by The Exploited.

That movie is still on my "to see"-list, mostly due to Maryl Streep. It sort of smells like "in order to get an Oscar"-kind of choice of role, though.
I can imagine that those years were so hard on so many UK citizens that it's difficult for them to keep separate the movie as a movie from their experiences of the era.

I'm not an expert on UK's economical/social history, but I think most of what happened there during MTs regime, happened then, and especially a little later, in many/most West-European countries and globally.
Many huge, old industrial and administrative structures collapsed or had to be downsized quite simply because they'd come to the end of the road. Global competition, environmental questions etc. The only alternative would be making all industry run on state subsidies, and that's a very short road. 

IMO the way competition in all fields has become global is as huge a process of change as the big migrations in Europe some 2000 years ago. World will change dramatically in a way that doesn't favor the ordinary folks in old industrial west. Now the change only takes a generation or two, not hundreds of years, like before, which makes it even harder. The more global business gets, the more it follows the rules of hard capitalism. Homo Sapiens should be capable of more controlled development than fishes or fungus, but it doesn't seem to be so. Hope I didn't violate TOS. I tried to keep this on general level.

The film came across to me as little more than a bad parody.

Spitting Image tackled the subject much better, and I'd argue, more poignantly.

Still remember this now, classic...

The Scene: Thatcher and her ministers are sat around a table in a restaurant, she is reading the menu..

Waitress (to Maggie, seated at the head of the table): Are you ready to order sir?

Thatcher: Yes, I will have a steak.
 
Waitress: How do you like it?

Thatcher: Oh.... raw please.
 
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?

Thatcher: Oh.... they'll have the same as me.
 

jbow


I didn't care for the dead husband constantly in the picture. IT portrayed her as insane... but perhaps it showed her as able to overcome it. I have no idea if that part was pure fantasy or what.

Julien, she has dementia. I think the film is less about Thatcher specifically, and more to do with how its creators imagined people with dementia might perceive the world. For me, it failed miserably on both counts.
 
She was probably viewed as the ideal candidate to use as the vehicle to illustrate such a concept.
 
 

jbow


Was that the same song as the FACES Not Gonna work on Maggie's Farm No More? Don't remember the exact title..

Yes, both are covers of the Bob Dylan song.

craigb

SteveStrummerUK


The film came across to me as little more than a bad parody.

Spitting Image tackled the subject much better, and I'd argue, more poignantly.

Still remember this now, classic...

The Scene: Thatcher and her ministers are sat around a table in a restaurant, she is reading the menu..

Waitress (to Maggie, seated at the head of the table): Are you ready to order sir?

Thatcher: Yes, I will have a steak.
 
Waitress: How do you like it?

Thatcher: Oh.... raw please.
 
Waitress: And what about the vegetables?

Thatcher: Oh.... they'll have the same as me.
 

My chortle comes from the waitress addressing Maggie as "sir."

 
Craig, the original sketch is HERE, about 20 seconds in.
 
 

Bristol_Jonesey

jamesg1213


I can't speak for the movie, because I couldn't bear more 10 minutes of it.

As far as Thatcher goes, in my opinion (and I'm not alone), she was single-handedly responsible for the dismantling of the working class in Britain, replacing, for example, matrons and ward sisters in the NHS with 'managers'. With her 'there is no such thing as society' mantra, she created a massively misplaced sense of entitlement in the 1980's, leading to over-stretching of personal finances, home repossession, bankrupty and state dependancy from which, I believe, we have never recovered.

We now have 3rd generation unemployed in the UK.whole families in which no-one has ever worked, and will never work. I blame her.

^^^^ This!

I also believe she was personally responsible for the horrendous cover up over the Hillsborough disaster, and hopefully with the new evidence unearthed and a new inquest/inquiry, the truth will come out before she pops her clogs

Not to mention screwing up pensions.


And Council Houses are pretty much a thing of the past, being replaced with over greedy "housing associations." In my opinion, of course.