Haven't seen the movie in eight months! Maybe it's significant that he's got a chick name, I dunno.

On poorly publicized, well, I should amplify: No, Slumdog and Juno were not poorly publicized. Film-industry parasites such as myself were given multiple opportunities to see those movies, interview the filmmakers and cast, and shmooze the studio deli tray before they were released to the general public.

It appears that the distributor of Spread has concluded that reviews and press ops won't help the film, so they're releasing it abruptly, on a modest-sized platform, without (to my knowledge) any press screenings, talent junkets or the other customary publicity machinery. (Now, it's perfectly true that if Ashton's been on ET to talk about it, I probably didn't see that.)

Yes, they think there's an audience for this film, but they think they have to grab it quickly -- and they are clearly not expecting the upscale, bicoastal indie-type audience to dig it too much. Which is kind of weird to me, but there you are. So yeah, I do expect the movie to dump to DVD pretty fast. I could of course be wrong.

just fyi, the director of this film is not the same Robert Stone who wrote Dog Soldiers, Damascus Gate, Outerbridge Reach, etc. This one's a British-born filmmaker who's been making excellent TV & theatrical docs for 20 years, beginning with "Radio Bikini" in the late '80s.

Thanks for mentioning United Red Army, which I recently saw on DVD. Yes, it's terrific, & rather similar to "Baader Meinhof Complex" (probably better, though they're both worth seeing).

@silenced: Yes, I am well aware of the grad-student argument that the Irish should not be considered "white," at least in the sociological meaning of that word. While that may have some validity when you're talking about the British Empire or 19th century America, it has a whole lot less in the modern era. There was definitely some anti-Irish bigotry to be found in Britain as recently as the early '90s, but it faded pretty fast over the last few decades and has now definitively been replaced by anti-Muslim bigotry.

As for "the war between Britain and Ireland," we could argue about semantics but the bottom line is that by framing it that way you are surrendering to sentimentality. The relationship between Ireland and Britain is a complicated, ambivalent love-hate relationship between unequal siblings, but there has been no war between the two countries since the 1920s. One small segment of the Irish population -- a minority within a minority -- conducted a 30-year guerrilla war against the British government's administration of a tiny, weird little mini-state that never should have been created, and also against another small segment of the Irish population.

There is a great deal of semi-submerged resentment against the British among Irish people and I do not discount that. I once engaged in a public pissing match with Irish academic Conor Cruise O'Brien on this very topic, in which I pointed out that many Irish people were capable of condemning IRA violence in public and tolerating or even supporting it in private. Without that hidden reservoir of support, the conflict could never have lasted so long. My father used to say: "Ask an Irishman what he thinks of the Brits at 3 in the afternoon. Then ask him again at 3 in the morning."

Now, that said, most Irish people have grown up watching British TV, listening to British pop records, reading about the royal family and rooting for Manchester United. Most Irish people, like most British people, would have been delighted if the entire Northern Ireland question had simply disappeared. To use the words "war," "Britain" and "Ireland" in the same sentence is way more misleading than it is to point out that Irish people, if they weren't "white" originally, became so a long time ago.