24hr party people Revelation!!

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
I avoided this film like the plague when it came out because it sounded like utter tish.

They showed it on UK TV last night and I didnt have to work today, so I gave it a go - and it absolutely blew me away. especially the JD/ACR concert sequences. I've read truckloads of book about this scene, listened to loads of bootlegs and seen all the live footage I can hoard, but i've never seen anything that gives a better sense of what it was actually like to be there watching these incredible bands at the height of thier powers.

I should add the caveat that i was a bit stoned, and i notice weed does give me greater powers to think myself into situations. I'm going to pick up the DVD and see if it has the same effect sober.

But, f$%£ing hell, that is genuinely one of the best youth culture films I've ever seen! And doubly so because I went into the experience on a massive downer expecting it to be toss.

What did you all think of it - tell me am i going soft in my old age?
 

secretagentgel

Well-known member
i saw it, loved it, bought it, continue to love it. asked martin moscrop about it when i met him, and he said it was definitely romanticized, but not too bad. so i take it with a grain of salt, but love the legened. like watching the doors movie or something.

corey
 

blunt

shot by both sides
secretagentgel said:
he said it was definitely romanticized, but not too bad. so i take it with a grain of salt, but love the legened.

I think that's kind of the point of the movie tho. It plays explicitly with both the perception and reality of the period. As Tony Wilson say (in both movie and real life): "When having to choose between the legend and reality, always print the legend." :)
 

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
It's an excellent film, innit. Re: the fact versus fiction issue, it's a bit like Lawrence Of Arabia I reckon- even though there's lots of things that didn't happen, it's captures the spirit if not the letter of what actually happened.
 

alo

Well-known member
Yeah, i too thought it was way better than i expected. Coogan was excellent, and the way the truth was filtered out through Tony Wilsons psyche, brilliant. Also the way that the emotional coldness of the JD era turned warmer but more bankrupt, as everything spirals out of control: the film makers really got down the idea of this post modern cocktail of Art, Industry Economics, and social order imploding, as well as a great story and extremely funny gags. Still thought it was played for laughs a little bit too much---Curtis' suicide might have had a bit more resonance for a start...?
But, its not often that musical fiction in film gets dealt with this much respect is it? Anyone seen that Johnny Cash film?
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
I liked it too. I just wish it was 2 times longer so they wouldn't have to rush through it so fast. I am still mystified about what the big deal about The Happy Mondays is or who they are. The only part I understood is some guy from the audience jumped up on the stage one and became a member whose sole responsibility is jumping around on stage and feeding the other members pills. I disagree with their claim that anyone not into this music or bands would enjoy the movie. I know next to nothing about A Certain Ratio and I am afraid I know just as little after the movie.

They really go heavy on self-reference. My head nearly exploded when he said something about some scene making it onto the DVD. So was it cut out of the theater release or what or is he just fucking with me?

The one big surprise to me was what a psycho Ian Curtis turns out to have been. Not how I pictured him at all after "Love Will Tear Us Apart".
 

Immryr

Well-known member
DigitalDjigit said:
I liked it too. I just wish it was 2 times longer so they wouldn't have to rush through it so fast. I am still mystified about what the big deal about The Happy Mondays is or who they are. The only part I understood is some guy from the audience jumped up on the stage one and became a member whose sole responsibility is jumping around on stage and feeding the other members pills. I disagree with their claim that anyone not into this music or bands would enjoy the movie. I know next to nothing about A Certain Ratio and I am afraid I know just as little after the movie.

They really go heavy on self-reference. My head nearly exploded when he said something about some scene making it onto the DVD. So was it cut out of the theater release or what or is he just fucking with me?

The one big surprise to me was what a psycho Ian Curtis turns out to have been. Not how I pictured him at all after "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

hmm i dont really want to be mean here, but you sound like a total idiot.
 

don_quixote

Trent End
whilst watching it, i was mostly interested in who people were meant to be. did the devoto fucking wilson's wife thing actually happen or not? the three guys who speak to wilson outside curtis' funeral - one, the last, is certainly paul morley. the other two, the first - the guy who says that he has recorded himself singing joy division songs... is he a representation of bono? i don't have the dvd, so i cant watch it back, but did he have an irish accent? the second guy - he looked like robert smith and had flowers like morrissey. was he meant to show the two of them? is this wilson on an ego trip trying to show how he was influencing EVERYTHING in manchester? also there's very dodgy timescales, rowetta wasnt with the mondays until 1990, yet the scene after wilson is chatting to yvette livesey as current miss uk which must have been 1988... but whatever.

i wasnt too keen on the mixing of archive footage and actors either, it felt disconcerting
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
Gabba Flamenco Crossover said:
I should add the caveat that i was a bit stoned, and i notice weed does give me greater powers to think myself into situations.
That's one of the problems with weed: it robs you of your critical faculties where films are concerned, makes incomprehensible Japanese cartoons seem avant garde and turns TV watching into an activity.

That said, I quite enjoyed 24 Hour Party People. More for the Hac / Mondays era stuff than the early Factory days. Alan Partridge was a wee bit annoying as Tony Wilson, but I suppose that was kind of the point.
 

Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
DigitalDjigit said:
The one big surprise to me was what a psycho Ian Curtis turns out to have been. Not how I pictured him at all after "Love Will Tear Us Apart".

Actually that was one thing that really impressed me - JD and ACR being portrayed as Northern Soul-loving perry boys who were a bit tasty, rather than introverted classics students transplanted into salford. This factor above anything else was what gave it credibility for me. You could see how ill equipped they were for discussing all the emotional sh1t they had going on and how that intensity fired their music.

And it really brought home how big an influence northern soul is on the JD sound - something which isnt massively apparent from thier studio albums (much more obvious on thier early stuff, like Digital which is performed in the film).

What i found most moving though, is that the mancunain culture that produced that scene has almost totally disappeared - every city in britain has seen a polarisation of working and middle class under thatcher and new labour, but nowhere more so than manchester. Today its a completely different place to the city portrayed (accurately) in the film - awash with football money and well-to-do students and yuppified to an alarming degree, but simultaniously the asbo capital of britain. For me the magic of that scene was uptight working class rubbing up against arty middle class through sheer boredom , and i dont think that could happen now.

Very very mixed feeling for me - I grew up close to manchester, my family come from that kind of background, and i totally identified with this music as i was growing up, so it's painful to see it moving into the past. it was almost like a requiem for me. But then again, even if there are significant minority further down the pole, most northern families have a vastly better standard of living than they did 30 years ago - so who am I to shed a tear over all this?

I think watching 24Hr pp was my first real taste of the power of nostalgia, and i feared initally that it was this, more than the herb, that had clouded my critical faculties. Kind of the reasoning behind the thread. But I appear to be wrong! Gonna check it sober to make sure though :D
 
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Gabba Flamenco Crossover

High Sierra Skullfuck
don_quixote said:
whilst watching it, i was mostly interested in who people were meant to be. did the devoto fucking wilson's wife thing actually happen or not? the three guys who speak to wilson outside curtis' funeral - one, the last, is certainly paul morley. the other two, the first - the guy who says that he has recorded himself singing joy division songs... is he a representation of bono? i don't have the dvd, so i cant watch it back, but did he have an irish accent? the second guy - he looked like robert smith and had flowers like morrissey. was he meant to show the two of them? is this wilson on an ego trip trying to show how he was influencing EVERYTHING in manchester? also there's very dodgy timescales, rowetta wasnt with the mondays until 1990, yet the scene after wilson is chatting to yvette livesey as current miss uk which must have been 1988... but whatever.

i wasnt too keen on the mixing of archive footage and actors either, it felt disconcerting

The guy with the flowers is robert smith i believe.

I thin most of the events have thier basis in reality - sometimes amalgamated for convenience or dramatic effect. like, hannett did walk out of factory in the early 80s in a row over money, but not specifically about the hacienda AFAIK. And Ryder did shoot out a mirror in the dry bar and kidnap the master to yes please!, but they were seperate incidents.

But great touches to give real flavour of the scene - like JD slagging off ACR. i know JD had a rather imperial attitude to ACR in the late 70s which wasnt helped by ACR consciously appropriating JDs sound (to be fair hannett was partly responsble for this), Would they have put that in if it was a rose-tinted hagiography?

I think the thing with wilson being at the centre of the narrative is a dig at his self image - hence all the self referencial stuff and the riffs on post-modernism. Wislon is basically a wolrd class bullshitter as anyone whose ever met him or heard him speak will know, but thats part of his genius.
 

notoriousJ.I.M

Well-known member
It's a great film, not a documentary but that's the point. It is educational and entertaining. I'm very interested in seeing the film being made about Curtis, not heard much recently but I hope they don't cast Jude Law. I thought the guy in 24hpp was the best bit of casting in the whole film.
 
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