<$BlogPageTitle$> <$BlogMetaData$>

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

This week at SFC: 24 Hour Party People

Thursday 16th August 2007

Our screenings are free and all are welcome.

Film starts 8:15 pm. Doors open 7:30 pm.

Antonioni, Bergman...Wilson?

This Thursday SFC pays tribute to the recently deceased Tony "Mr. Machester" Wilson, one of the main men behind the Manchester music scene from the late 70s to the early 90s.

24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom/UK/2003/115’)

The Manchester music and dance scene, from punk to post-punk to acid house, is the subject of Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, one of the sharpest and funniest movies about the music business ever made. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and extending from the late seventies to the early nineties, it covers the Sex Pistols and Joy Division, the founding of Factory Records and the Manchester dance club the Hacienda, as well as the ascendancy and crash dive of the group Happy Mondays.

The impresario holding everything together is Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), TV host and Factory co-founder, who continually turns to the camera and clues us in on what's happening. As Wilson moves through the years, he goes from a foppish Oscar Wilde hairdo to tie-dyed shirts and ruffled neckties until, in the end, he looks a lot like David Frost. He has a gyroscopic gift for steadying himself in the maelstrom.

Winterbottom really gets the look and sound of this era in which pathos and slapstick and psychosis were all jammed together. Punk and the rave culture come across without a smidgen of moralizing, which makes the manic intoxication bubbling up before our eyes seem all the more real. It all had to end, of course, but the movie does justice to Wilson's plum observation that this was the "moment when even the white man starts dancing."

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

studiofilm@wow.net is bouncing emails. What's the correct email address?

11:42 AM  
Blogger Nicholas Laughlin said...

studiofilmc@wow.net

4:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ok thanks...note that the email in the right hand column of your site has studiofilm AT wow DOT net

7:27 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home