| | Review Date: Director: Michael Winterbottom Writer: Frank Cottrell Boyce Producers: Andrew Eaton Actors: Steve Coogan Sean Harris Andy Serkis |
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Who are these people? What motivations, interests, background do most of them have? I have no clue, folks! The movie doesn’t give you much about any of them and ultimately just felt like a “clique” flick, for which one needed to be a member, in order to fully appreciate. I guess I’m just not part of that clique because the film did nothing for me. What’s even stranger is that we follow Tony around for the entire picture (actor Steve Coogan is actually quite likeable and funny at times), but we really don’t even get much of a sense of him either. He comes off like a funny dude with a good attitude about life, but at some point, it seems as though others perceive him as an asshole (so was he a goof or an asshole…no clue!). Even stranger still is that he actually looks to the camera at some point (he does that from time to time, which was neat) and tells us that the movie isn’t “about him” at all-well, then why the fuck does it keep focusing on you, dude!?! (“It’s about the music”) Some of the tunes were sweet to be sure (I love the shit out of “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), but it would have been nicer had we gotten a sense of who these people were, why they wrote the music they did, what made them tick, etc… Instead, we’re treated to a 3-minute montage of two chaps from the Happy Mondays poisoning pigeons and watching them plummet to their deaths (after which, they kick them around). Neat?
What’s even stranger is that the only other insight we get on these doofuses is that they’re loud-mouthed, spoiled, drug-addicted poseurs who are apparent “geniuses” of music?? Well, once again…the film doesn’t bring that across…one bit!! In fact, the only thing I got from these fellas was that they make the Gallagher brothers of Oasis look like choirboys. But there’s more! For anyone who doesn’t know anything about these bands, the director makes it doubly hard for you to figure out who is who by playing all of the credits really fast, garbled and in spurts. Most of the time I had no idea what band was playing, what character was speaking and what they were saying (their accents didn’t help). My only conclusion after suffering through this debacle and reading all of the extravagant praise about it around the Net is that I just didn’t “get” it, or that all the other critics were huge fans of this “scene” in the first place. For me, the film went on for too long, delivered very little substance, offered zero interesting characters with no depth and ultimately just bored the crap out of me. Oh by the way, some of the stuff depicted in this movie didn’t actually happen either so don’t go believing everything you see in there either. So what’s the fuckin’ point?! Like I said…I guess I just didn’t “get” it.