funnystrange.com

Feb. 27 movie: 24 Hour Party People. Deliriously fun movie, ostensibly about the 80's Manchester music scene but actually mostly about Tony Wilson, co-founder of Factory Records. There's lots of breaking the fourth wall, witty asides & in-jokes that could have so easily ended up annoyingly clever, but didn't. I'm a bit amazed that it worked so well. My favorite line was when the actor playing Wilson talks to the camera, pointing out a bunch of cameos including the real Tony Wilson, and says that one cameo was cut "but I'm sure it will be on the DVD." (In fact, I don't think it was.)

My only quibble is that, if you didn't know anything about the Manchester music scene, you wouldn't learn as much as you should (and what you did learn wouldn't always be true). I had heard that the movie was "about" New Order, but I was surprised by how little presence they had. Maybe the Happy Mondays, who do get a lot of screen time, fit in better with the story they were trying to tell. The Smiths and the Stone Roses aren't in it at all (I think they each get mentioned once). The portrayal of Ian Curtis was brilliant, but I really wished the movie had spent more time with him. I felt many times like allusions and references were being thrown out that would have made much more sense if I had known already what they were alluding to. (This feeling wasn't helped by the thick accents, and frequency of scenes in noisy clubs, which meant that I often had trouble understanding the dialogue.)

My short assessment: don't rent this movie expecting a thorough or accurate overview of the Manchester music scene, rent it because it's a damned lot of fun.

(I thought for sure I'd be humming music from the soundtrack today, but instead I'm hearing the Alex Gopher single "Party People," which was not in the movie, over and over. "Pa-arty, where's the party at? Party people, where's the party at?" Not a bad thing to have stuck in my head.)