Movies From the Hat 7 – #16 – Ben’s Pick – 24 Hour Party People (2002)

This is my 3961st Review

Thanks to Ben of Views From the Sofa for this recommendation.

Here are his thoughts on the film.

“And tonight something equally epoch-making is taking place. See? They’re applauding the DJ. Not the music, not the musician, not the creator, but the medium. This is it. The birth of rave culture. The beatification of the beat. The dance age. This is the moment when even the white man starts dancing. Welcome to Manchester. ” – Tony Wilson

Number of Times Seen – 1 (11 Apr 2018)

Brief Synopsis – Biopic of the start of the exodus of music from Manchester as it started to become world renowned.

My Take on it – This is yet another film that I had heard nothing about before seeing it and didn’t know what to really expect with it.

The story itself is interesting but I assume that fans of the the music scene of the 70’s and especially of the Manchester Music of the time will get so much more from this film.

The story is presented in a jarring fashion which actually takes away from a lot of the impact of it all.

The choice to use voice over narration throughout actually works really well because it gives us the opportunity to learn more about the characters history and background because so much is going on at once and this helps make a bid of order around that.

The choice to constantly blur the lines between fact and fiction also works really well because they are trying to say that when telling a story like this, there are things people recall crisply and others that are too foggy to properly decipher.

The music is ok here and overall the story drags a bit too much and could have been paced a bit better.

Bottom Line – Interesting story that would mostly be of interest to fans of the music world. The story is told in a jarring way and that distracts a bit from the story. The narration actually works quite well in order to give us more background on the things that are going on because there is so much happening the entire time.  I liked the way that they sometimes blur the lines between fact and fction and parts of that blurry line on semi-clear memories. Overall tho, the music was fine, but the story drags on a bit too much for its own good.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – Peter Hook from New Order described the film as “A film about the biggest c*nt in Manchester, played by the second biggest.” (From IMDB)

Rating – BAFTA Worthy (6/10)

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