24 Hour Party People

So I watched this last night, in the wake of Tony Wilson's death. Jon in the Morning on KEXP Seattle has been promoting the film as, like, utterly necessary viewing for anyone interested in music, playing The Clash, The Happy Mondays, Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, A Certain Ratio, New Order, and whoever else this marketing and managerial genius Wilson backed during the late 70's, 80's and 90's. The man went to Cambridge and certainyl has a head for business. You can't tell from thsi vesion whether they guy really was such a "cunt" as everyone, including Ian Curtis, said he was.

(Side note: Jon in the morning is strating to make me a little angry. Yeah he plays good music and KEXP is listener supported etc etc. But he's constantly playing shit, too, and then gloating about it. His kid is always in the wings doing something "hilarious". And this fucking Bumbershoot concert. What the fuck is Bumbershoot and why does it have to have that name? Jon manages to say Bumbershoot at least 3 or 4 times/minute. As does the intentionally "sexy" sounding commercial girl. Bands and Seattle natives seem to like the guy because he's modest and constantly self-effacing and he plays their shit, but more often than not the guy's annoying as hell. His passion for Cloud Cult is ridiculous. That band. "Suck up, suck up and take your medicine"? How tragic and poignant and accurate for our age. And their shitty cover of Mr. Tambourine Man, which manages to give an entirely unsentimental song the most blasphemously sentimental treatment of any shitty cover I've heard. I can see the lead singer of this band right now smoking a Clove and listening to Tangled Up in Blue and trying to figure out how to fuck it up as badly as he did Mr. Tambourine Man. Cloud Cult. Like, a potentially dangerous sect of obviously harmless accumulations of moisture. They'll live on.)

Steve Coogan plays Wilson, a very dry British bloke with a tendency to quote W.B. Yeats, William Blake and Shaun Ryder, whom he thought the best poet sincce Yeats himself. I admit I didn't know who Shauan Ryder was, but the gloating over his "genius" seems a little strange. Like those who can't stop saying what a brilliant lyricist Pete Doherty is. Couldn't the prophetic anticipation of musical and cultural trends everyone attributes to Ryder simply be on account of him being at the right place at the right time, inside the Hacienda hanging out with Tony Wilson and meeting the guy who, it seems, introduced Ecstasy to planet earth? If you're at the center of things and you happen to write semi-coherently about what's happening, then you're going to seem like prophet, I guess, to those who are lined up outside the club waiting to get in and see who's playing and whether they can score this new drug their friend said they have to try.

The movie is good though. I liked the splicing of actual footage into the scenes. Iggy Pop and Johnny Rotten appear. You don't see Ian Curtis though, unless I missed it, which would have been nice. In order to convey that "Ian Curtis will soon commit suicide" the director goes a bit far. Everyone knows the guy will do it. The extended shots of him looking miserably out rainy windows as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" plays could have been cut by about 30 seconds. All that was needed was a few quick glimpses of the guy withdrawing into himself. Not the broadcasting of: "Secretly entertaining suicidal ideations whle listening to his own hit song." And the use of a cartoon rooster on the television beyond Curtis's dangling feet. Right. Cartoon juxtaposed with suicide equals pathos.

Either way, whatever, I liked it. Tony Wilson. Interesting guy. Would've been cool to be him.