| TOTAL BALEARICS : Michael Dowse's It's All Gone Pete Tong [2?/10] |
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| Monday, 16 May 2005 | |
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The title is Cockney rhyming-slang for "it's all gone wrong," and seldom can a film have been more aptly named. This is a depressingly poor, one-joke mockumentary about 38-year-old superstar DJ Frankie Wilde (Paul Kaye) and his craaaazy times on the Balearic party-island of Ibiza. Frankie's coke-fuelled, booze-soaked, uber-hedonistic lifestyle catches up with him when he suddenly loses most of his hearing - hence the picture's crass clunker of a tagline 'When you can't hear, things look very different.' The picture supposedly gets much better in the second half as Wilde comes to terms with his affliction, but I wasn't in much of a mood to find out. I lasted about 35 minutes before heading for the exits - the final straw being a hallucination sequence in which Wilde is confronted by an aggressive bloke in a badger suit who supposedly 'embodies' his cocaine addiction - a fairly blatant ripoff of Sexy Beast and Donnie Darko, just as the film itself bone-headedly apes This Is Spinal Tap and Boogie Nights, among others. The most bizarre element of It's All Gone Pete Tong is the presence of real-life superstar DJs cameoing as themselves, including the eponymous Mr Tong who at least has the sense to look somewhat embarrassed. Why on earth did they want to appear in a film which makes DJs and their ecstasy-popping audiences look equally foolish? Then again, this has always been one of the most unashamedly - and baselessly - self-congratulatory of youth subcultures. And now it's got exactly the film it deserves. Neil Young 16th May, 2005 IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG : [2?/10] : UK 2005 : Michael DOWSE : 90 mins seen at Odeon cinema, The Gate, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 16th May 2004 - press show (walkout) |
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