Film
'24‘iiiou'n PARTY PEOPLE (18) 110 mins 0....
You all right, our kid? Then I‘ll tell you a story. Once there was a TV presenter who saw the Sex Pistols and decided to bank role a record label. He signed some of the greatest bands this country has ever known with a single contract written in his own blood that said the label belonged to the artists. He opened a club in the dark industrial heart of Manchester that unwittingly became the essential beating heart of British rave culture. Then he signed a band called the Happy Mondays, because
he believed their lead singer, Shaun Double top Ryder, was a greater poet than Yeats. Later, it all fell apart in a haze Godard and Lindsay Anderson, and Simm as New Order’s Bernard of drug smoke and situationist is more than up to the task using a Sumner and a hilarious turn from business ethics. It was all a variety of scratchy, quirky, punky Andy Serkis as the fat mad Phil beautiful dream. It was the story of devices to tell tales from a Spector of the Factory studios, the one and only Factory records. cantankerous city. He is aided and Martin Hannet, all make this a
This whole crazy tale is retold by abetted by Robby Mi’iller’s superb delightfully strange experience. Plus writer Frank Cottrell Boyce photography. there are cameos galore, from
Steve Coogan more than makes Howard De Voto, Mani, Vini Reilly and Wilson himself.
(Coronation Street, Butterfly Kiss, The Claim) who has done something up for the crimes of The Patrol
quite extraordinary — he has turned Officer, playing Tony Wilson as a This is the oddest, most self- Tony Wilson‘s dysfunctional Partridge-esque visionary — thick- conscious movie since Being John adventure from 1976 to now into a skinned, overeducated and besotted Malkovich. Like that movie, it is a post-modern romp that never takes with Manchester. Paddy Considine singular, unique, gloriously vulgar itself too seriously. Boyce’s regular shines as angry Rob Gretton, treat. In fact, it’s proper good, our collaborator, Michael Winterbottom, Wilson’s closest. While Danny kid. (Paul Dale)
directs like a man possessed by the Cunningham as Shaun Ryder, Peter I Genet-ma 'eease ‘."o”‘ P :‘E An". See
conjoined spirits of Jean-Luc Kay as the sleazy Don Tonay, John ': rages; '(i ;"
TIME OUT (L’EMPLOI DU TEMPS) BLADE ll (PG) 134 mins .00. (18) 116 mins
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24 THE LIST. ~ :'
DRAMA
WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE
(15) 119 mins 00..
There has often been a sense of absurdity in Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura's work. whether it be present most conspicuously in the title — History Of Post- War Japan As Told By A Bar Hostess — or more latently in the material. as in the grim and graphic serial killer film Vengeance Is Mine la preCursor to Henry . . . and Man Bites Dog perhapsi. Then there is also. of COurse. the almost Keystone Kops fight sequence in The Eel.
But the concen at the heart of lmamura's new film gives the whole work a warm artificiality. With Misa Shimi/u playing a 30-odd year old woman whose excessive water content demands release either through shoplifting or sex. After ODSOF‘JIHQ Shimizu in the act of the former. unemployed suit Koii Yakusho gets to help Shimi/u reduce her water content by helping out in the latter department as regular lovemaking returns Shimizu's body to its normal state.
Imamura. though, isn't so much making some obsCure sexual point about a woman's needs. He's more interested ll‘. the broader cosmic affiliations ‘.‘l|ili water as he plays up its elemental power to renew life. and xvittily utilises the absurd to pOint up the thoroughly natural, l'Tony McKibbini I Film/ionse. Edinburng from Fri 29 Mar: OFT. Glasgow from Fri :5 Apr:
Witty and absurd