It's All Gone Pete Tong - Movie Review
Rating: 3 out of 5
Whatever you think about It's All Gone Pete Tong the movie, it is unquestionably one of the worst titles for a film I've ever heard.
At first I thought I was reading it wrong: The title was just It's All Gone and "Pete Tong" was a wayward producer credit or something.
Nope, that's the real title, and Pete Tong is both a real person and a minor actor in the film (playing himself), in this bizarre and allegedly true* story of one Frankie Wilde, who gained notoriety as "The Deaf DJ" -- on account of he was deaf and a DJ. Lovable freak Paul Kaye plays Wilde, charting his rise to fame (as famous as a DJ can get, anyway) and his wild drug abuse and developing deafness as a result. After beating up the six-foot-tall drug badger that chases him around, Wilde cleans up, learns to read lips, and figures out how to feel the beat by hooking up speakers to special crates that he rested his feet on. This way, Wilde could know when to slip the little slider control from right to left -- which is pretty much all that a DJ has to do, if you believe what you see in this film. Finally, following a triumphant return to a packed house in Ibiza, Wilde promptly vanished from the public eye.
I may be oblivious about DJ's, but I do know that Tong is far from a great film. Its attempt to combine mockumentary and narrative styles is a full-out mess, with talking heads interrupting the action at regular intervals. Kaye is energetic, to say the least, but he's never been an endearing actor and it's hard to feel for his struggle here. Dowse ably portrays Wilde's junkie lifestyle here, with a handful of memorable supporting characters and a few funny lines here and there. Whether you really dig this film will depend entirely on your affection for the club scene and you opinion of its heroes.
As for Pete Tong, he's another famous DJ with almost nothing to do with Wilde's story. The title is meant as a rhyming joke of some sort ("It's gone all wrong") with a little Bend It Like Beckham kick. Watch for it on DVD with an entirely different title, I'm guessing.
* Not really. Frankie Wilde is an elaborate hoax that, we have to imagine, no one is really going to care about.
Pete Tong's hooked on phonics.
Facts and Figures
Year: 2004
Run time: 90 mins
In Theaters: Friday 27th May 2005
Box Office Worldwide: $120.6 thousand
Budget: $2M
Distributed by: Matson Films
Reviews
Contactmusic.com: 3 / 5
Rotten Tomatoes: 77%
Fresh: 54 Rotten: 16
IMDB: 7.4 / 10
Cast & Crew
Director: Michael Dowse
Producer: Allan Niblo, James Richardson
Screenwriter: Michael Dowse
Starring: Paul Kaye as Frankie Wilde, Kate Magowan as Sonja, Neil Maskell as Jack Stoddart, Beatriz Batarda as Penelope
Also starring: Mike Wilmot, Pete Tong, Allan Niblo, James Richardson, Michael Dowse