Watch 24 Hour Party People For Free

Memorable, crazy movie

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It's a semi-true story as Coogan would himself tell the audience as he breaks down the 4th wall. In 1976 Manchester, TV presenter Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) is risking his life hang gliding for silly Granada Reports and he's not happy about it. Then he is one of the 42 people to see the first Sex Pistols gig along with others like the kids in Joy Division. He would tout the overlooked music scene on his small show "So It Goes". He rents out a club to play his type of music on Fridays. He turns that into Factory Records where he signs up Joy Division among others. Joy Division would attract skinheads because of their Nazi inspired name. Lead singer Ian Curtis commits suicide just when the group is on the verge of their American tour. Tony continues with the creation of the infamous dance club The Hacienda.The movie starts pretty funny with Coogan breaking down the 4th wall within the first 10 minutes. Ian Curtis becomes the second most important character in the movie. That's why his lost leaves a big hole in the emotional feel of the movie. It's like the comedic air is let out and the movie feels flattened. The funny is gone. The movie still works but it's just not as much fun.

24 Hour Party People is directed by Michael Winterbottom and written by Frank Cottrell Boyce. It stars Steve Coogan, Paddy Considine, Shirley Henderson and Andy Serkis.Film charts the rise and fall of Tony Wilson's (Coogan) impact on the Manchester music scene from 1976-1992. Musically it encompasses the Punk Rock explosion, Post Punk, Madchester, the birth of Factory Records and The Haçienda Nightclub. Main bands featured as narrative threads are Joy Division and The Happy Mondays. Print the legend.There's nothing like it, in music based movies that is, 24 Hour Party People is a collage of styles and genres, part biography, part comedy drama, part rock mockumentary, part tragedy and part fantasy, with the latter a little galling to those in the know since the film often plays fast and loose with the truth. But this almost chaotic approach by Winterbottom is perfect for this most important and influential era of music. There is a bustling energy throughout the picture, a chic coolness coming out of the hand held digital camera, the music is excellence unbound, while it more often than not is great fun, even as dark passages flit in and out-making thumping emotional beats-there's a causticism involved. Wilson was a colourful impresario, and well worth the time afforded him here. The performances vary from good to great, with Coogan at the centre a pure delight as he not only acts out the part of Wilson, but also narrates and breaks the fourth wall to ensure viewers are in the know about the players and situations. While it's also fun to play spot the cameo star as well.Martin Hannett: Too Big For Death.As a "big" fan of New Order I find the only thing that irks greatly with the film is the short amount of camera time and credence given to the band. The Joy Division years are covered greatly, and rightly so, but New Order's prominent impact on the era, and that on Factory Records and The Hacienda, is relegated to tiny visual snippets and snatches of narration. Someone in the producing department has failed to grasp that they were the most important band of the time in relation to Tony Wilson and The Hacienda years. The other to get short shrift is producer Martin Hannett, here expertly portrayed by Andy Serkis. Early in the piece Coogan's Wilson tells us that Martin Hannett is one of only two geniuses to feature in this story, yet we never get to know about it. It's right that Hannett's sad and tragic demise is followed from beginning to end, but where's the glory of his producing skills? Without him Joy Division and New Order would have been just good bands instead of "great" bands, this really needed to be pressed home to the unitiated.C'est la vie, I'm sure there are many other fans of "movers" who were prominent around this time who feel they deserved narrative time. So we can't have it all eh? Top film regardless, fascinatingly constructed and with an astute handle on the time, it's essential viewing for British music fans. 9/10

24 Hour Party People is a film that perfectly captures the spirit of an era. For those who have been born some years after that period, or those who have not reached to live it fully (including me), 24 hour party people becomes a kind of historical document.The film tells the story of Factory records, in a mock-documentary style. How it arose, how it established, and finally its debacle.Steve Coogan delivers an excellent job in the role of Tony Wilson and Andy Serkis on the other hand makes an exceptional portrait of a lost genius as was Martin Hannet.Without a doubt, the job of Micheal Winterbottom is one of the most original I've seen. It is a strange narrative between observation and integration of the viewer. In some points the main character take us into the story and even gives us some hints of future events. The film shows us its own cinematic mechanism in order to include us in it. A blend of past, present and future, where Tony Wilson knows he is making history.Finally, as Steve Coogan says, 24 Hour Party People is a movie about music, about that period in particular and what it gave to the world. The characters involved are only secondary elements which belonged to that spirit.Music lovers, enjoy it. And those who are not so, take a sit, relax, and open your mind to a new form of cinema. You won't regret.I hope you enjoyed this review. See you next time. PS: Excuse my English, i'm doing my best.

I watched the DVD of '24 Hour Party People' again on the August night in 2007 when Tony Wilson died. I first saw it in 2002, and then I'd never heard of Tony Wilson, Factory Records, Joy Division, and was only vaguely aware that there had been a group called The Happy Mondays and a Manchester nightclub called the Hacienda. Yet, it's the strength of Michael Winterbottom's film that it made me wish I was a film director - the picture is so alive with the genuine possibilities of film-making.7 years later, the film stands up to many successive viewings as a piece of genre defying brilliance, and like the best English films - A Matter of Life and Death, A Hard Day's Night, Monty Python and the Holy Grail - finds fantasy in reality.Steve Coogan neither looks nor sounds like the real Tony Wilson - but that's part of the idiosyncratic point of the film. He's terrific in the part of the Cambridge graduate with ambitious plans for the Manchester music scene. The film follows Wilson from 1976, when he is a TV presenter in Manchester, up to closing of his nightclub the Hacienda in the early 1990s. It's the story of his record label, the groups he signed - Joy Division (later to become New Order) and the Happy Mondays - his epic nightclub and lots of civic pride.'24 Hour Party People' portrays the Manchester music scene of the time as being populated by foul, rowdy, drug fuelled yobs. Other than Wilson, none of the characters are remotely likable. Winterbottom's film is full of the authentic shabbiness and aggression of the late-seventies and the 1980s, but whilst the look is realistic, the directional style has an anything goes brilliance about it. For instance, Coogan's Wilson narrates to camera constantly referring to the fact you're watching a film. Indeed, the first scene is a 1976 Granada evening news report about hang gliding after which Wilson tells us - like the film we're about to watch - it works on a literal and metaphorical level. It's full of memorable moments like Shaun and Paul Ryder on a Manchester roof top, feeding the pigeons rat-poison filled bread then watching the pigeons fly and off and drop from the skies dead - all accompanied to the Ride of the Valkyries on the soundtrack. Or Wilson walking across Hacienda dance floor surrounded by frantic clubbers and saying of the birth of the Rave culture "Something epoch-making is happening, they're applauding the DJ....Welcome to Madchester."Frank Cotteral Boyce's script gives Coogan's Wilson some sparkling dialogue, such as "Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented. Jazz musicians enjoy themselves far more than anyone listening to them."Wilson eventually looses control of his nightclub to drug dealers and has to sell his record company Factory Records after the Happy Mondays spend three months in Barbados spending the company's money on drugs when they should have been recording their new album (they eventually record one, but without lyrics) In the final scene - atop of a gloomy Manchester roof top - Wilson sees a vision of God, who looks just like him. The supporting cast is uniformly good, from Shirley Henderson as his wife, Paddy Considine as Rob, the manager of Joy Division; Andy Serkis as the drunken, drug addicted sound recordist Martin Hannah; even Rob Brydon as a local rock journalist. Winterbottom is an astonishingly versatile director, but this is - along with it's companion piece A Cock and Bull Story - is by far his most entertaining film.