It's All Gone Pete Tong (2004)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

An Exercise In Nonsense

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Love this movie and great acting!Looks good, hilarious subtle comedy, and you hate a character in the beginning that you end up loving at the end.Stupendous job.

It's All Gone Pete Tong has a incredible dichotomy. You go from rave scenes with large uncontrolled crowd to complete isolation. From incredible super loud techno music to silence. The man looses it all, yet finds something.The settings are captivating, the music is off the wall, the acting on spot, the scenario very interesting, the situation unusual, and the drama gripping. What more can you ask for?Well, you have to like techno music and its usual scene to appreciate fully, but it's not a prerequisite, really. The fall is very human in nature, as is the end. You'll smile, I guaranty it.Take a peak at least, and you'll finish the movie, I'm sure.

A visually-based comedy with Paul Kaye as an Ibiza DJ going through a crisis did not immediately stand out to me as an appealing prospect, I must say, and it's testament to Dowse that he could pull it off with such class, especially with it being his first major project. Kaye had become an increasingly dreary presence on UK TV, even hosting a particularly awful game-show on the BBC for a short time I seem to recall, just one of a sizeable host of incumbent, tired hacks on the British television scene, and as much he may well admit.It was interesting, then, to see him take on the role of a renowned DJ, a profession that can offer much by way of booty, but that is not traditionally credited as being one requiring much musical talent, perhaps unfairly. Though the film makes light fun of the DJs place in the music industry, (Kaye goes deaf from over-indulgence of all kinds, but somehow managed to climb his way back to the top of the scene) it also seeks out and finds a genuine place whereby a DJ can be as intuitive and soulful as any other kind of musician. Therein lies the success of It's All Gone Pete Tong, to be so convincingly two things at once, and for them to not collide in the least, as so often happens in comedies that attempt to convey some semblance of human understanding, or those which aspire to inspire us. Kaye was excellently endearing as Wilde, and just as often hilarious with all of his perfectly selected facial expressions and tone of delivery. He plays his first attempt to order a drink while deaf with comic perfection.The film satirises, to an extent, standard tragicomedy motifs, especially those dealing with a man's battle with himself (the excess scenes with the cocaine badger were particularly hilarious), and all at the same time, it is a film works in its own terms as a tragicomedy, and a moving tale of creativity and possibility. The life Frankie Wilde leads in the early parts of the film can seem crushing, and it can seem rapturous. It's all a cycle, until his life catches up with him, though not in the most clichéd and predictable way, but in that he actually starts to go deaf, and the only sense he owns which he can make sense of is lost to him.Of course, he learns to adapt his other senses to supplement the loss, but none of this is presented in the most melodramatic fashion, nor is it exploitative.At one point he goes to meet a woman who will instruct him how to read lips, and communicate intelligibly, and in that sense she teaches not to understand again, but for the first time. He meets her outside some pristine white building, in a quiet location on the island, a haven away from the deadening rush of people.The soundtrack is excellent and, as it is largely made up of non-clubbing songs, it serves a similar purpose to that of the sweet woman who serves as Frankie's guide and haven, and who will eventually become his girlfriend, in a very moving while at times confused relationship. She helps him up from his fall, to rise again to DJing success, but in satisfactory fashion he shuns his career as soon as he reaches the peak of it again, as he has been bestowed with a true gift, that of perspective.The natural setting is beautiful of course, but the cinematography is such as to find beauty in all the dirty pockets of Ibiza, and every aspect of Frankie's ostensibly pathetic life.I love this film, and I'm quite serious.

'Pete Tong' is a movie that admittedly grew on me as it went along. I really wasn't getting into this movie, which is about one of the top DJs in the world, and his reaction to becoming deaf. GREAT subject matter. Wasn't quite sure about why I didn't get into the movie as much as I could have at the beginning. Maybe it was because I really didn't care for a character that was filthy rich, takes lots of drugs, parties all the time and is generally scummy. I'm sure that's it. But as we go along, and as he is more accepting of his hearing loss and what to do about it, he really started to grow on me, and I was sort of cheering at the end (but booing at the very end though, the ending sucks). I have no idea who this Paul Kaye is, but let me tell you, he has the most riveting blue eyes I've ever seen, so it's next to impossible to forget someone like him, he makes his character (actually named Frankie Wilde) someone you'll remember. He's very good in this role, and I would like to see some more of him. The supporting cast is alright I suppose, but not really memorable. As a partially deaf man, this was not necessarily the best movie about my condition. I actually prefer DEF, which was a short about a fully deaf teenager wanting to become a rapper. This is a somewhat okay alternative I guess.