Telstar (15.)
Directed by Nick Moran.
Starring Con O’Neill, Kevin Spacey, Pam Ferris, Tom Burke, JJ Feild, James Corden, Ralf Little. 108 mins
Providing a strange companion piece to the bland period comedy of The Boat That Rocked, here’s a bland period drama about 60s British pop music. Directed and co-written by Nick Moran - who ten years ago was the one most likely to succeed of the Lock Stock quartet - the tragic story of Joe Meek, a pioneering record producer from the earliest days of British pop music, is a hybrid of Prick Up Your Ears and Absolute Beginners.
The subject doesn’t lack interesting material: Meek was violent, obsessive, manipulative, a homosexual when it was still illegal, into the occult and made million-selling records in a flat above a shop in the Holloway Road. He also turned down The Beatles while championing Screaming Lord Sutch and eventually shot himself and his landlady when debt and changing music trends overwhelmed him.
Telstar started on the stage and the movie adaptation mostly leaves it there. You are always aware that these are actors acting and it hasn’t been opened out much. Only in the middle does the film stray from its main location, the North London recording studio flat. The opening half hour resembles a particularly camp and bitchy sitcom with various musician all laying down their parts in separate rooms - string section in the cupboard, band in the toilet etc – and being occasionally interrupted by the complaining landlady from downstairs or Kevin Spacey as Meek’s business partner, a much sharper version of The Major from Fawlty Towers.
As a portrait of flawed genius it is all flaw and no genius. Meek is relentlessly unpleasant – he starts out vain and egotistical so when success hits all he has to expand into is violence and paranoia. His great achievement is Telstar, his tune to commemorate the launch of the first communication satellite. Telstar may resemble a spaghetti western theme played on one of Rolf Harris’s Stylophones yet it still sounds marvellous today. It beautifully evokes all the naive optimism and hope of the early sixties. But the film doesn’t make much of a case for the rest of his achievement - this is a film that doesn’t really have much interest in music.
Directed by Nick Moran.
Starring Con O’Neill, Kevin Spacey, Pam Ferris, Tom Burke, JJ Feild, James Corden, Ralf Little. 108 mins
Providing a strange companion piece to the bland period comedy of The Boat That Rocked, here’s a bland period drama about 60s British pop music. Directed and co-written by Nick Moran - who ten years ago was the one most likely to succeed of the Lock Stock quartet - the tragic story of Joe Meek, a pioneering record producer from the earliest days of British pop music, is a hybrid of Prick Up Your Ears and Absolute Beginners.
The subject doesn’t lack interesting material: Meek was violent, obsessive, manipulative, a homosexual when it was still illegal, into the occult and made million-selling records in a flat above a shop in the Holloway Road. He also turned down The Beatles while championing Screaming Lord Sutch and eventually shot himself and his landlady when debt and changing music trends overwhelmed him.
Telstar started on the stage and the movie adaptation mostly leaves it there. You are always aware that these are actors acting and it hasn’t been opened out much. Only in the middle does the film stray from its main location, the North London recording studio flat. The opening half hour resembles a particularly camp and bitchy sitcom with various musician all laying down their parts in separate rooms - string section in the cupboard, band in the toilet etc – and being occasionally interrupted by the complaining landlady from downstairs or Kevin Spacey as Meek’s business partner, a much sharper version of The Major from Fawlty Towers.
As a portrait of flawed genius it is all flaw and no genius. Meek is relentlessly unpleasant – he starts out vain and egotistical so when success hits all he has to expand into is violence and paranoia. His great achievement is Telstar, his tune to commemorate the launch of the first communication satellite. Telstar may resemble a spaghetti western theme played on one of Rolf Harris’s Stylophones yet it still sounds marvellous today. It beautifully evokes all the naive optimism and hope of the early sixties. But the film doesn’t make much of a case for the rest of his achievement - this is a film that doesn’t really have much interest in music.
