Thursday, May 12, 2005

It's All Gone Pete Tong

It's All Gone Pete Tong is the story of Frankie Wilde who, for all those not familiar with the electronic dance world, was the biggest and most famous DJ, traveling the world with his music, and spending his summers in his tropical mansion, with his beautiful wife, DJing in the best place in the world, Ibiza. He had it all, until he went deaf.
Frankie had a birth problem with his hearing, has been always losing throughout the years. Of course, working a techno DJ didn't help at all.

And all the drugs he was taking didn't help either, so when he finally goes deaf, he can't DJ, his wife leaves him and he goes crazy to the point where he hallucinates about a Coke Badger, a great character that made me remember Donnie Darko's Frank, only this one was funny and stuffed with coke. Just awesome.
And so Frankie disappears for a year, locking himself in the house, never coming out, and only seeing those who were delivering him drugs.

After that time, he decides to go out and try life once again, so he takes hand signals classes, and this is when he discovered a new way to make music. By putting his feet over the buffers, Frankie can feel the vibrations of his music, and mix and create new music by watching the wavelengths in the monitor. And so he makes a CD, gives it to his old manager who had left him, and soon the city is full of "Frankie Wilde The Deaf DJ" posters and he's on the top of the world again.

A fantastic story, backed by interviews with real superstar DJs from around the world, with a very strong performance by Paul Kaye as Frankie and a visual style very reminiscent of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, this small biopic, written and directed by Michael Dowse, is a work of art.