IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG 
(Guest review by Kryshan Randel)

**** (out of *****)

It's All Gone Pete Tong, opening in Vancouver theatres in June, is the best film of 2005 to date.  The fact that it's a Canadian film is icing on the cake.

This tale of a DJ going deaf is the first (and only) great film of the year so far – and it's also in a league of its own in the electronica DJ / clubbing subgenre.  Many films have been made about the often-brilliant music and its makers and/or audience, and most have failed, because them seem more interested in the music than the characters (Human Traffic, Groove, Better Living Through Circuitry, etc.).  This film had me from its opening vomiting montage – finally, a character in the electronica scene worthy of his own feature!

What is the secret of Tong's success?  There are several – Paul Kaye's knockout performance as drug-fuelled hard-of-hearing DJ Frankie Wilde; the beautiful settings in Ibiza, Spain; the best movie soundtrack in years, which propels the film forward like Trainspotting's trend-setting electronica, Run Lola Run's techno thunder and Kontroll's yet-to-be-topped raging beats; and the film's modern-myth structure (but I'll get to that later).

The single best thing about Tong, however, is its use of sound; one of the few films I've seen in which sound is the true star of the film, and rightfully so.  Most films seem to treat sound like an afterthought; insert overbearing musical score here, sound effects here, dialogue here, done, moving on.  True, some films don't need any more than that, but what a missed opportunity when they do.  Sound can take you inside a character's mind, inside a world, inside a movie, far more than visuals can (a theory that I first pondered while re-watching the sound-driven masterpiece Clean Shaven, and which Tarnation proved once and for all).  Tong knows this, and crafts an entire movie around it.  As the DJ loses his hearing, we selectively hear everything the way he does several times; those sequences are the highlights of the film.  Vancouver's Post Modern Sound deserves a special mention for their amazing work; it not only competes with the Hollywood blockbusters released lately, it knocks them out of the park.

Tong's modern myth structure also takes the film to another level – his larger-than-life struggles, legendary reputation, and his "inner demon" hallucinations (reminiscent of the Satanic rabbit in Sexy Beast) are brilliantly executed, and never lacking a severely dark and twisted sense of humor – his attempted suicide (via firecrackers) is hysterically funny.

The film has one major flaw that prevents it from getting a perfect ten – and it's a big one.  The mockumentary framework frequently doesn't work, and at times it threatens to destroy the momentum of the film when mock-interviews pop up during the film's best sequences.  The first half hour of the film particularly suffers from this.  Tong is too smart to rely on any mockumentary clichés.  Fortunately the rest of the film more than makes up for it.

It's finally happening – Canadian films are going from good, to great, to better than anything else out there.  Tong is a Canadian film for people who don't like Canadian films.  It's a great story well told, period.

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