Slade

Odds and sods about the British rock band Slade

Saturday, April 07, 2007

MOJO review of Flame

In their May issue MOJO has a one-page review of the Flame DVD. As usual MOJO succeeds in coming up with a totally ambivalent piece of work, this time written by Mark Paytress.
In the review Paytress says that Flame is NOT the Citizen Kane of pop pictures, that the plot is hardly unfamiliar, the film has no technical brilliance and that the band is more ham than thespian. Paytress goes on to say that the film uses any old trick in the book and that the film meant the end to the band.
On the other hand Paytress lists the “old tricks” with some fondness and goes on: “Add in a splendid McCartneyesque theme tune (How Does It Feel?), a convincing club performance (Them Kinda Monkeys Can’t Swing), Don Powell’s pathos-filled canal-side scene, Noddy Holder and Jim Lea’s convincing stab as warring songwriters, ludicrous Dave Hill resembling a bucktoothed Brian Jones, and a string of classic on-liners (“I’m not a bloody fishfinger!”) and this quickly looks like neatly leavened miserablism.”
To complete the ambivalence, Paytress admits that Flame is a classic of rock’n’roll cinema and the film is given four stars. There is hardly any mention of the documentary and no mention at all of the rest of the bonus material.

1 Comments:

At 5:15 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Lise

Yes, it's ambivalent precisely because that's the way I feel about the film! MOJO regard it as something of a classic - hence the four stars. More often, though, you'll find that I am daringly partisan in my opinions, eg the review of the Melanie CDs in the current issue.

Mark

 

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