You Instead (2012)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Powerful

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Absolute best thing about this film is an introduction to Natalia Tena.. binged.it/1nPSBSU .. Go on youtube and look her up along with the group Molotov Jukebox. They have several fun videos, with a pretty good sound.. bit.ly/10YlzOk .. The film Tonight You're Mine is fairly standard stuff, but it did give a good feel of what it is like to be young and attend an all-out, in-the-mud music festival. And the worst thing about this flick is the choice of the last song... it should have been something totally special... instead it just kinda leaves things out-a-sync. Captions would have helped with lots of the inaudible dialogue... (hey... netflix listened!!).

Someone else called this sweet. That is a good word for this very simple story which was filmed at a real rock fest with 100,000 people attending. It was shot in five days. That said, it is important to see the high professional level of acting and story telling. Appealing young people, good not great music making and the feeling of being in the middle of things. The rock crowd helps give a docu-drama feel to the enterprise. Two rock "stars" meet and have an argument. A security guy puts them in handcuffs to quiet them down. Suddenly he, and the key, is lost in the crowd. The couple is stuck together. Boy and girl. Chemistry. Situations. I enjoyed the film very much and will plan on seeing it again in awhile.

It must have been an absolute nightmare to try to shoot a watchable film at a wet festival over one weekend. There's the odd really lovely piece of camera-work tucked away in here and the whole thing beautifully captures the festival experience with a surprisingly unobtrusive but mesmerizing music score. Great to see a cast of more or less unknowns, putting to shame bigger names and far bigger budgets. Not every film has to shock or nudge the audience into exploring some hidden dark side of themselves. Sometimes films are there just to record the lighter side of life, and this is one of them. A pleasant stroll through T in the Park ..... nothing wrong with that.

You Instead is as close as it gets to being at a music festival without actually being there. Right from the start the audience is wholly immersed in the festival atmosphere. This is, in part, down to the crew shooting the entirety of the film at the T in the Park event in Scotland and featuring the artists performing there (Biffy Clyro and Joe Mango to name two).Director David Mackenzie took the two actors and their supporting cast and literally dropped them in it. Up to their knees in mud at times and performing amongst a genuine crowd of revellers from start to finish. Luke Treadaway and Natalia Tena are more than convincing as frontmen of their respective bands, largely helped by Tena's burgeoning career as a musician with her group Molotov Jukebox.You Instead takes brilliant advantage of an environment where the rules of daily life no longer apply. The result is a film populated with larger than life characters in a world we rarely get a glimpse of, and it's a great fun place to spend an hour and a half.