Awaydays (2009)

Thanks for the memories!

People are voting emotionally.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

This film is jarringly bad - there's the odd decent tune on the soundtrack, but how did this garbage ever get made. We live in harsh, recession hit times, yet people still had money to waste on making this!!!!! Sometimes, the world just doesn't make sense.Where to start... Acting - uniformly bad; the accents - terrible; the screenplay: Sampson cannot blame anyone else for this mess - he adapted his own novel (have not read the book but would anyone be encouraged to after seeing the film?) He clearly doesn't understand the period that well, though - scousers did not talk like this in the late seventies. In sociolinguistic terms, the dialogue is miles off! I didn't get beyond the 12-minute mark; without a doubt, a contender for the worst film ever made.

There's a track on Joy Division's 1979 album 'Unknown Pleasures' called 'Insight', in which the narrator - possibly Ian Curtis, possibly a character - reflects on the lost dreams of youth; how he's resolved to never fulfilling them. And how that fact no longer fills him with fear. It's a song for a 45-year-old man sung by a 22-year-old. At the 2 minute 15 second mark, immediately following a sonic shoot-out, there's a strange ribbed sound, in an album filled with extraordinary sounds, repeated three times in quick succession. Hooky's bass? Stephen Morris' snare? Something producer Martin Hannett cooked up over the mixing desk? Who knows? But that sound, at less than a second long, is more interesting than anything in the whole of Awaydays.The 1998 cult novel the film is adapted from, however, is just fascinating. Straddling Liverpool's music and football scenes circa 1979, this complex rites-of-passage tale explores class-tourism, teenage nihilism, pack-violence, and the unspoken homo-erotic tensions in close male friendships. And the music of Joy Division. It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary, but don't take this reviewer's word for it - take its author Kevin Sampson's: "It's beautiful, poetic, and quite literary." Sampson also wrote the screenplay, about which he says "It's taut and punchy, but poetic too. It's beautiful." Can you detect a theme here? "As a film", he says, "it's in a league of its own." Except this time, it isn't. Awaydays functions as a really good argument for why writers should never be allowed to adapt their own novels for the screen.As in the novel, arty Carty (Nicky Bell) becomes fascinated with the hooligans at Tranmere Rovers. His passport into this knife-wielding, wedge-cut world is Elvis (Liam Boyle), a young working-class romantic-savage who stands at the intersection between two subcultures. The noose he hangs in his new wave riot of a bedroom, "a reminder of the absurdity of life and certainty of death". The unlikely pair embark on a messy, complicated bromance, before the disturbed Elvis drifts into heroin abuse and a depressive spiral, while Carty is sucked ever deeper into a lifestyle he cannot control. Can either of them bail out before something terrible happens? Something terrible already happened - this movie: a pretentious, grubbily voyeuristic paean to football hooliganism, kitted out with ubiquitous slo-mo violence, tactical post-punk hits and retro fashions, while entirely lacking the kind of insights director Alan Clarke brought to 1988's The Firm. There are serious casting problems too: Carty is supposed to be a kind of proto-Renton from Trainspotting, selfish and ruthless - yet Bell possesses all the charisma of Rodders from 'Only Fools And Horses'. The dialogue and delivery also errs on the 'Grange Hill' side, while as is often the case with pop-period dramas, the clothes look too box-fresh and the walk-on bands suspiciously modern-sounding. Another thing that sticks in the craw a bit is the film's use of Joy Division, a band currently enjoying a huge cultural resuscitation. As in the novel, Awaydays heavily genuflects to everybody's favourite Ballardian bards, thematically and musically. Scene after scene depicts Carty and Elvis gazing out over the Mersey, dreaming of Berlin, while enormous chemical barges drift by to doomy soundtracks from Unknown Pleasures and Closer. "Where will it end?" Elvis repeatedly quotes from 'Day Of The Lords'. While his exit, he assures Carty, will be facilitated to the strains of Curtis, Hooky and Co: "'New Dawn Fades' on low, noose around the neck, off we jolly well pop." All this, at least, is in context. And yet... and yet had Awaydays been made by anyone other than Sampson and producer Dave Hughes (both original scenesters), and had Sampson not already doffed his cap to them, you'd swear blind its makers were cynically exploiting the music and mythos of this immensely popular band to peddle their poxy movie. As Nigel Blackwell of Birkenhead's Half Man Half Biscuit sung in 2005, "I've been to a post-punk postcard fair in me Joy Division oven gloves", a comment on the lengths merchandising will go to turn profundity into commodity. (Satire so often being a psychic projection of future reality, two years later Yo! Sushi was offering diners a 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' salmon and tuna takeaway box set.) Awaydays' use of the group's music does seem contrived and desperate, but perhaps it isn't the film's fault. Ian Curtis has been metaphorically exhumed so many times since 1980, it's eventually bound to result in Joy fatigue. Familiarity will tear us apart. And yet nobody's really to blame. Certainly not New Order. Nor Anton Corbijn. Or even Tony Wilson, God rest him. If anything, it's probably our fault. The market is duly rounding up every last shred of the past to cater to our insatiable nostalgia. That definitive album (until the next even more 'definitive' one), complete with 15 outtakes, seven additional remixes, 52 alternate versions and a live gig, is ours for the download. Along, no doubt, with the Ian Curtis pincushion, jelly mould and soap-on-a-rope. Where will it end, indeed?

As someone who was born in Birkenhead and lived in Wirral for over 30 years, the first thing that struck me was the awful accents. Even I struggled to understand! Hardly surprising that most of the cast is from Manchester. It's difficult too to pin a time on the film, 70s buses and trains then a modern Renault Clio and some recent Merseyrail trains. All of which just make me think 'must try harder'A group of young kids embark on several fights against men 3 of 4 times their age, come out unmarked. Little to make you feel for any characters, a death that comes out of the blue with no real reason.....all in all, not great. My reason for watching....spotting the local landmarks and a decent soundtrack. Perhaps I should have read the book instead.

I had prepared for a nice evening with football/hooliganism themed movies and "awaydays" was one of them. I was looking forward to it and during the beginning of the film I really liked what I saw but then I missed something. Carty doesn't really go anywhere or do anything in my opinion. In between the fights he spends time with Elvis, gets annoyed by him and leaves only to return a couple of days later. This pattern repeats throughout the film and you can see Elvis falling in love with Carty and eventually committing suicide coming from a mile away. Knowing how the film ends doesn't really add to the excitement and so it just drags on. Same for the part with his sister getting beaten up or raped and him avenging her. Also there barely is any character development. Carty is pretty simple for a main character and his sister goes through more change than him. Most guys in the Pack don't have even have any form of character to speak of. They're just there and occasionally punch and kick guys twice their age in the face.This may not be a very deep analysis but I just got bored by a film that I had been excited to see. The music although sometimes misused is very good and I also liked the overall style of the film. With a little more happening and a bit less predictability it might have been a very good movie. But it ended up as quite boring, especially if you expect to see a take on British hooligans in the 70s/80s from a young lad's perspective. I think I don't even have to mention the lack of realism (the murder of Godden and the fights always ending as if the Pack was fighting pre school kids).5/10