Mojo

I so thoroughly enjoyed this movie I thought the acting was excellent I found it very gripping and tense and unpredictable. Some one had made very negative comments about Ewen Bremner in their review...........they were really unfounded. I just wish some one would cast him as some psycho bad guy I'm fed up of seeing him as the inept fall guy there is much more to this actor.

I found the dialogue an authentic portrayal of wanna be thugs and small time crooks and hustlers wanting to believe they are bigger than they really are. Thoroughly entertaining, well written, well directed and well produced.

I don't know how he did it but Jez Butterworth was able to collect some of the brightest British actors into his beautiful, little Debut Movie and what a movie it was!!! Set in 1950's Lonodn Soho, the story revolves around the lives of the people working in The Atlantis Club, one of the hippest joints around. Johnny Boy (Hans Matheson) is a sensation - he woos the girls, is a role model to the boys and can boogie-woogie like no other. Plus, he's making a whole lot of dough for the owner (Ricky Tomlinson). Thats when he starts to get some attention by local villain, Mr. Sam Ross (Harold Pinter) and has a proposition..... For me it's a wonderful film, and full of superb actors, for example, Ian Hart who seduces you into his world, one that you will never get out of. A gem of a movie which deserves a DVD release....NOW!!!!

Well it's true. This could have been really good. Most of the cast are good actors, the setting and plot were intriguing, the characters interesting and the score was good but for some reason it failed to come together.

A few comments about the good things first - the music over the opening credits was beautiful, really beautiful. The actors' performances were all good, Hans Matheson especially surprised me with how good he was given how bad he'd been in Dr. Zhivago.

The bad things - the plot didn't really hang together, the script was badly written and even the characters that weren't supposed to jabber did at times. It was also unfortunate that there was only one sympathetic character in the whole story and that the characters as a whole were a little underwritten. The directing was a little flat and if you can get Harold Pinter into a film at least use him for more than five minutes.

I like crime films, gangster flicks, those sort of things but this is definitely one not to recommend. Except for the first fifteen minutes which I would watch just for the music over the beginning credits and the appearance of Silver Johnny I would avoid this unless you're a fan of one of the actors since all of them get a decent amount of speaking time.

I watched this film on late night TV and I was hooked. I didn't know Aidan Gillen at the time but his presence was dominant in the film. Whenever he laughs in the film, his eyes never laugh. His character is totally unpredictable - you never know what he's gonna do next. Gillen's acting makes the film tense.

And personally, it was a fun to watch Ricky Tomlinson playing his father.

'Mojo' is a story of fifties London, a world of budding rock stars, violence and forced homosexuality. 'Mojo' uses a technique for shooting the 1950s often seen in films that stresses the physical differences to our own time but also represents dialogue in a highly exaggerated fashion (owing much to the way that speech was represented in films made in that period); I have no idea if people actually spoke like this outside of the movies, but no films made today and set in contemporary times use such stylised language. It's as if the stilted discourse of 1950s screenwriters serves a common shorthand for a past that seems, in consequence, a very distant country indeed; and therefore stresses the particular, rather than the universal, in the story. 'Mojo' features a strong performance from Ian Hart and annoying ones from Aiden Gillan and Ewan Bremner, the latter still struggling to build a post-'Trainspotting' career; but feels like a period piece, a modern film incomprehensibly structured in an outdated idiom. Rather dull, actually.