British Gala
World Premier
Shimmy Marcus/ UK 2010/ 82 min/ tbc
The great British public don’t seem to be able to get enough dancing recently. Quite apart from Strictly, So You Think You Can Dance and Glee there’s Streetdance 3D, Fame and, God help us, a promised remake of Footloose. Expectations are high then for Shimmy Marcus’s SoulBoy, a British comedy set in and around Wigan during the infamous ‘Northern Soul’ phenomenon of the 1970s.
Marcus sets the scene well enough, with a killer soundtrack and some original footage, but as with many of the recent spate of films set in the 60s and 70s- most notably Richard Curtis’s The Boat that Rocked, the vernacular sounds anachronistic, and the women are strong and independent and swear like they have been beamed back from a post feminist alternative universe. Add to that Alfie Allen’s crap wig and you start to feel your suspension of disbelief straining at the seams. The biggest problem with SoulBoy though, is the dancing. It just doesn’t come up to scratch. In any good dance film, the thrill of the dance is the real object of desire. Look at Flash Dance, or Saturday Night Fever. Here, you never feel that lead protagonist Joe is dancing for the sheer love of it, and so the Northern Soul dance scene is reduced to a backdrop to what is in the end, a pretty flaccid love story. The film finishes off with a laughably awful ‘dance off’ between two men who can’t dance, and have learnt nothing from trying, and will leave real dance fans feeling decidedly short changed.
Showing @ Cineworld 19th June 19:45
@ Filmhouse 26th June 16:15