Swing

After seeing this rather fun loving film, I just wanted to take up my dancing career again. Lisa Stansfield plays a very convincing scouser, even though there are the odd times when Rochdale creeps in, this is also a slight problem with Hugo Speer, non the less a most enjoyable film with laughs a plenty. If you have never been to Liverpool, once you have watched "Swing" you'll feel you have lived there.

This director didn't miss a beat in developing these characters. The humour is dark and rich, with a really local flavour and a lot of geniune affection behind each turn. I was amazed at Lisa Stansfield whose performance was so natural you'd think she'd been treading the boards for years. While SWING shows Liverpool and the kind of poverty you can't shake off your boots, it begs you to be optimistic, let loose and come have a good time. Music, faith and hard work (with a bit of luck in the form of an hysterically funny "professional" lottery winner) transform Hugo Speer's world and I left the theatre with the lightest of hearts from experiencing his journey.

And forget about the soundtrack, everybody was tapping and grinning away throughout the film.

This movie simply makes you smile. I can't understand why so many people need to dissect a movie into a trillion pieces and examine the underlying meanings and hidden agendas. Sometimes all one needs to do is sit back, relax and just enjoy a movie, like I did with this one. The music was great and there were some good laughs. Who cares if the plot is implausible? The whole point of watching a feel good movie like this is that it's detached from reality - I live in reality and sometimes I need to escape it!

Where would a jealous cop try to forment a riot in a hotel to win his wife back from the leader of a swing band? In contemporary Liverpool, if this film is to be believed. Mind you, it also asks us to believe that the same band leader, who's a Catholic, vows to bring up his kids as protestants in return for the use of a band hall. _Swing_ can't seem to make up its mind whether it wants to be a zany comedy of a piece of naturalism in the British Social Realist tradition, and this schizophrenia often irritates. It's got some entertaining scenes , though, some great music and good acting, particularly from the sexy Lisa Stansfield.

Just fast-forward through the plot. The writer did. The guy who wants to set up a band just happens to have a bartender uncle who can provide a brass section, a maitre d' friend who can provide a hall, and another friend who works for a crazy millionaire who decides to set up a record label. There are a few good inspirational lines spoken by Clarence Clemons (who also provides the dubbed sax for the protagonist), but the script doesn't take the time to put them in context so they take on the purplish tinge of a sore thumb. The most amusing lines in the film are printed in the closing credits. Oh, but the music is nice and Lisa S. is magnetic.