Sorry, this movie sucks

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Joe Meek was a man I knew little about despite the fact that he was of my era with many mega hits he wrote and produced during the early 60s, most notably "Telstar" which was a massive hit.An English Phil Spector if you like and even more remarkable for the fact that all this big sound he produced was on basic recording equipment in his flat that was over a leather goods shop in Holloway Road, London.A flawed genius (aren't they always?) played superbly by Con O'Neill with excellent support cast including Kevin Spacey who effected a remarkably good English accent as a retired Army officer who financed Meeks.What also surprised me was the number of session musicians that came out his stable to go onto huge fame later in life and the number of then unknown artists he worked with. His life ended in a terrible double tragedy. If it ever comes on TV again I highly recommend you see it.

Telstar is the satellite that inspired British music producer and his in house band The Tornadoes to launch the instrumental record which became the first US number 1 hit by a British group.Meek who operated out of the top of of a leather good shop was a maverick like Phil Spector, and just like Spector with a fondness of guns.The film starts and feels like a stage play very much in keeping with its origins as a stage play and low budget adaptation as a film. Con O'Neill (reprising the part from the play) plays Meek, harried, frazzled, on the edge with drugs keeping him going. Kevin Spacey makes a cameo as Major Banks his business backer who keeps the whole enterprise in even keel as we find that Meek is certainly no businessman.Somewhere within the chaos of the upstairs apartment cum music studio Meek who could not read or write music and was ridiculed for being tone deaf managed to produced a string of heats and had major musician working under him such as Ritchie Blackmore, Chas Hodges. I shall omit Screaming Lord Sutch as a major musician though.However the pill popping, plagiarism accusations, arrest for importuning in a public toilet, his falling out with the Major lead to deepening financial turmoil and the falling out with friends and musicians. The hits dried up and in a tragic demise he ended up shooting his landlady and himself.The film by actor turned director Nick Moran is rather messy. Moran does well with a low budget to evoke a sixties atmosphere which is away from the swinging which was so beloved by past filmmakers.Its nice to see support from Spacey, James Corden as well as some of the real life people who associated with Meek turn up such as Jess Conrad.However the film feels overlong and as Moran tries to imbue Meek with some psychological character traits based on his upbringing and his past family life it feels like a failure as it adds little. Many people of his generation had family affected by The Great War or trauma in childhood.I found this a middling film whose kinetic energy runs out midway through and the film starts to drag until the tragic ending.

If he's up there, looking down on the world at forty five revolutions per minute, Joe Meek will undoubtedly have seen this horrible film. Knowing Joe, he probably burst into tears. In fact, it's surprising he didn't manage to engineer a shower of satellite debris to fall upon the collective heads of everyone involved in it.Let's start from the known facts: Joe Meek was a genius. He was also a wayward personality, deeply troubled, a complex and infinitely intriguing human being. That's a tall order for even a decent actor to essay. For a ham like Con O'Neill it's asking way too much. It's hard to believe that there is anyone alive who could look, act and speak less like the vital lead character of this movie. Okay, so one doesn't necessarily expect a perfect Meek lookalike, but some facet of his personality has to come across. Con O'Neill misses his target by a country mile. There is nothing of the real Joe Meek here, just a badly-realised cartoon performance, one-note, manic, utterly shallow.We know from the preserved film and audio of Meek in person that the reality was far more subtle than the brash, shouting, bungling oaf of this movie. The Meek who comes across in the extant archive clips is an apparently mild-mannered, gently spoken individual who betrays no outward sign of the violent emotion of which he was capable. O'Neill plays him as a pilled-up lunatic, hectoring his performers and frantically twiddling knobs in the hope of engineering some audio accident. Sure, Meek had his moments of mania, but to interpret this as his entire personality is a complete misunderstanding of the man. And he was not Welsh. Newent, Meeks' birthplace, is not in Wales. It's in Gloucestershire. So why the Welsh lilt? O' Neill looks and sounds like someone doing a really, really bad impersonation of Rob Brydon. Oh, and Meek would never have said 'whoop-de-doo.' Neither would anyone else back then. It's far too recent. At least he didn't punch the air and shout 'yes' but he might as well have done.This being the central performance, and the entire raison d'être for the movie, it's hard to see past O'Neill's sheer awfulness, and the movie's better aspects are easily overshadowed by this towering piece of monumental miscasting. Any of the other actors here would have made a better Meek. Even, at a pinch, Kevin Spacey, whose performance in The Shipping News was probably a lot closer to the reality of Joe Meek. Spacey is amusing to watch - evidently having been briefed that the movie was a comedy - but better by a long, long way than anyone else on show here is JJ Feild as Heinz Burt. Voice, appearance and demeanour all agree exactly with what we know of Heinz from the archive. James Corden won't disappoint, if you're expecting his standard fat, charmless git. He can't do anything else, evidently. And he looks nothing like Clem Cattini, either.After all this awfulness, the film's period atmosphere is surprisingly good, with Meek's studio flat realised in fine detail, and the contemporary footage integrates almost seamlessly with the new material. One might quibble at anachronisms like a 1970s Gretsch guitar, but generally the production design is top notch and really captures the feel of early 60s Britain. But all this effort is reduced to mere window dressing, turd-polish on a film that's deficient in so many other departments.If Joe Meek were given a copy of this film on DVD, he'd smash it with a hammer. Then he'd throw the director, and Con O'Neill down the stairs. Meek's is a great story, shot through with incident, intrigue, emotion and genuine human drama. Telstar the movie is a bit like Joe's original off-key demo of his classic instrumental: a wayward shot at something that could be done much, much better.One star - and that's ten stars too many.

British films made by people like Richard Curtis (The Boat that Rocked et al) tend to look at the swinging 60's of London with heavily rose tinted spectacles. All pimms, waistcoats, flower power and crazy shenanigans. All very well but not much to do with reality - I thought Austin Powers would have killed that off in the 90's....which is why Nick Moran's directorial debut is such a breath of fresh air.For those that don't know the Joe Meek at the centre of this film - control freak, gay in the wrong decade, tone deaf drug addicted musical pioneer - get ready for a roller-coaster of a ride. Without wishing to spoil the arc of the story, this is a classic tale of a man with a vision breaking new ground...with disastrous consequences.Con O'Neil dominates this film with a superb manic performance which captures the claustrophobic and chaotic feel of the centre of Joe's universe, his recording studio above a handbag shop in central London in the early 60's. Ably supported by a host of good actors - in particular Kevin Spacey, Pam Ferris, and (even) James Cordon are all spot on. What looks like a cod-60's Curtis-esquire disaster for the first 20 minutes heads somewhere altogether darker once the action cranks up as Joe starts to get some no.1 hits in the charts.A must watch cautionary tale about fame, love, jealously, paranoia and music, this is a fine carachter piece with some excellent nuanced comedy amidst the darker elements, it's a really well executed debut from Mr Moran...enjoy.