One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie Review

Wake me when it's over.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 20, 2012

How do you feel about screaming teenage girls? Better yet, are you a screaming teenage girl? If you answered “yes” to the second question, or if your answer to the first question is “I don’t mind them, actually”, chances are you’ll be able to at least tolerate if not actually fall in love with One Direction – Up All Night: The Live Tour. In case you’re not a teenage girl, a little catching up might be in order. One Direction is yet another creation of the ubiquitous Simon Cowell, or at least Cowell can be credited with pouring the career equivalent of Miracle-Gro on the British quintet after they placed in third on The X Factor, the series Cowell infamously claimed would top American Idol’s numbers when it matriculated to America after several successful years in the United Kingdom, only to see it not exactly light up the Nielsen on this side of the pond. In Britain, it’s still something of a cultural phenomenon, and One Direction, despite not winning the grand prize, attracted enough attention that Cowell signed the group to his Syco Records (they’re handled by Columbia – Sony in North America). Their debut album Up All Night tore up the charts in both the United Kingdom and the United States, where it evidently became the first debut album by a British group to claim the top spot on the Billboard charts in its opening week (take that, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones). The five young men making up the group are all in their late teens or early twenties, and they seem poised to capture the youth market in a way unseen by boy bands since the halcyon days of ‘N Sync and The Backstreet Boys. In fact this rather brief live concert (clocking in at barely over an hour) is a notable for its nonstop screaming female audience as it is for any of its music, which is of rather questionable quality even if it follows the tried and true prefab structures that Cowell seems to prefer in his many “overnight sensations”. The question with regard to these overnight wonders is, what’s going to happen when the sun comes up tomorrow and a new day has dawned on another prefab group waiting for its day (or fifteen minutes) in the klieg lights of international fame and fortune?

What can you say about a group that is so relentlessly packaged as One Direction is? Well, for starters, for one of these demographically focused assemblages, they have a peculiar lack of stage presence, and in a rather unexpected turn (no pun intended), there’s virtually no choreography here, other than the boys occasionally jumping up and down like kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In fact the lack of choreography is exacerbated by what seems at times to be absolutely no clue on the part of the boys as to where they should be on stage, as they wander about aimlessly and frequently upstage (or downstage) whoever is singing lead at any given moment. In fact about the only rehearsed "dance move" seems to be ubiquitous crotch grabbing (or, somewhat humorously, "almost" crotch grabbing, since these boys seem to be carving out a niche as "clean cut young men" instead of the typical rock star sort young girls would not want to bring home to Mother.)

The music is bland, repetitive pop with too many cliché ridden changes to count, with the typical teen angst lyrical content that is sure to set teenage female hearts racing but which will leave most others singularly underwhelmed. The boys all have decent enough voices, and they occasionally pull out a guitar to prove that they actually have at least a modicum of actual musical skill, but this is such pre-programmed fare that it’s pretty hard to take any of it seriously. That of course is the opinion of a reviewer who is obviously the wrong gender and several decades too old to “get” One Direction.

There have of course been prefab groups for decades, but what’s so egregious about One Direction is how shameless they are about it all. In fact in one of the music videos included on this Blu-ray as a supplement they have the audacity to mimic The Monkees in one instance that I won’t “spoil” for those of you who haven’t seen it and may in fact be curious, for pop cultural sake if for no other reason. It’s a hopefully intentional irony, but one suspects the boys were told what to do and they did it willingly with absolutely no clue what any of it meant. Such is the state of the Simon Cowell controlled media universe these days. No wonder so many of us are sleepless. Up All Night indeed.

The rather short concert consists of:

• 01. Na Na Na
• 02. Stand Up
• 03. I Wish
• 04. I Gotta Feeling/Stereo Hearts
• 05. Valerie/Torn
• 06. Moments
• 07. Gotta Be You
• 08. More Than This
• 09. Up All Night
• 10. Tell Me a Lie
• 11. Everything About You
• 12. Use Somebody
• 13. One Thing
• 14. Save You Tonight
• 15. What Makes You Beautiful
• 16. I Want

One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

One Direction – Up All Night: The Live Tour is presented on Blu-ray by a consortium consisting of Sony Music, Cowell's Syco Music and Modest!, with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1. This is the rare Sony (or Sony related) live concert release that at least somewhat misses the mark. The high definition video presentation is highly problematic a lot of the time, especially with regard to the busy light display stage left which routinely fills the screen with swirling moiré patterns that may drive some viewers to distraction. But even aside from such artifacts, the overall look here is strangely soft and undefined, even in many close-ups, where fine detail never really seems to pop the way it should. Midrange and far range shots often simply melt into a blur of color, with no distinct object detail whatsoever. Contrast is not very well defined either, leading to a sort of milky ambience a lot of the time. The good news here is such typical concert video bugaboos as posterizing are extremely minimal, even when the audience is bathed in a cool blue light.

One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Say what you will about the actual music performed on One Direction – Up All Night: The Live Tour, the audio, courtesy of either a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix or an LPCM 2.0 stereo fold down, sounds remarkably crisp and well defined. The 5.1 mix is more than occasionally overwhelmed by the literally nonstop screaming of what seems to be an entirely young female audience. (Frequent cutaways to the audience throughout the concert reveal girls literally in hysterics at the sheer excitement of seeing their idols. Many of the girls are holding signs begging for a hug or even a marriage proposal.) The 5.1 mix does slightly open up the sound field, however, injecting a bit of breathing space into the close harmony that the boys typically fall into in the second eight or choruses of the prefab tunes. Fidelity is very strong even if dynamic range is somewhat limited.

One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• What Makes You Beautiful Music Video (1080i; 3:31)


• Gotta Be You Music Video (1080i; 3:53)


• One Thing Music Video (1080i; 3:20)


• On Tour With One Direction (1080i; 7:24), or: "You know it's important because it's in black and white!"

One Direction: Up All Night - The Live Tour Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There was a famous old album by Mr. Presley called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong, to which I responded in my best curmudgeonly voice, "Why can't they?" Chart success is no indicia of actual quality, as common sense hopefully dictates. That of course won't stop One Direction from selling millions upon millions of records—at least until the next "phenomenon" comes along to replace them. We live in an age of such interchangeable "artistry" that it becomes harder and harder to really respond to any of it with anything other than a casual shrug. That's why someone glitz free and with obvious intrinsic gifts like Adele has been such a breath of fresh air in the recent pop universe. Packaging may make it all look (and even sound) relatively pretty, but it's a hollow gift with no redeeming characteristics inside. This review will no doubt leave countless young girls screaming, albeit for a different reason than being in the presence of their current Pop Gods.