CONTROL
CONTROL
December 20 2009, DVD, home living room, from library
Yeah, how come I hadn't seen this movie before? It slipped past me, as did so many films from 2007. As is starting to happen, those films show up on the shelf at the library, and I snag them and take them home and give them a spin.
CONTROL is much the way I expected it to be - excellent casting, a sad sad story, and lovely melancholy black and white imagery courtesy of generally-known-for-videos director Anton Corbjin, who directed "Atmosphere", the Joy Division video that was my very first. (Imagine my surprise when I heard the rest of Joy Division's music!) I was taken a bit by surprise by just how perfect the casting was - Sam Riley makes a tenderly beautiful and intense Ian Curtis, Samantha Morton gives us his long-suffering wife Debbie, and the freaky convergence of the guys they got to play (essentially) New Order. Yeah, I KNOW that in a biopic, you should look at the actors playing certain roles and recognize them instantly, but this is a whole different level on top of that. Additionally the band learned to play all the songs and performed them in the movie; are Joy Division songs so easy to play? If so, sign me up.
Yeah, it goes without saying that it's depressing. It's depressing throughout. The ever-tightening noose of pressure around Ian's neck - between his grim job at the Job Centre trying to find work for various folks with varying degrees of profound disability, his increasingly unsatisfying home life (which happens quite suddenly, and is no fun to watch - Ian Curtis is no good guy here), the band's increasing success, and of course, the vicious specter of epilepsy, emerging right when he least wants it to. The seizures are difficult to witness; there's no fantasy land here, no sugar-coating, just a young man spasming on the ground and making those horrible noises. (If you've ever seen a grand mal seizure, you know what it sounds like. I am sorry that I know. I wish no one ever had to go through that.) And then the weeping and shame and sickness afterwards, and the looks of concern on everyone's face. It's awful. But beautiful in the worst way.
I'm sure all the world's Joy Division fans have already seen it, so I won't bother to recommend it to them. But if you watch it and you're new to their music, it'll either make you a raging fan immediately, or it will make it so that you can never listen to it again. Personally, it made me dance, because that's what it does.
December 20 2009, DVD, home living room, from library
Yeah, how come I hadn't seen this movie before? It slipped past me, as did so many films from 2007. As is starting to happen, those films show up on the shelf at the library, and I snag them and take them home and give them a spin.
CONTROL is much the way I expected it to be - excellent casting, a sad sad story, and lovely melancholy black and white imagery courtesy of generally-known-for-videos director Anton Corbjin, who directed "Atmosphere", the Joy Division video that was my very first. (Imagine my surprise when I heard the rest of Joy Division's music!) I was taken a bit by surprise by just how perfect the casting was - Sam Riley makes a tenderly beautiful and intense Ian Curtis, Samantha Morton gives us his long-suffering wife Debbie, and the freaky convergence of the guys they got to play (essentially) New Order. Yeah, I KNOW that in a biopic, you should look at the actors playing certain roles and recognize them instantly, but this is a whole different level on top of that. Additionally the band learned to play all the songs and performed them in the movie; are Joy Division songs so easy to play? If so, sign me up.
Yeah, it goes without saying that it's depressing. It's depressing throughout. The ever-tightening noose of pressure around Ian's neck - between his grim job at the Job Centre trying to find work for various folks with varying degrees of profound disability, his increasingly unsatisfying home life (which happens quite suddenly, and is no fun to watch - Ian Curtis is no good guy here), the band's increasing success, and of course, the vicious specter of epilepsy, emerging right when he least wants it to. The seizures are difficult to witness; there's no fantasy land here, no sugar-coating, just a young man spasming on the ground and making those horrible noises. (If you've ever seen a grand mal seizure, you know what it sounds like. I am sorry that I know. I wish no one ever had to go through that.) And then the weeping and shame and sickness afterwards, and the looks of concern on everyone's face. It's awful. But beautiful in the worst way.
I'm sure all the world's Joy Division fans have already seen it, so I won't bother to recommend it to them. But if you watch it and you're new to their music, it'll either make you a raging fan immediately, or it will make it so that you can never listen to it again. Personally, it made me dance, because that's what it does.