Control
Saw the Ian Curtis biopic last night, and could tell by the first minute of the movie that I'd be disappointed -- misled by a glowing Voice review ... the actor playing Ian being a bit too pretty and childish ( even as a teenager : can you really imagine Ian Curtis donning Ziggy Stardust makeup and furs? I always imagined him as conservative in that sense ) for the awkward-looking, serious-sounding Mr. Curtis. This was especially clear when the first song chimed in, and the actor lip-synched to them. The audio held the movie I wanted to see -- it's amazing that someone who died at 23 could sing with such sober authority, with his brand of intensity, which seemed so mannered. I thought he was at least a few years older than that when he died. His story has been considered for film for a long time, it's disappointing that the photographer who put this out as his directorial debut was the one to do it. It wasn't bad, and Samantha Morton was great as his estranged wife, I had just for something more substantive. The scenes of the band in bars, or backstage suggest an aloof and silly, definately naive band ( and they may have been, being as young as I guess they were ). I'd like to know if the interview conducted by Curtis' soon-to-be mistress was an actual transcription - if it was, then maybe it's director got it right. I remember meeting a young actor in Washington Square Park, in that period after I'd chosen to abandon college, who said that he was being considered to play the lead in a film about Ian's life, and he, at least, seemed abstract and psychologically gaunt enough to approximate a better Curtis. I remember thinking that the guy who played the lead in Children of Men would be great also, but that would be misplacing his age by, like, fifteen years! The best line of the movie, delivered by the band's manager, after Ian has a seizure onstage, comes as he's comforting him backstage: "it could be worse, you could be the lead singer of the Fall". As it is, it's got to be a daunting task, trying to reimagine someone who had such purity of vision ...
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Was looking, earlier in the week, at a tribute page to Peter Laughner, who died at the age of 24, due to alcoholism. How you'd have to drink to kick the bucket from saucing, at that age, astounds me, though our next-door neighbor in the neighborhood my brothers live in in Richmond, which I spent my first years in, managed to do it faster ... That Pere Ubu, and the Dead Boys came from the same initial band is hard to imagine, but I guess that in the smaller metropolises people and energies are forced closer together ... I know one of the 'Boys got it, also, I think it was Stiv Bators ( 'Ain't It Fun /When you know that you're gonna die young' )
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Was looking, earlier in the week, at a tribute page to Peter Laughner, who died at the age of 24, due to alcoholism. How you'd have to drink to kick the bucket from saucing, at that age, astounds me, though our next-door neighbor in the neighborhood my brothers live in in Richmond, which I spent my first years in, managed to do it faster ... That Pere Ubu, and the Dead Boys came from the same initial band is hard to imagine, but I guess that in the smaller metropolises people and energies are forced closer together ... I know one of the 'Boys got it, also, I think it was Stiv Bators ( 'Ain't It Fun /When you know that you're gonna die young' )