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"Control" reactions

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on May 18, 2007 at 03:53 AM

The positive buzz (mostly from Cannes-covering British journalists) and yesterday's positive review from Variety's Russell Edwards aside, I've been told that Anton Corbijn's Control -- a black- and-white biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis, who hung himself at the peak of the band' s success -- is a fairly conventional work.

"It follows the usual form," a critic friend (and a once-devoted Joy Division fan) said this morning. "It tells Curtis's story going from one chapter after another....the old 'and then this happened, and then this happened' approach." He also said "it's too domestic," which always seems to happens when your source material comes from a widow or ex-wife, in this instance Deborah Curtis and her memoir, "Touching From a Distance". Plus it mainly focuses on the band playing live gigs, which the critic-fan says is wrong since Joy Division was mainly a studio band.

On the other hand, another respected critic friend says Control is definitely worth catching.

I would have gone to last night's Director's Fortnight Control screening at 7 pm, but I had to go to an early screening of Leonardo DiCaprio's global-poisoning doc 11th Hour, since I'm taking part in an early-afternoon interview session with DiCaprio and co-directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners tomorrow at the Hotel du Cap. I have to hold on my review until after the public screening that day, which would be sometime around 2:30 or 3 pm.

Comments

this is just a guess, but i'm assuming they show the band on tour to detail Curtis' epileptic seizures that he would have when the band was playing live. at times, the band and the audience wouldn't even know he was having a seizure (it would seem like he was dancing..oddly). the epilepsy, of course, is one of the reasons for his depression and eventual suicide.

Posted by: travis b at May 18, 2007 06:04 AM

I'm not going to comment on a second-hand review, but anybody who insists that Joy Division was "mainly a studio band" would do well to check out their live album "Les Bains Douches," which reveals them as about as shit-hot a live band as you got back in the old New Wave.
"Mainly a studio band." Jesus.

Posted by: Glenn Kenny at May 18, 2007 06:05 AM

129 live shows between Jan. 1978 and May 2 1980. And that's not counting their gigs under the name Warsaw. Two minutes on the internet, that took me!

Posted by: Glenn Kenny at May 18, 2007 06:15 AM

is that with or without all of their cancelled gigs?

Posted by: travis b at May 18, 2007 06:17 AM

The eight minutes of 24 Hour Party People that covered this exhausted my interest in Curtis' sad life story, even if I did like the band. What am I supposed to take from this? Even less than Selena or La Bamba, movies about the similarly pointless deaths of musicians just getting started.

Posted by: Mgmax at May 18, 2007 06:27 AM

Wells to Kenny: The critic-fan's point wasn't thjat Joy Division never played live gigs, or didn't play very many of the, but that their musical artistry in the studio was much more profound and satisfying than whatever they got going "live" in front of the fans.

Posted by: gruver1 at May 18, 2007 06:58 AM

Posted by: gruver1 at May 18, 2007 07:00 AM

Joy Division? Can they make a movie about a lamer band?

Posted by: Dave Polands Gut at May 18, 2007 07:14 AM

Spice World?

Posted by: Mgmax at May 18, 2007 07:19 AM

DPG, you got no taste.

Posted by: hatchetface at May 18, 2007 08:19 AM

*slaps Jeff's hand with a ruler*

Hanged himself!

Posted by: alan at May 18, 2007 08:38 AM

i had the displeasure of seeing joy division's spawn, new order, in concert in 1988. they turned on a couple drum machines, dropped two fingers on a couple of chords and kept their backs to the audience and didn't say a word. so i walked out.

brilliant!

Posted by: christian at May 18, 2007 10:28 AM

Joy Division was an incredible band in the studio, but a different kind of incredible band live. Still, this is the Ian Curtis story, which is different from the Joy Division story, and as anyone who has actually, you know, *read* his widow's memoir knows, there's more to the man than the music. So I'm looking forward to this, if only because it's by Anton Corbijn, one of the all time greatest rock photographers, and one of the few whose work could be deemed truly iconic in its own right.

Anyway, this film should get some fun reactions, as mainstream critics struggle to pretend to know anything about Curtis/Joy Division, let alone pretend to be fans. It'll be like "24 Hour Party People" times ten, with reviewers tripping over themselves to appear hip but mostly just tripping up.

Posted by: Vitesse98 at May 18, 2007 11:20 AM

Mgmax, just wait. You still have the Darby Crash biopic to look forward to this year.

Posted by: Armin Tamzarian at May 18, 2007 11:40 AM

what will be worse with this are the hipster critics who over-mythologized joy division just because the singer killed himself.

Posted by: christian at May 18, 2007 12:20 PM

Will it be rated R, because the dude's smoking?

Posted by: Edward at May 18, 2007 03:03 PM

which brings us back to john waters:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=YnpofBtijF8

Posted by: christian at May 18, 2007 03:21 PM