Ever since Ian Curtis, lead singer of the British band Joy Division, died in 1980, he has achieved the iconic status of an emerging artist showing signs of brilliance before meeting an early, tragic end. In Curtis' case, he committed suicide on the eve of his band's first American tour. His brief life has already been depicted on film in Michael Winterbottom's fast `n' loose look at the Manchester music scene of the 1970s and 1980s, 24 Hour Party People, but it was only for the first half of that film. Control draws most of its content from Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division, the memoirs of Ian's wife, Deborah, and is directed by music video maker Anton Corbijn. He not only directed the video for their song, "Atmosphere," but also shot some of the most memorable photographs of the band, making him the ideal choice to helm this film.
There is an audio commentary by director Anton Corbijn. With his thick accent, he's a little hard to follow at times but manages to cover the usual topics: casting choices, shooting on location, and so on. He praises the performances of Sam Riley and Samantha Morton while also pointing out technical details, like how the concert scenes where shot with hand-held cameras and everything else was done with steadicams. This track is a little on the dull side but Corbijn does impart interesting factoids and it was clearly a labour of love for him.
"The Making of Control" takes a look at how the film came together. Corbijn moved to England because of Joy Division and took iconic photos of the band. So, he had an emotional connection to the material. His black and white photos influenced his decision to shoot the film in a similar style. The actors who played the members of Joy Division talk about the challenge of playing people who are still alive, learning to play musical instruments, and the songs. This is an excellent featurette filled with loads of interesting information.
"In Control: A Conversation with Anton Corbijn" tends to repeat some of the information from the commentary track and the making of featurette. The director talks about how he discovered Joy Division's music and how he eventually met them. He touches upon how they shot in Ian's hometown for authenticity.
"Extended Live Concert Performances from the Film" allows you to see "Transmission", "Leaders of Men", and "Candidate" in their entirety.
In a nice touch, there are the videos for "Transmission," a powerful rendition done for live TV with a riveting performance by Ian, Corbijn's video for "Atmosphere" that is haunting as it was done after Ian's death, and The Killers' cover of "Shadowplay" which is surprisingly effective.
Also included is a "Still Gallery" with photographs from the film.
Finally, there are "Promotional Materials," trailers for the film, a blurb for Deborah's book about Ian, the soundtrack, and so on.
A lot of great films came out last year, 2007--No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Lives of Others, and so on--but I honestly can't think of a better one than this: "Control."
This is a gorgeous and skillfully done film--all awash in silvery starkness, in luminous black and white--and all feeling so genuine and so far from anything fake or phony. I am not the suicidal singer of a New Wave band, I am not in love with a French journalist, and I do not think I married too early, but watching this, the movie really put me inside the man's skin.
"Control" tells the story of Ian Curtis, Joy Division's ill-fated lead singer--as well as his unfortunate wife, his band, his manager, his label, and his lover--and it does so without resorting to making it a slick biopic or a phony depiction of celebrity. It is one of the realest feeling films I have ever seen, and yet it doesn't sacrifice anything compelling or filmic to be so. The story plows ahead with amazing music and a formidable drive, with scenes that are artfully shot and gorgeous to behold.
The film's final scenes are indelible, cut forever into my mind, and the feeling the film invokes is powerful. I have never felt more genuinely punk than after seeing this--leaving the theater, I wanted to rip benches out of the ground and attack speeding cars head-on. More than that, I wanted to walk back into the theater, get another ticket, and watch it again. (I'm not really that into Joy Division either--at least I wasn't before seeing this.)
"Control": Best Movie of 2007. And Best Music Movie in Decades. So well-made and flawlessly executed that it couldn't ultimately depress me--it could only excite me. It's amazing.
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This film is based on Deborah Curtis' biography and so this "Ian Curtis" is the Ian Curtis that she knew and Control in most respects adheres to her interpretation of his life. But it should be noted that Deborah Curtis knew but one side of Ian Curtis' story, her side. And like any other point of view that might have been chosen to tell this story, this one is limited & distorted. The writer of the screenplay is fully aware of the fact that Deborah's perspective is a limited one (as all of our perspectives are) and the screenplay makes some attempt (though not enough) to find the Ian that Deborah did not know, and that maybe no one knew. To achieve this screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh balances Deborah's own remembrance with the remembrance of other key figures in Ian's life (parents, band mates, Belgian girlfriend Annik) to give us a more rounded look at what it might have been like to be Ian Curtis. Unfortunately, these additional perspectives do not amount to as much as one would have liked them to as Ian was apparently not particularly close or open with parents or band mates. (The film rarely shows Ian interacting with either.) And the girlfriend just seems like a very pretty, very fresh, very young smiling face. Most likely the band has their own story to tell, as does the girlfriend Annik. To Deborah, Ian Curtis was a husband and so her story is one largely dominated by domestic squables. After the fourth or fifth round of domestic argument the film begins to feel like a film about marriage and not about music. The over-reliance on Deborah's perspective/biography begins to feel like a liability before the second hour of this two hour biopic begins, and the second hour is almost entirely devoted to the last moments of marital woe that, according to Deborah, sparked the final act. But there is so much more to this story than the one that Deborah has to tell. In addition to Ian the husband, there is Ian the singer and performer. And, most importantly to fans, there is the Ian Curtis that wrote some of the most austere and hypnotic and compelling rock music ever recorded. This is what is really missing form the film: a sense of where the music was coming from. Certainly some lyrics can be explained as autobiographical confessions of self-loathing and regret but some are comments and critiques on modern life.
To listeners of Joy Division's postpunk sound what was immediately alluring was that it sounded nothing like punk. Punk was manic and Joy Division was subdued. The sound was hollow but hypnotic and the voice was full of romantic longings and yearnings for some kind of transcendence but the romantic longing was always accompanied by the feeling that there was nothing to be done with these feelings. If punk was about irreverence and having a rebellious larf in the face of authority, Joy Division was about looking for something to revere and finding that modern life gave man very little to revere. In the face of utter hopelessness, the only grace to be found was in the music itself because the music offered trance-like beauties unavailable in real life (Unknown Pleasures). To fans, Ian & the band were the rarest of things, the expression of a genuinely original sensibility/musical vision. Unfortunately, this is the part of Ian's story that Deborah has the least access to--the writer Ian and the stage Ian is someone she barely knew--, and so it is simply not dealt with. We get no sense of what music meant to Ian nor what he was looking for in it, and without some kind of understanding of the music it is very difficult to understand Ian. Instead we get a story about a relationship and a cliched one at that. Sympathetic as we are with Deborah, rock wives rarely lead happy lives, and in biopics they almost always look like obstacles to their more talented husbands artistic urges & drives. Thats true here as well. And sad as the relationship between Ian and Deborah was it is simply one part of a larger story.
The other perspective on display here is the directors. As one might suspect from that very romantic film poster, director Anton Corbijn knows Ian as a photographic object. And, as a visual object itself, the film is primarily a chance for Corbijn to display his own considerable gifts for grim yet starkly beautiful composition. From both the still photographs that he took of the actual band circa 1980 (which should have been included in the DVD extra gallery) and from the film itself, one can understand that Corbijn felt a deep connection to Ian & Ian's unique romantic/existential sensibility and vision. As compelling and convincing as the film sometimes is, it is a work of art made by an artist that has his own ideas about what made Ian what he was and what made the music what it was. But, like all great artists, Ian was more than just the sum of his many influences (William Wordsworth, Lou Reed, Brain Eno, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Apocalypse Now, Werner Herzog...) and so no mere visual record of these influences and sources from which he drew will ever fully explain the artists own vision. Artists recognize greatness in others but the good ones always transcend their sources. Ian Curtis' true sources of inspiration are & will remain mysterious, no film can really know or show what Ian was or knew or what he felt when listening to a favorite song or reading a favorite book; no one can know what Ian was to Ian. Biopics are intriguing and frustrating because they are, at best, speculative. Though the film faithfully represents Deborah's version of things, the key moments in this life are ones that no one had any access to but Ian (how does anyone really know what he watched, or listened to, or thought in those last moments?). Faced with unknowability, it is our nature to be curious and to speculate but one should not mistake speculation for truth. As a result, the most valuable part of this DVD to those fans of Ian the artist and his formidable band mates (given short shrift in this film) will be the actual footage (not included in the actual film but included as a DVD extra along with Corbijn's 1988 video for Atmosphere and the Killers video for Shadowplay) of the real Joy Division playing Transmission.
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I've now seen this story played out 3 times, twice at the movies in the last 2 days and once as a 15 year old from the North of England where the film is set. In the true spirit of the "Kitchen Sink" genre, it begins like a modern day "A kind of loving" and has a touch of " Room at the top" (the wedding car scene). Sam Riley plays Ian Curtis Lead singer of Joy Division, a band who influenced so many groups in the UK and internationally. Riley is outstanding, portraying Curtis in a way that does not show him as the icon he became posthumously but as a somewhat immature 20+ year old man. This of course is countered by a soundtrack that reminds us of his musical genius played by the actors in a very authentic "Garagey way". A portrait of a man torn between his old and new life complicated by the onset of an illness he was struggling to come to terms with.
If that wasn't enough the photography is glorious, every other shot could be hung on the wall, it never looked so good when I was a young! I understand that Corbijn was trying to shoot the film like a sequence of music videos and with his massive experience as a still photographer it all works beautifully. He sank a large amount of his own money into this project, and you can tell that making it was important to him as a fan and aquaintance of the band You can see his passion and committment to the film throughout. The sequence in the kitchen towards the end of the film was electric, an incredibly haunting dramatic shot. This movie demands the biggest screen that you can find.
I read a review that said you don't watch this movie you live it, the first time I saw Control I was angry at the futility of it all, the second I wept tears for lost youth, his and mine. My advice ? Go to a really big Movie screen and take a box of tissues and enjoy what must be considered the best music movie of all time. There's no getting away from the end, like Ian Curtis's all too short life it comes too soon in this movie, but enjoy the majesty of the photgraphy, the stunning performances, revel in the darkness and enjoy the music. Surely a candidate for Oscar(s)?
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A biopic of Joy Division's lead singer, Ian Curtis? Who besides a handful of people like me, (in 1980 we had their posters on our bedroom wall and sketched what Joy Divison's third album cover might have looked like), and the only other patron at the matinee theatrical showing that I viewed could possibly care? Indeed, why should I want to see actors performing a suicidal swan dive when all the sadness of Curtis' death lies imbedded in the gloomy, psyche-rich and beautiful music Joy Division left behind?
Because now Ian Curtis is really dead. Anton Corbijn's film, "Control" brings closure to the first time I heard Joy Division, raced to a record store, and was no sooner through a second listen when I heard the lead singer had committed suicide. I've been in denial ever since, and the sketchy details of Curtis' death, the same sketchy details offered in the film, suddenly ring true to me.
Filmed in the British working class black and white, like the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night", with tones of muted and spacious greys, like The Who's "Quadrophenia", the film brings vitality to the bleak Manchester neighborhoods that were the haunts of the band. It has that wide screen black and white ordinariness that film geeks love. Very common images of modest Brit apartments, cheap recording studios and seedy clubs, are given an immaculate shine by the variable b&w cinematography which conjure not only the do-it-yourself Manchester music scene, but Joy Division's own bleak and surviving psyche. And the head bobbing teens digging the band in the clubs look like the honest to god post punks of yesterday.
You'd thing that was genuine Joy Division during the musical performances, but it is the actors uncannily recreating the music with Sam Riley as Curtis, not only looking the part while delivering a 'let's-let's not' demeanor, but sounding like a dead-on Ian Curtis, with all the brooding deep voiced restraint Curtis possessed. In a subtle performance in which the camera finds him, as opposed to a mugging for the camera, Riley as Curtis, (just another English bloke holding a day job), gives reason to believe in the seemingly petty causes of Curtis' self-destruction. He simply didn't want to live anymore, ("I give them everything 'on stage' and they want more"), and the overload of prescription drugs to combat epilepsy surely complicated matters. Samantha Morton as wife Deborah Curtis, (whose autobiography the film is based), is extraordinary as the plain and sexy love struck young woman who stands like a pillar against Curtis' doomed horizon. The big scene is taken like an arrow through the heart, even as you know it is the only destination the film aims.
My one and only gripe is the movie's insistance to incorporate Joy Division music at times of marital strife, which seemed a lessening of the music's depth.
But now Ian Curtis is really, really dead. He had sung his last song. Finito. Out of here. Love tore him apart.
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It looks like other reviewers here are probably involved with the film. I am not; I just watched it. This movie is the average slasher fare with a reality show spin on it. Even though the storyline is not so original, I still found the movie likeable all the way to the end. It has the cheesiness but doesn't look cheap, some humor, decent kill scenes, and good music scores. Slasher movie fans would particularly find this film entertaining.
