CONTROL: or How Can You Lose Something That You Never Had In The First Place?

At best I'm ambivalent about the whole blog culture, the unnecessary compulsion to confess/opine/drivel on about this and that to an audience that is both invisible and probably non-existent. I'm already bored with this blog, because what I've been writing has that almost desperate "me too" kind of feel to it. Who cares what I think about movies anyway? It's not connecting to anything in my life anyway, except for the experiences that revolve around sitting in darkened rooms with a couple of hundred strangers. I'm not a critic. I'm not even a critical observer, or haven't been lately. If you want to call it an epiphany, be my guest, but that was the thought that presented itself to me this week.

I've been participating in a Directors' workshop this month, a harrowing group activity where I and other directing hopefuls workshop scenes together under the instructive gaze of Adrienne Weiss. After a director gives their performance, the kangeroo court is in session, and all and sundry give their feedback about the process, the delivery, and the overall impact on the audience. Except that my feedback always sucks, is rarely inciteful, and is often drawn out of me out of necessity, rather than real desire to contribute. I'm the one who says "well I enjoyed such-and-such doing this with that line" or "I enjoy so-and-so's take on this character" etc. It's more painful than I can set down here.

But the reason for this is the same as the reason for these indifferent and irrelevent blogs about movies I kind-of liked but sort-of didn't like. I miss, and apparently still cling to, the childlike experience of just enjoying a movie because someone put it out there for me to see. I pay my $10 (or whatever) and base my judgement on how much of a sucker this movie takes me for. Beyond that I'm ready to be entertained, and it takes a pretty bad movie to vent my ire.

So, in the context of the Directors' Workshop, I'm committed to change. All well and good. But how does that reflect itself in the everyday? Am I going to turn into one of those technically aware bores that I despise seeing movies with? (I mean, granted, "3:10 to Yuma" is not an amazing, nor relevent, nor even necessary film, but I enjoyed it for all of that. It was a refreshing change from the relentlessly predicatable and generally hateful movies I've seen lately)

Who knows, but I guess I'll find out...

Originally I'd intended this entry to be about how this blog wasn't just about movies I felt compelled to apologize for or defend, and that I could write unnecessary reviews about movies I disliked too. Which brings us to "Control", Anton Corbijn's feature debut based on the last few years of Ian Curtis' life, specifically his marriage and his experience in the band Joy Division. Now with the onset of the British Independent Film Awards loading the nominations with this film for multiple categories, I can't hold my tongue any longer.

It's not a good film. Pure and simple.

It's not a terribly BAD film, either, but regardless it is a minor work brought to the screen by a noted stills photographer and music video director, who brings the same sense of superficiality to this more 'significant' work. It is as vaccuous as Corbijn's portraits of U2 for the Joshua Tree album, with rich, resonant images of stioc, majestic popsterism captured in the deeply textured grayscale of gritty 35mm. For sure, Corbijn squeezes every ounce of exposure latitude out of every frame, but in the effort to capture what? There's just no story here.

Okay, is it a love story? Well, not particularly. While the set up for the relationship between Curtis and his wife-to-be Deborah is touching, economic, and effective, once the marriage is in full swing, all we get are landmarks, and tritely displayed at that. It becomes like a coach tour of Italy - some of the sights, but none of the flavor or personalization. Where he should have referenced the very book this film was supposedly adapted from ("Touching From a Distance", Deborah's account of her relationship with Curtis and subsequently with Joy Division), Corbijn retreats to a safe distance and paints the picture with the broadest, most clumsily obvious of strokes. I have nothing but contempt for the tacky obviousness with which the score swells with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and exactly the most painfully obvious and unrewarding moment of the film. Better to have never used the song again - I mean, how many people seeing this film HAVEN'T heard this song before?

So is it a biopic of an artist as musician and collaborator? Not even close. Embarassingly, Michael Winterbottom's interpretation of the same events, constituting the first half of "Twenty-Four Hour Party People" has more insight, simple information, and dramatic weight than the entire telling encompassed by 'Control'. And that was intended to be a satire, a cartoon. And it was half a movie. There's no sense of his relationship to the other band-members, there's no sense of how the music was created, nor how the dynamic within the band made these creative choices inevitable. Curtis is aloof and above all of this in 'Control', like it doesn't matter. And yet we're clearly supposed to believe that it does.

The greatest crime for a film that is supposedly adapted from an account by one of the central characters, is that Deborah is robbed of a voice in this film. In fact, there are only two female characters that have speaking parts - Deborah and Curtis' mistress Annik - and neither have ANYTHING to say of any material benefit to the story. The emotional presence of women have been sucked out of the universe Curtis inhabits in this film. This robs the narrative of any meaningful insight, because he never has anything to challenge his world view, not even the acknowledgement of the existence of another outside of his own. The audience is invited to accept his take on the world at face value (and given that this can only be an interpretation of Curtis' life up until his final moments, we're really talking about Corbijn's view of Curtis' world) and never question his artistic right to shit on everyone around him for no better reason than his vanity and his lack of vision.

So what we have then is a music video about a superficial interpretation of some selfish arsehole's life, leading up to his melodramatic suicide in the kitchen of a semi-detached in Manchester on the eve of his greatest success. Like the act itself, the film is self-involved, near-sighted, and ulitmately worthless. Using a man's life as a visual framework to play some great music over doesn't sound like such a terrible idea, but there's so little life in this film that the music itself often feels trite and innappropriate, and THAT, I'm afraid, is a crime I cannot forgive.

An absolute miss. Don't give these people your money.

Brian de Palma's righteous retread

I'm one of those hopeful romantics when it comes to Brian de Palma. Like Terry Gilliam, he has underdog cache and a track record of some noteable hits amongst his bloated misses that still fuel my optimism with every new film. I really liked 'Black Dahlia', and so, with cautious enthusiam, I bought my ticket for his New York Film Festival screening of 'Redacted' last Thursday.

'Redacted' is a competently told story about troops on the ground in Iraq, numbed by the daily grind, who incite a number of violent acts and are victim to exponential retribution from the locals. That's the plot, but what the film is actually about is how the news media and communication technology in general has merged with the act of war to the extent that the passive audience is as culpable as the soldiers in the field. Passivity is condemned, but positive action is futile.

While that theme is not so terrible in itself, I was viewing 'Redacted' in the context of having recently subjected myself to Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (1997). Rendered with all the subtlety of a ransom note, 'Games' is an obnoxiously smug rumination on the audience's guilt by association with violence as depicted in film (and presumably, by extension, in other media). The film is weighed down by its own belligerent arrogance, and by a moral self-righteousness that is utterly counter-productive. Haneke here is a filmmaker on the offensive, with the audience as the object of his contempt.

De Palma, on the other hand, is more interested in the characters in his story (not to mention the actors portraying them), and with the new communication technologies that permeate the world so very distant from that of the first telling of this combat rape story, his Vietnam centered 'Casualties of War' (1989). As one of the weaker aspects of the story, de Palma's use of the internet (news media video streaming, insurgent snuff movies, YouTube diatribe from self-righteous teenager) is a brute-force insertion of contextual information that doesn't always add to the core narrative. Without the window dressing, 'Redacted' is not so much an inspired re-interpretation of his Vietnam text, but a digitally re-packaged rehash of old, familiar material. Worse, the horrific events portrayed in the film never resonated more than they shocked. The fact that the troops themselves are at best 'archetypal' and at worst, ethnic stereotypes (and I consider good-old-boys from the mid-west an ethnic minority), brings nothing new to the scenario. The audience is instead encouraged to make cozy assumptions about how soldiers who lack formal education and economic opportunity are the cause of aggravated sexual assault and pre-meditated murder in foreign territories.

Regardless, the audience's patience is rewarded by a brutal closing montage of Iraqi civilian war casualties, themselves redacted (allegedly because of legal panic from the executive producers at 2929 - see the YouTube clip and decide for yourself if this is honest disagreement or viral marketing at its most insidious). Except for the final image - the teenage girl whose rape and murder is the centerpiece of the film. The censored pictures leading up to this aggressively placed and beautifully photographed fresh corpse is nothing short of assault on the audience. On that level it's a very effective film.

But as sensational and trite as de Palma might be considered as a storyteller, he is not the self-righteous goon Haneke is. De Palma sincerely wants you to feel the same outrage he does, and, in this allegedly censored version he himself decries, that very shock and outrage could not possibly be more effectively communicated.