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.