hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
Equally untempted by this. It all seems like a classically de-intensifying piece of biography, everything naturalised and pop psychologised into conventionality (both in terms of explanation and fitting joy div into a ludicrously straightforward canonic "tragic rock" slot)... Joy Division taken out of relation to politics, post punk, and modernism, and to Peter Saville's art design and Martin Hannet's production techniques are entirely meaningless to me, it fails to capture that inhuman aura of purest grimmest EVIL which I felt from their music, moreso than any black metal or whatever, that unearthly sense of coldness, of the entire political situation of the time expressed in sound... that darkly compelling sense that is impossible to put into words (but which has nothing to do with suicide- check Nirvana for how lame that particular myth really is) or even sadness or melancholy, but rather some portal into the electrical inner-life, all chill neural fire and shattered glass, and in all of it a kind of heroism of youth, within the grip of mortality, an electrifying dialectic of fleshy heat and ice-pick cold. To place all of that on the shoulders of an individual is romantic tosh-- its as embodiment of something broader that Joy Division are important, how a mere confluence of contingencies can give rise to all this would be far more interesting to explore.
That's it in a nutshell (even though you haven't seen it! [Whoever said you need to 'experience' a text in order to judge it?]).
Control is symptomatic of the long-standing poverty of that film genre - the music film (invariably regressing into irrelevant biopic), whether about a musician or even a concert movie, as this recent TimeOut 'fave fifty' confirms: 50 greatest music films ever. And even the No 1 in that list, Todd Haynes' innovative debut film-short from 1987, Superstar: the Karen Carpenter Story, makes much the same mistake - I've long since grown tired of seeing endless docs about Joplin-Hendrix-Morrison-Drake-Vicious etc retrospectively re-defining the historical contingencies of their music purely in terms of their suicide. That list excludes so many excellent films, I wouldn't know where to start ... Where, for instance, is John T Davis' innocently impressionistic Shell Shock Rock from 1978, his verite doc about the Northern Ireland punk scene (and which reminds us that Corbijn's aesthetic strategy, his nostalgic mode, is twenty years out of kilter, in its attempt to graft on the late 1950s urban England of Room at the Top on to the late 1970s), the Bowie and Talking Heads docs from the 70s and 80s (the latter superior to their concert movie)? Ironically, Velvet Goldmine Haynes probably would have been a better choice as director than Corbijn, even though his imminent film on Dylan has fallen into the same trap.
Unsurprisingly, Simon Reynolds makes much the same points in his recent New York Times review: the film's retreat into 'family values' psychologizing. But what else would anyone really expect from U2-enmeshed Corbijn?