Toronto. Control and Joy Division.

"Directed by Grant Gee (Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy), Joy Division may not be as immediately striking as [Anton] Corbijn's [Control] - with its stark-yet-warm black-and-white photography and Sam Riley's performance as [Ian] Curtis - but it's just as compelling," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi, who also interviews Gee.

"Just about everyone still living who had anything to do with the band chimes in on the doc, which benefits from director Grant Gee's ability to contextualize Joy Division's place in landscapes physical, sonic, and artistic," writes the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy. "[S]eeing the doc so soon after seeing Control made me truly appreciate actor Sam Riley's portrayal of Curtis. The resemblance is pretty spooky."

"As sad as the Ian Curtis story is, Corbijn and his actors let so much air and light into the movie that it's never oppressive," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek of "the most beautiful-looking picture I've seen all year... What's most touching about "Control" is that it reminds us that these four guys making some very heavy music were really just kids. 'The movie doesn't try to make them into big mythological people,' Corbijn says. 'It's very down-to-earth, really. It's very human. It's basically the story of a young boy finding his way, and getting lost.'" Then: "Gee's movie dovetails perfectly with Corbijn's. He has a knack for nonfiction storytelling: He never resorts to frenetic editing to capture our attention, nor does he bore us to death with expository voiceovers."

"Control smashes the music biopic mold by portraying the star at its center not as a mythological creature, but as a real-life, fucked-up kid in over his head," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Particularly in the balance it finds between transcendence and dread in suburban family life, Control has a lot more in common with the British realism of the films of Mike Leigh than it does with even the recent wave of rock-star-as-antihero pics like Walk the Line."

"Personally I prefer the doc, though it needs more performance footage, and it hits the same wall that Control does when it tries to explain how married working class bloke Ian Curtis wrote songs so bleakly, timelessly poetic," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

J Robert Parks offers a dissenting opinion on Control: "It's just a story I've seen too many times before, and this one doesn't have any larger context to provide a balance."

"Verity definitely isn't the problem with this uncompromisingly bleak Ian Curtis biopic; it's just the task of making a biopic about Curtis at all that turns out to be the film's eventual undoing," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Online viewing tip. Corbijn's on ReelerTV.

Earlier: "Cannes. Control."

Update, 9/14: Mike White: "Too often you'll find me kvetching about biopics. Auto Focus, The Notorious Bettie Page, The Man in the Moon - all of these films left me shaking my fist and crying out, 'Why couldn't I just see a decent documentary instead?'... This time, my cries were heeded and I was able to see Grant Gee's documentary, Joy Division. Wouldn't you know, I find myself a bigger fan of the biopic than the documentary."

Update, 9/15: Stephen Dalton talks with Corbijn for the London Times: "The director intended Control to be 'more in the vein of Andrei Tarkovsky than Sid and Nancy.' But even this highbrow stylistic flourish is grounded in the gritty northern realism that helped to shape Joy Division’s urban, minimalist aesthetic."

Update, 9/16: Paul Morley has a long piece in the Observer on the making of Control. Also, Carl Wilkinson lists ten "classic" rock biopics.

Updates, 9/19: Karina Longworth proposes that it may be "useful to simply think of hauntology as a tool with which to posit Ian Curtis as spectral presence in Control, and Joy Division as the ghost haunting Manchester in Joy Division."

Blogging for the Guardian, Sean Dodson sorts through the soundtrack.

Updates, 9/25: "Initially I was dead against visiting the set of Control, the film about my father's life directed by photographer Anton Corbijn," writes Natalie Curtis in the Guardian. But she did go, met Sam Riley, who plays her father, and hung with Samantha Morton, who plays her mother, and stayed around long enough to be an extra in a few scenes, too. Related: Brian Brooks profiles Riley for indieWIRE and Craig Mclean interviews Morton for the Independent.

More Morton: Chrissy Iley in the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2007 5:51 AM