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May 24, 2007

JOY DIVISION BIOPIC

I first encountered Joy Division as a reaction to all my friends who were into The Cure, a band who has the kind of cult that I feel like I should be a part of, but somehow am not. I met Joy Division with passing interest at first, listening to a borrowed CD and shrugging. I'd never heard anything like it, and at the time that wasn't a good thing. In the mid to late 90s, my music tastes were very meat and potatoes: I was always very interested in whatever Weezer was doing, I lived in a steady rotation of Talking Heads CDs, I became obsessive about Bob Dylan, and I listened to a lot of Soundtracks. Ian Curtis' voice, needless to say, wasn't what I was looking for as the type of a pop-messiah figure to break down the boundaries that stood between me and liking such a sound. Even though I liked the New Order connection, as I had always somehow linked them with the Talking Heads, I found JD to be a weird looking guy moaning incoherently into a microphone. I didn't understand the punk ethos, or the New Wave movement, and it wasn't until 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE that I got Joy Division.

Which is, I suppose, kind of dorky. It's lame to have your musical awakening at 25, when most right-minded people have it at 17. At 17, I really really liked the Gin Blossoms and the Eagles. Kill me.

But it happened, and after my fourth viewing (in as many weeks) of 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE, I had downloaded every song Joy Division ever made. I listened to it constantly. It made me look outside the mainstream, and its a journey I've enjoyed - beginning with Joy Division, I also discovered Television. I became at once repulsed and fascinated with Iggy Pop. I began to formulate my pop music world view.

So, needless to say, I find this Joy Division Biopic CONTROL very troubling. For me, the Ian Curtis document that matters will be 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE - a film that's more interested in placing him in a context and a scene than establishing him as a pop icon. The first rumors about the project had Edward Norton involved. I love vintage Norton, but the last five years have been pretty harsh on the indie posterboy. Since 25TH HOUR, he has been in one high-profile dud after another, often giving boring, uninspired performances. Norton as Curtis sounded like an opportunity for Norton to put the story in his shadow, for an Ed Norton performance as opposed to an Ian Curtis memorial. Since then, the famed Music Video director Anton Corbijn has picked up the project. It's his feature-length directorial debut - which means two things: it's a pet project and it has the potential to be a two hour narrative-free music video, complete with static shots and endless thirty second montages set to JD songs.

This trailer does not look promising. In fact, it looks pretty boring. As a trailer, its poorly edited and overlong, and it makes me think that the movie is full of a type of hyper-realism that dedicates itself too much to recreated every damn second of Ian Curtis' life with encyclopedic detail. There are also at least four or five scenes here that were also in 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. That film was an ironic post-modern joyride riffing on biography, celebrity, the shaky marriage between business and music, and responsibility. This film looks like RAY as conceived by the director of Nirvana's HEART SHAPED BOX video. The argument will be made the Corbijn directed this awesome tribute for Curtis. But my argument against it will be this very conventional (albeit black and white) looking trailer.

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I don't think there are a lot of LOST fans that hang at Andytown, but last night's episode was bafflingly awesome. It had all the staples we've come to expect of great episodes, and it will have me very excited come Fall when the new season arrives. Anyone wants to start a spoiler-filled dialogue, go ahead, but I'll spare the rest of you.

| By Andytown | 06:52 PM

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Posted by: Ben Roberts at May 25, 2007 05:54 PM

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