[quote][i]Originally posted by edisonoside[/i]
<br>[quote][i]Originally posted by Blir[/i]
<br>Control.
[/quote]AND?! Don't keep us in suspense..What D'Ya think?
[/quote]
Copy and pasted from here:
http://nwoutpost.com/forum/topic.asp?TO ... hichpage=1
Well...would anybody here possibly think that I wouldn't say this was a great film?? It definitely was, but it also definitely wasn't "epic" or any other over-the-top adjective. It's just perfectly and brilliantly well-balanced. It's definitely not a Joy Division film either. It's an Ian Curtis film, and it neither glorifies nor crucifies him. Kinda just "there you go, this was him." I found it completely satisfying for those reasons, without a single complaint. It treated the material and the audience intelligently I guess. How often can you say that?
It also felt really personal, like I was peeking into a very private thing in the middle of a movie theater. I can't imagine what it was like for those involved to have watched it. The biggest emotional impact I felt was Curtis' palpable fear and loss of control, which of course was likely a key objective of Corbijn's. Before this, reading about his growing fame, epilepsy, infidelity and suicide were kinda spare historical facts. But this movie really conveys how increasingly fucked he must have felt.
There's plenty of Joy Division music in there of course. None sparked me up more than the first track that cut in at around 20 minutes, "No Love Lost". Holy fucking shit did I want to leap out of my chair and play some convulsive air guitar! What a powerful track, and what a killer first selection. The boys in the movie played all the songs really well too, although not all to the same level of success. I don't think Riley perfectly nailed the "Transmission" scene, although it was freaking great to watch regardless. Another weaker cover was the studio scene of "She's Lost Control" - it didn't have the bite of the original vocal, but maybe the almost sullen or conceding sleepwalk through it was the effect Corbijn was going for. They absolutely nailed "Love Will Tear Us Apart" - I really thought it was the original just being played as soundtrack until it panned over to the characters doing the song. But "Dead Souls" more than anything else made me wish like hell that I had seen the band back in the day.
There's also plenty in the movie for just pure movie fans. It's not just that it's shot in black and white. It's a particularly harsh and high-contrast black and white. The blacks are really black, the whites are often blown, and the midtones just seem really gritty and realistic. Not unnaturally so, but it certainly conveys its own characteristic mood. Almost all of the movie also seems to be shot at wide-open apertures, meaning the depth-of-field to almost all the shots are sliver thin. Corbijn makes more use of deliberate selective focus than in any other film I can remember, which makes sense since he's a photographer. A character's eye would often be in dead focus and literally nothing else, not even their nose or ear. A written page would have only one word in focus. Many shots would have the characters walk into the focus point from the background, which dramactically draws you to, um, focus on specific parts of the scene. Sometimes the action and dialogue would move off the focus point while the camera stayed on focus on some other interesting but not necessarily primary part of the scene. I think a film buff will absolutely love the cinematography in this movie. And jeez, who knows how many cool period mementos were in the background - a real childhood photo of Curtis, Buzzcocks/The Fall/Throbbing Gristle concert posters, Roxy/Iggy/Bowie soundtrack snippets, etc.
I'll have to watch it again. Obviously a big thumbs up from me. [:I]