Control (The Miriam Collection)
by Anton Corbijn
List Price:
Our Price: $17.49
You Save: $11.46 (40%)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Used: from $8.88 (click here)
Category: DVD
See more DVD details
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
DVD details
Actor: Alexandra Maria Lara, Joe Anderson (VI), Sam Riley (II), Samantha Morton, Toby KebbellDirector: Anton Corbijn
Brand: WELLSPRING/GENIUS
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC, Widescreen
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-06-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: The Weinstein Company
DVD Reviews of Control (The Miriam Collection)
DVD Review: Beautiful and tragic
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie documents the beautiful and tragic life of Ian Curtis the lead singer of the band Joy Division. I already knew the story of Ian Curtis' death on the eve of Joy Division's American tour, so I watched the movie already knowing how the story would go.
What makes this movie so great is the focus on the details from Ian's wife. I felt I gained more insight into how he dealt with his epilepsy and what compelled him to write music. The cinematography was beautiful in black and white. The concert scenes looked very authentic to actual live videos I have seen of the band. I thought the actors did a brilliant job representing the characters from one of my favorite bands.
DVD Review: No Exit
Summary: 4 Stars
Train wrecks are endlessly fascinating, especially when the passengers are young, so talented and so full of potential. "Control" gives us the disaster everyone now sees coming. The script is based on the book "Touching From A Distance" by Deborah Curtis, wife of the late Ian Curtis. Her memories and director Anton Corbijn's eye for texture drive this rather slow, mannered take on the Joy Division story. Sitting room aridity and Euro artiness seem inevitable with this particular concoction. It's a worthwhile exercise but fortunately just one version of a music phenom's howl in the night. The recent Joy Division documentary is an essential companion piece and a must see for all devotees of the band and post-punk. Corbijn's film, on the other hand, gives us a young man who could not reconcile his hasty marriage with a compulsion to scream out his dark phantoms from the stage.
The Dutchman's cinematography is bleak but beautiful, the end of the film, as expected, wrenching. And yet the last leap is more a relief, a kind of release, than an emotional gut punch. Curtis had an interior as grim as his surroundings, an internal landscape drained of fellow feeling by a fascination with the abomination, but the descent needs a counterpoint. Curtis had a laddishness too. When Curtis (Sam Riley) explains "Man City Blue" to his Belgian girlfriend Anik, there is a glimmer of the submerged Manc scally. The real Curtis supported a football team, drank pints, and engaged in elaborate pranks with his bandmates, all barely out of school (they were particularly fond of a turd holding challenge). The trajectory of "Control" doesn't allow for the contrast of British bluster and reserve. The film gives us only the latter, to the extreme, which in a way seems a clich?. The visual acuity of the film is undeniable, however. The marital meltdown is equally powerful for its authenticity, and Riley does a very good spastic chicken dance and pale-eyed gaze to the beyond: both trademarks of a seer too soon felled.
DVD Review: Taking all the colour out of life.
Summary: 2 Stars
"Control" shows many details that will jump out at anyone familiar with Joy Division's history. The young Ian Curtis wears a jacket with the word "HATE" drawn on the back. Bernard Sumner yells, "You all forgot Rudolf Hess." Ian watches "Stroszek" and listens to Iggy Pop, as he must. Yet "Control" is not really about Joy Division. There is not much music; the film makes no mention, none whatsoever, of the band's second and final album. The actors went to the trouble of learning to play some of the songs, but they can't help sounding amateurish -- if you haven't heard the songs before, you are unlikely to understand why there was anything special about them.
Moreover, the other band members come across as louts. This provides the film's few memorable lines of dialogue, but seems unfair. Watching "Control," one might believe that Ian had no interaction with his own band. He is shown attacking Bernard in the scene that leads to his first epileptic fit, but he is never shown talking to the guys about anything. They all act quite cold to each other. They have little love of music; they think The Buzzcocks are "okay," but show no enthusiasm. Ian is shown offering his services as singer to the other guys as if he were a total stranger. One wonders why they accepted.
Look, just because the film has Joy Division in it doesn't mean that everyone involved has to be an icy death machine. Even Tony Wilson, that charismatic bon vivant and con man, is a gloomy Gus in this film. Watch 24 Hour Party People -- it is not pleasant viewing for a Joy Division fan, but it shows the sleazy, yet exciting and adventurous atmosphere surrounding the burgeoning Manchester scene. People knew there was something good in the air, and they were excited about it. That's why they spent their free time doing it. "Control" shows none of that. Producer Martin Hannett is never mentioned by name. Instead, the spotlight shines on manager Rob Gretton, who steals the show simply by swearing a lot.
Okay, fine, the film doesn't have to be about Joy Division. But it's not really about one man's anguish, either. The first half of the film gives the impression that the director's knowledge of dialogue and human interaction derives entirely from French New Wave films. Scene after scene consists primarily of "smoking cigarettes with existential meaning," to the point where it is unintentionally comical.
For example, the film opens with Ian reciting a verse from "Heart And Soul," and shows him purchasing an LP. But that's all it does to show his attraction to poetry and music. Why was he interested in these things? Okay, he didn't like to show his feelings, but every earnest young man, especially one with an introverted character, has numerous pedantic opinions on rock music, and greatly enjoys holding forth on them. The film shows Ian and Deborah attending the Sex Pistols concert, but they show no interest in the music. Ian gives no sign of excitement, except perhaps some slightly more animated head-nodding. In another scene, he flatly recites from Wordsworth, one of the least edgy poets in the English language. What's the big deal, why is he interested in Wordsworth? More importantly, why do his friends listen to him? Do they view him as an authority on intellectual matters?
The courtship between Deborah and Ian is so bizarre that it's funny. Deborah is shown to have a boyfriend; she pouts in front of Ian, who gives her no emotional cues. They both look very bored at the concert, when suddenly, they leap into each other's arms. Starting immediately, the boyfriend disappears and is never heard from again, and Ian proposes to Deborah in the very next scene. This also is peculiar. Ian, both in the film and in real life, seemed to have little taste for family life and fatherhood ("with children my time is so wastefully spent," he cruelly wrote). Yet here, he's the one who initiates every move. He proposes, and he also asks Deborah to have a baby. It is not unrealistic that a man might have an idealized view of marriage, and then become dissatisfied with the reality, but that's precisely the sort of thing you have to carefully explore if you're making a feature film.
But here? You honestly have to wonder why the man is depressed. In the early scenes, he's a dashing mop-top with a manly chin, who wins Deborah's heart without the slightest effort. There is some indication later that he is distraught by the diagnosis of epilepsy, but this quickly takes a backseat to the love triangle with Annik Honore, which Ian himself initiates of his own free will. The only logical conclusion would seem to be that Ian always had a self-absorbed death wish, and willfully ignored his slavishly devoted wife (traces of Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves"). Oh, and he also sang a few songs in the process.
Toward the end, Ian laments, "I give them everything on stage and they want more." He says that no one can understand how his performances affect him. The film gives no indication, prior to this line, that this is the case. Ian's performances just seem to be a mild distraction from his usual moping; a distraction that he engages in just so he can have something to do.
There are two possibilities. Either a) Anton Corbijn is a hack, or b) everything good about Ian Curtis had already been expressed in his music, and thus there is no point in a film about his short life. Either way, there is little reason to watch "Control."
DVD Review: jes the mess
Summary: 5 Stars
tragic and beautiful all in the same go. i laugh and cried and sang along.DVD Review: Great movie, if only for just a glimpse
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a story about Ian Curtis and not Joy Division. It is written by the main person who was closest to him in private moments at this time in his life. There is always a difference between a book and a movie, and then between a movie and reality. I love this movie if only for being able to give me a brief glimpse into this awesome life. Sam Riley is uncanny in this role, I think that has been said over and over. Don't believe the negative hype written by people who never met the guy and make your own judgment. His daughter has his exact eyes and lips and he loved her. Beautiful movie.
Description of Control (The Miriam Collection)
Control tells the remarkable story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the influential band Joy Division and one of the most enigmatic figures in all of rock music. Based on his wife's memoir, Control follows Curtis' humble Manchester origins and his rapid rise to fame, tormented battle with epilepsy, and struggles with love that led to his death at the age of 23.In his elegiac debut, Anton Corbijn combines the music film with the social drama to stunning success. Based on Deborah Curtis's clear-eyed biography, Touching from a Distance, Control recounts the wrenching tale of a working-class lad about to hit the highest highs only to be waylaid by the lowest lows. Born and raised in Macclesfield, a suburban community outside Manchester, Ian Curtis (newcomer Sam Riley in a remarkable performance) dreams of fronting a band. Just out of high school in the mid-1970s, he finds three like minds with whom he forms post-punk quartet Warsaw--better known as Joy Division (Riley and castmates ably recreate their somber sound). All the while, he falls in love, marries, and fathers a child with Deborah (Samantha Morton, turning a thankless role into a triumph). While Curtis should be enjoying parenthood and newfound fame, he's plagued by seizures. A diagnosis of epilepsy leads to powerful medications with unpredictable side effects. Then, while on tour, he falls in love with another woman. His solution to these problems is a matter of public record, but Corbijn concentrates on Curtis's life rather than his death. Just as Control establishes a link between such disparate black and white works as fellow photographer Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost and kitchen-sink classics like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the Dutch-born, UK-based director presents his subject not as some iconic T-shirt image, but as a deeply flawed--if massively talented--human being. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Australia & New Zealand DVDs
DVD Video
- Action & Adventure
- African American Cinema
- Animation
- Anime & Manga
- Art House & International
- Classics
- Comedy
- Cult Movies
- Documentary
- Drama
- Educational
- Fitness & Yoga
- Gay & Lesbian
- Horror
- Kids & Family
- Military & War
- Music Video & Concerts
- Musicals & Performing Arts
- Mystery & Suspense
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Special Interests
- Sports
- Television
- Westerns
Bestsellers in Australia & New Zealand DVDs
Eagle vs. SharkEagle; Release date: 2008-01-08; DVD
Best price: $13.08
Price in other shops:
The CastleRelease date: 1999-11-16; DVD
Best price: $12.76
Control (The Miriam Collection)WELLSPRING/GENIUS; Release date: 2008-06-03; DVD
Best price: $16.24
Price in other shops:
ShineRelease date: 1997-07-16; DVD
Best price: $4.26
Price in other shops:
The Year of Living DangerouslyWarner Brothers; Release date: 2000-06-06; DVD
Best price: $4.49
Price in other shops:
The Wiggles: Sing a Song of Wiggles!Warner Brothers; Release date: 2008-10-07; DVD
Best price: $9.43
Price in other shops:
The Road WarriorWarner Brothers; Release date: 1997-03-26; DVD
Best price: $5.06
Price in other shops:
The PianoLions Gate; Release date: 1998-01-20; DVD
Best price: $7.00
Price in other shops:
Strictly BallroomRelease date: 2002-03-19; DVD
Best price: $4.75
Price in other shops:
Dead AliveLions Gate; Release date: 1998-09-09; DVD
Best price: $5.99
Price in other shops:
Similar DVDs, VHS Video, Audio CDs
In BrugesUNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENTERTAIN.; Release date: 2008-06-24; DVD
Best price: $6.28
Price in other shops:
Joy Division: Piece by Pieceby Paul Morley
Plexus Publishing; Published: 2008-01-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.37
Price in other shops:
Original Soundtrack - ControlRelease date: 2007-10-30; Music CD
Best price: $10.99
Price in other shops:
Live in GlasgowWEA DVD; Release date: 2008-06-24; DVD
Best price: $12.10
Price in other shops:
I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)WELLSPRING/GENIUS; Release date: 2008-05-06; DVD
Best price: $6.84
Price in other shops:
There Will Be BloodPARAMOUNT PICTURES; Release date: 2008-04-08; DVD
Best price: $9.98
Price in other shops:
The Future Is UnwrittenSony; Release date: 2008-07-08; DVD
Best price: $10.99
Price in other shops:
24 Hour Party PeopleRelease date: 2003-01-21; DVD
Best price: $10.98
Price in other shops:
Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Divisionby Deborah Curtis
Faber & Faber; Published: 2007-10-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.16
Price in other shops:
Joy Division (The Miriam Collection)WELLSPRING/GENIUS; Release date: 2008-06-17; DVD
Best price: $14.88
Price in other shops: