Anton Corbijn to direct film about Ian Curtis

Plans for a separate Joy Division film had been announced at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, but the project did not get off the ground as it failed to get the backing of Curtis's family.

eh? i'm confused now. people have been talking about a "touching from a distance" film for ages. there was chat about jude law playing curtis, etc. why would one film be acceptable to the curtis estate and another one not? ach well.

either way, i'm really not looking forward to this. 24HPP was wonderful because it played with the myth and didn't give a flying fuck about authenticity. to be honest, i thought "touching" was a dreadful book: what was her motivation? "everybody thinks my late husband was a genius, so i'll pop the myth"? gah.

.. at the same time...

[grins like a fucker]

they should really just get the guy who was ian curtis in 24HPP too, because he was fucking phenomenal. i mean, ian hart played lennon in at least two different films ...

o ye, and andy serkis as hannet again. the deleted scene on the 24HPP DVD with hannet in his house is devastating. i don't think he says a single word, but he manages to convey so much emotion. christ alone knows why it was cut.

well, no: the myth existed, and had existed for many years before "touching" came out. my point is that i feel it's a mean-spirited and basically pointless book. yes, ian curtis ate cheese and went to the toilet like everyone else, but do we need to know about it? i mean, the fact he voted tory and guzzled prescription pills (IIRC) doesn't negate the power and majesty of JD's music, or the tragedy of his suicide.

and no, he didn't treat deborah particularly well. but, to be brutally honest, she came across as such a dullard that i'm not bloody surprised he was off shagging belgians.

I loved it! I'm not really a Joy Division fan, though.

Granted, she's a dullard, but fortunately she knew well enough to not have the book focus on her (except in her direct dealings with Ian), and do generally solicit comments from others to fill in blanks. She admits that she was shut out of the Joy Division circle, and IMO is realistic about her often marginalized role in Ian's life.

That was called an "opinion". If you'd care to provide a counter-argument rather than being a dick, I'd be happy to engage in a "discussion".

interpol does. cash in caching.

Nah, seriously, fair enough. I just think usually biopics don't give a true picture of a life or an understanding of how the subject achieved their work. What's left feels like gossip.

trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JHQkoGHcx4

I hope the rumours about Brian Blessed playing Peter Hook are true.
-- elwisty, Friday, 7 January 2005 18:55 (2 years ago) Bookmark Link

"Ian's Alive???!!!!???"

(soz. and for being 2 years xpost TIMING!)

i really wish they would've used the guy in 24 Hour Party People

most of the 24HPP cast was very very well chosen

I thought they were using the 22HPP guy!

How come so many people look like Rob Gretton?

Oh, and nice use of Low's version of "Transmission" in that trailer.

this trailer is kinda boring... says nothing about the movie necessarily but... boring trailer.

It's too long! A four minute trailer?

ya... maybe it's a reel for distributors or something.

And Francophones.

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/images/column/6107/controlposter.jpg

the poster looks like a successory!

That or a new men's cologne. (I do think it's kinda strange that Corbijn ended up fully recreating a shot he took of Curtis three decades back.)

huh.

I could be wrong, maybe it is the original shot!

Yeah, that's gotta be a distribution trailer - dem things max out at 2:30 in the states...

boy that trailer was horrible.

i thought the trailer looked real Bela Tarr, which is a plus for me.

also, i think sam reilly looks a lot more like ian than the guy in 24hpp did.

We need Dr. C to give his thoughts on it.

oh and yeah, that trailer was awful - the timing was off throughout...i'd put ten dollars on corbijn trying to cut it himself.

does he have famously bad timing?

i kinda liked that trailer though i generally hate trailers. maybe because it is too slow for a trailer? and i found 24hp very disappointing. annoying dumb dialogues and so not capturing the force and intensity of joy division. which admittedly only played a small role there. i dunno but i have the impression that movie plays in the league of worst music films ever together with the doors film by oliver stone.

the doors movie is terrible, but in a fun and bonkers way! SLAAAAAVES! YOU'RE ALL SLAAAAAVES! *dancing spirit indian* *billy idol cameo*

also, this is the poster that i saw, which beats the successories one above.

i dunno, if this film is mind-numbingly slow, shot in black & white and contains as little dialogue as the trailer implies, i don't see a universe in which i could possibly dislike it.

i thought that 24HPP was one of the better music films.

yes.

Is it true there's a happy end in this movie and Curtis survives?

yes, and they go on to be bigger than U2 (© wilson, 1994).

The Annik book looks quite interesting!

I think this looks pretty good actually. Better than I was anticipating anyway.

The trailer kind of brought it home to me exactly how undeserving of a biopic Joy Division really are. Not "insignificant," mind you, but "undeserving of a biopic" - a huge difference. There's just not enough real narrative there, you know? The death comes so early and so randomly that every attempt to build a satisfying arc from the Deborah-Annik story, or the epilepsy, is just bound to overreach.

Unless, of course, Corbijn doesn't build any arcs at all. The only way this will work is if the movie just kinda sits there - for which there's thankfully, a good British tradition, what with Ken Loach or early Mike Leigh.

You touch upon something that the trailer does bring home to me, which the book and 24HPP did as well in different ways -- the ordinary grinding flatness of their surroundings, something which always seems worlds apart in my removed-by-time-and-space mind from their music. Aspiration driven by desperation is surely the theme.

To be honest, Ned, I would be most satisfied with the film if it was all tableaux of Ian & Co. with grimy pubs and council flats in the background!

I dunno Ned, I don't think they overtly aspired.

Doubtless. Yet they reached. My AMG reviews mutter that the driving theme of the band is connection outward, something beyond an implied norm -- how much of that is sheer projection on my part is another matter.

you know, the fact that there isn't that much story, as it were, is why i think the JD narrative worked so well in 24pp, where it wasn't the only thing driving the movie. to be honest i'm kinda skeptical whether corbijn's movie will make me forget winterbottom's take.

the doors movie is terrible, but in a fun and bonkers way!
maybe you are right but and this is a huge BUT a film on a band which made music which reached beyond the ordinary which meant something to many people shouldn't be a slapstick comedy of mauvais goût. not only that morrison and curtis died young in a tragic way. there was something very serious about their way of making music. the oliver stone movie is not on par with that. 24hp neither. both films are ordinary and unenlightening. they don't approach their subject in an adequate way. they seem to be realistic, maybe they are but they don't try to get close to their subject. i am much more impressed by films like no direction home or the miles davis story which are documentaries, not biopics. the ian curtis film seems to be more in that direction. probably also as corbijn was a fan and deborah curtis whose book i liked very much as it gave a different perspective was involved as well. the ian curtis movie doesn't give me the impression that somebody wants to cash in. which was the case with oliver stone. 24hp just missed one of its subjects, i guess. i think one or two things i am looking for in music films is (com)passion.

24pp is "ordinary"?? give me a fucking break

i am not sure if that is the right word, i am no native speaker of the english language. i didn't want to say shallow as that would imply a judgement which seems to be too harsh. it's a film which just passed me by. which didn't give any value-added (sorry for that economic term) to my appreciation of joy division. it was totally superfluous from my pov. good films make you understand things and people better. 24pp didn't at all for me.

but 24HPP isn't about Joy Division, it's about Tony Wilson and Factory Records. i think it more than suitably handled JD's part of the story.

this movie = awful.

even though it got some critical kudos, the fact that it disappeared off the radar (and off screens) almost immediately seems like justice.

the painstaking, fetishistic recreation of the legendary mise-en-scene of curtis's suicide was just one of the more crass of the film's clichés. ridic. fuck this movie.

24 Hour Party People is the only Joy Div film anybody needs to see.

agree x 2

i kind of felt like i was at some post-punk madame tussaud's where there was an attraction that recreated the scene of curtis's murder. like you walk past the TV playing "stroszek" and then everybody gasps when you move into the kitchen or whatever and see his lifeless body hanging from the light fixture. people on their way out say to one another, "gosh, that was so realistic."

every scene felt more or less like this, without the morbidity--but with the totally unflective, fetishistic, dull-as-doorknobs wish to "recreate," in the most boneheaded fashion, the various highlights of joy division's career. "oh, this is where they get signed to factory!"

basically all the ridiculous aspects of the ian curtis cult went not only unquestioned but almost cartoonishly amplified here.

like i said on the other thread, that's Corbijn's whole steez

I don't think it was totally awful, but I do agree with your main points, as I said in the other thread:

Anticipate "Control" - The Ian Curtis biopic...