In 1981 I was 18 years old and a big fan of Paul Newman. Fandom in those days wasn’t as concentrated as it is now. Apart from my best friend, with whom I went to see his movies, I didn’t know anyone else who was a fan and all I knew about the man was what I read in the printed press. I kept a scrap book with cuttings from newspapers and magazines and saved up to buy posters and picture books from a movie memorabilia shops in The Hague and London.

When I spotted a birthday card with the text ‘You have something in common with Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Marlon Brando’ on the front and ‘You’re all over 40 years old’ on the inside, I bought it and sent it to Newman. I had learned the name of his house, in Westport, Connecticut, and that’s where I sent my card. I didn’t expect anything of it.

A few weeks later I received a large envelope. In it was a signed still from his latest movie – Absence of Malice – and a letter, written by Newman’s secretary on ‘Paul Newman’ embossed stationery. I didn’t know at the time a lot of actors would send out autographed pictures to fans when written to. So for me, a – somewhat immature – girl living in a small village in the Dutch countryside, it was a wonderful surprise.

Learning of Paul Newman’s death today through Twitter made me dig out my old scrapbook to find the picture and letter. I’m not sure the autograph is Newman’s own, his secretary may have signed the photo. It doesn’t matter, really, and I’m way past the autograph-phase, but I’m glad I still have it, a reminder of the person I was back then.

Never having been a Joy Division fan and only really appreciating their music in hindsight – for a few shameful months in the early 80’s I claimed to prefer Paul Young’s cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart over the original – , my main reason to see the film Control was its director. It’s safe to say I’m not going to be entirely objective in my opinion of the film. Corbijn’s the only Dutch hero I have and you’re not going to find me slagging off his work. Thankfully, I don’t have to. Control may well be his best snapshot.

I knew the basics of Joy Division and Curtis’s story: the epilepsy, the way he moved on stage, the suicide. I put him firmly in the ‘tortured soul’ (and thus sympathetic) department of the ‘dead icons’ warehouse in my mind.

Halfway through the film, my opinion of Curtis changed. I’ve never had much sympathy for kids stupid enough to marry in their teens or manchildren who cheat on their wives.

‘Twat,’ I thought as Curtis rings the wife to tell her he’s finished it with his Belgian paramour, then stumbles straight back into the other woman’s arms. ‘Idiots,’ I thought, as his manager and fellow band members put him back on stage straight after his first attempted suicide. ‘Fuck off and die,’ I thought as the terribly twee ‘Annik’ kept coming back for more supposedly deep and meaningful conversation, the sneaking around condoned and abetted by the likes of Tony Wilson. God rest his soul, but… ‘Wanker!’

Meanwhile I’m practically salivating over the stark cinematography of the film. Given Corbijn’s visionary photography, this was always going to be a good looking movie. Still, I think he surpassed himself by toning down the romanticism so prevalent in his photographs; omitting the more baroque influences on his style: the religious and erotic imagery you’ll be familiar with through his work with Depeche Mode in particular. In Control, Corbijn finds a painful, sparse beauty in grey, the predominant colour of Thatcherite Britain, capturing the essence of the era as only a knowledgeable outsider can. Every single shot in this film is a work of art, substance winning out over style throughout.

Corbijn – a photographer who really wanted to be a drummer – makes the ‘concert’ parts of the film look real. Hyper real. This isn’t what it’s like being at a concert, this is what it feels like to be at and play a concert. The sound during the concert scenes has a real punch too. Having the
actors play their instruments for real was a really smart move by the ‘first time’ director. His tracking shots of a rapturous audience are spot on: the anonymous strangers lost in their own worlds, the childlike gazes of your bestest fans, the one familiar face that’s there for you, time not running quite the way it should… Again, Corbijn is the knowledgeable outsider, drawing from his experience with musicians and their craft.

Anton Corbijn and Pimm Jal de la Parra, 1989

Actor Sam Riley looks the part and does a great job most of the time, especially on stage and in the scenes he plays on his own. He’s less convincing acting off other actors, the formidable Samantha Morton (who plays Debbie Curtis) in particular, but given his character, the clumsiness works in his favour. The supporting cast is excellent, particularly the light relief provided by Toby Kebbell as the band’s manager Rob Gretton and the two young actors playing Hooky and Barney.

Various reviews have made mention of the other movie set in the era, 24 hour party people, some claiming the earlier film superior, preferring its Winterbottom’s exuberance over Corbijn’s stark view. I think Winterbottom’s film is myth-making, somewhat glorifying, while Corbijn’s vision demystifies and humanises Joy Division’s story.

The final stages of the film are harrowing despite knowing the outcome in advance. For those of us who have lost loved ones in similar circumstances, these kind of images really are too close for comfort. Thankfully, Corbijn pulls back from his subject, granting Curtis privacy in his final moments. The last frame of the movie informs you he was 23 years old when he died.

Twenty-three. That’s when it hits home. Young enough to only see black and white, not old enough to know better. Young enough to be forgiven for his twattiness and philandering. What a waste.

The day after, I stick on Control’s soundtrack and burst into tears.

I’ve never seen (or read) A Clockwork Orange.

Reading the Wikipedia entry doesn’t count, I’m sure.

Interview with Anton and fragments from the film. Trailer at YouTube.

The UK trailer makes Scott Walker – 30th Centry Man sound like a thriller. Already it’s looking better than the Leonard Cohen tribute film.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen
"Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
"Bambi" (1942) Disney
"The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn
"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles (Have this on DVD, but not seen it yet.)
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989) Spike Lee
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder
"Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter
"A Hard Day’s Night" (1964) Richard Lester
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It’s a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It’s a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler’s List" (1993) Steven Spielberg
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa
"Singin’ in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming

That’s 51 out of 102, if I counted right. There’s a couple in there that I’ve only seen part of, and some of them so long ago that I wouldn’t remember the first thing about them.

My favourites from this list
The Third Man, Taxi Driver, Singing in the Rain, Scarface, On the Waterfront, the Holy Grail, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather II, The Crying Game, Blue Velvet, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now.

Films I’d never heard of before
The 400 Blows, The Big Red One, Aguirre the Wrath of God, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Duck Soup, The General, Intolerance, It’s a Gift, The Lady Eve,
Out of the past, Persona, The Rules of the Game, Tokyo Story.

• I walk the line: ‘And take the pills.’ Joaquin Phoenix is highly watchable channelling Johnny Cash, but the film felt a little too much like a tv/mini series to me.
• North Country: ‘Life is tough when yer a miner girl.’ Very ‘Silkwood’, in fact Charlize Theron might just be the new Meryl Streep.
• The Matador: ‘Bond. Not Bond.’ Eye-opening performance by Pierce Brosnan, great support from Greg Kinnear. I fell asleep 3/4 through the film, must watch the end soon.
• Walllace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were Rabbit: Gave up after five minutes. Not in the mood for clay-silliness.

I’m looking for a good book to read after Banville’s The Sea and McEwan’s Saturday. Any suggestions?

Cast members Nathan Fillion (Mal) and Summer Glau (River) will be attending too, but I’m more excited about seeing the film again. I’ve wanted to ever since I saw it at the private screening two weeks ago.

I have absolutely NOTHING to wear to a premiere. And I’m not joking, I’m all casual all the time. I also have no idea what to ask the cast if there’s a Q&A. I think I’ll stick to wielding my camera.

If things work out with the mail service, I’ll probably be donning a Whedonesque.com ’staff’ t-shirt. Front: ‘Who is flying this thing?’ Back: ‘Oh right, that would be me.’ Design similar to the regular Whedonesque.com t-shirts we’ve just made available.

Serenity is the Joss Whedon film based on the shortlived Firefly TV series. Last Saturday, I joined the fans at browncoats.nl, for a very special screening at the UIP office here in Amsterdam. It was the perfect way to see it. The film hadn’t been subtitled yet, there was no intermission and the audience didn’t talk or cough or kick my chair or munch popcorn or neck. So that was fab. There weren’t any cast members, like at many of the USA screenings, but that’s ok, I wouldn’t know what to say anyway.

I’ll post my non-spoilery thoughts here and then spoilers after the break and I’ll probably invisitext them too, so you’ll have to highlight them with the cursor.

First of all, for those reading this that do not know, I was a big Buffy & Angel fan and I run Whedonesque.com, a website dedicated to all things Joss Whedon, the writer / creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel. Having said that, the people that post on my site are the real fans. I can name some episode titles, but not all and I have no idea which writer wrote which episode. Basically, I was heavily invested in the whole watcher/slayer thing and Scooby friends/family vibe. That spoke to me.

Unfortunately the Buffy series didn’t explore that enough and became more about ‘who is doing the Slayer today’ and ‘female empowerment’ (barf), so I really didn’t care much for the final two seasons. Secondly, I liked Firefly, but didn’t love it like I loved BtVS and Angel. So yeah, I’m a fan, I run the website, but it isn’t life or death to me, you know what I mean? (Those with no experience in any fandom at all will have NO idea what I’m on about.)

When Firefly first aired on TV, I had a hard time connecting with the characters. There were so many, I didn’t have an immediate favourite and I didn’t fancy any of them either. Since then, I’ve watched the series a few times and I’ve grown quite fond of it. But still not in a ‘oh god, I adore these people and they’re telling my story’ kind of way.

Shortly after seeing the film on Saturday, I posted to Whedonesque about it and the minute I posted, the site and most of my other sites went offline. Which completely sucked for all the obvious reasons, but also because it meant I couldn’t talk about the film when I was still completely pumped up about it. So here is what I wrote:

Well, let’s put it this way. I went in with a lot of real life stuff on my mind and a pretty low mood.

I forgot all about it when the film started and I didn’t think of it for one second during, and for about 30 minutes after it ended I was still blissfully forgetful of said real life stuff. I was in a different world for the entire film.

That Joss. He brings the funny. And the scary. And the sad. And the poignant. And the relevant. All in one ‘big damn movie’!

So if you liked scifi, Star Wars, etc… you’ll be surprised, because this film has real acting, real dialogue, real emotions. If you don’t like scifi, you can still go see Serenity, because this film has real acting, real dialogue, real… you catch my drift. Go see it on opening week. Take your friends. Because when enough people show up for opening week… we’ll get sequels. God knows, we may even get a ‘cancelled’ TV series back on the (not so) idiot box.

Continue if you don’t mind spoilers… (highlight to make the text visible)

I want to see it again. There was so much stuff in there that looked
lush and detailed and went by too quickly, I want to get the DVD right.
this. moment. and freeze frame through all the scenes.

I was spoiled for what for those invested in the Firefly crew is
probably the major ‘event’ in the film: Wash’s death. But I didn’t know
anything else
and had no idea of the film’s plot. I had heard there were problems
with the schedules of two actors (Ron Glass, Morena Boccarin) in the
original cast, so their role in the film was going to be a minor one. I
didn’t know just how minor and I certainly didn’t know there was a
second death. Or that it was going to be Ron Glass (who plays ‘Book’,
the Preacher), who happened to have become my favourite character on
the show. Older guy with mysterious past… hey, I ADORED Giles.

So when Book buys it, I’m stunned (OMG, OMG, they killed BOOK!) and
annoyed. Because here I am thinking I’m ’safe’ since I knew Wash was
going to die and, yeah, sad, but you know, not invested, so no biggie.
But Book…

There’s a scene in the film where he tells Mal (The Captain) ‘I wasn’t
always a preacher, you know.’ and Mal says: ‘One day you’re going to
have to tell me about that.’ And Book says: ‘No, I don’t.’ Yeah,
foreshadowing, I suppose.

I was one of those people who couldn’t give a rat’sarse about whether
Mal gets Inara (The Companion = prostitute), or whether Kayleigh (Ship
mechanic, and my least favourite character) shags Simon (The Doctor) or
what the hell is up with River (The Crazy Fugitive and psychic,
empowered (barf) girl-woman, i.e. Joss’s unhealthy fixation). I wanted
to know Book’s story. I still do. Now we only get to learn it posthumously,
if ever.

So that bothered me a bit, as did the itty bitty part Morena Boccarin
got to play. I doubt the mainstream audience is going to ‘get’ what she
is about and they’ll just see her as Mal’s love interest. But she too
has a secret and I wanna know. I hope that’ll be part of the sequel. Or
‘a’ sequel. We don’t know if there is going to be one yet. I really
missed her input and Book’s, throughout the film.
 
The film is about River and what’s in her head. I have to say,
the character wasn’t half as bloody annoying as she was in the series.
Before I found out Wash was going to die, I had so hoped the ‘big’
spoiler would be about
River being slaughtered by Reavers, the movie’s ‘monsters’, humans who
have become flesh eating murderers. (Why? Well, that’s part of the
film’s story! I’m not going to spoil everything.) Wishful thinking.

For one second there, it looked like her brother Simon was going to
perish at a point in the movie (just after Wash gets killed in a
typically Whedonesque ‘random’ way) when you (the audience) are busy
gripping your seat in anguish and fear because you start to think ‘oh
god, oh god, they’re ALL going to die…’ That’s Joss’s great strength.
He makes you care. When the cast is in dire straits (think the Mines of
Moria, think Butch and Sundance in Bolivia) you are right there with
them.

What else can I say about the film? It looks beautiful. The opening
scene is great even if I thought ‘um, am I at the wrong screening, is
this the new Star Trek movie?’ He introduces the history of the
Serenity ‘universe’ in a flashback scene where a young River is
attending a history lesson at her primary school.

Serenity is less listerally ‘western’ than the TV series, but more or
less faithful to the canon. The only thing that grates is Simon’s
character, totally out of whack with who he’d become in the series.
Like he’d regressed to his former prissy self.

There’s a line in the film about heroes. ‘A hero is someone who gets
people killed.’ Mal, who, having lost his faith in the war preceding
the Firefly/Serenity story, finds something to believe in, namely
letting the world(s) know what’s inside River’s head, and decides to
risk his life and that of his crew to do it.

Mal gets the job done and people die because of it. He’s a hero, and he’s got to live with that. And with crossdressing…

… no, I’m not going to spoil everything!