I always appreciate when studios take the quiet road in their viral marketing, rather than coming up with some elaborate website/phone line/bomb hidden under a car scheme. YouTube user adin1978 is the former; seemingly a Weinstein Company employee, the person has posted a clip from I’m Not There, and now this neat little ad for Anton Corbijn’s biopic of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control.
The clip cuts between the film’s recreation and real televised performances. In doing so, it demonstrates how faithful the film is to reality, while also underlining license taken on-screen, and managing to do so without undermining the movie’s value. The differences: Joy Division’s debut on Tony Wilson’s show was ‘Shadowplay’ (see it here) not ‘Transmission’, as shown in the film. Most of the real-world performance footage in this clip, then, is taken from a later BBC clip. (See that one here.)
Jeff Wells, who now has our own Jeremy Smith as compatriot in Oscar prognosticators The Gurus of Gold, has already gone on record saying that Sam Riley should be nominated for his performance as Ian Curtis. I agree with his assessment, though it’s unlikely to happen. Riley is not only quite accurate, as this montage demonstrates, but his creation of Curtis is great by any measure. And as much as I love that old live version of ‘Transmission’ (as anyone peeking at my Last.fm profile could see) this clip would be even better with the in-film audio, featuring Riley’s vocal performance.
Control opens next week in a limited run, hopefully to expand over the month of October.