Joy Division

The cool thing about Control, Anton Corbijn's 2007 Ian Curtis biopic, is that it never tries to convince you that Joy Division are a bunch of geniuses. The whole movie is just a great looking black and white tale of some twenty-year old kids playing music in run-down pubs. It's nothing special, it's nothing extraordinary, and it's fucking fantastic. Control saddles itself with the Sisyphean task of making the guys in Joy Division real people and strips them of all the bullshit mythology that twenty-five years of NME-infused hagiography has bestowed on "She's Lost Control" and Closer. Somehow it succeeds. What a great film.

This American Life -- Season One

This Showtime series sucks, but you guys should all go out and download Episode 207 of the This American Life radio show. It's called "Special Ed," it costs ya a buck, and it's the most heart-breaking and charming thing we at the Cinema have ever heard. It's got three stories about people with developmental disabilities, and while the second two are respectively depressing and boring, the first one is so fucking great we've kept it on our iPod for almost as long as we've had a portable mp3 player! Don't wait any longer -- the sooner you get some Ron Simonsen in your life the better!