'Children of Men', the new Alfonso Cuaron sci-fi flick

That said, there wasn't a single empty seat in the house when I saw it on Friday night.

this superbly crafted action thriller is being treated like a communicable disease.

Ever sensitive to buzz, critics have gotten the message and are steering clear. When the New York Film Critics Circle met last week, Children of Men got only a handful of votes, mainly for Emmanuel Lubezki's sensational cinematography. Earlier this month, The New York Times imagined Academy members in surgical scrubs, with a "news analysis" noting the unusual goriness of the year's Oscar contenders: The Departed, Flags of Our Fathers, Blood Diamond, Apocalypto, and The Last King of Scotland. A more resonant and gripping movie than any of these, Children of Men wasn't even mentioned.

I did think that she'd never looked better than in the scene in the newspaper hut. Moore should walk around with a big halogen light next to her all the time.

Dreamgirls is not part of the particular equation being addressed there (melisma is the musical equivalent of gore).

saw this on Friday, if it counts as a 2006 movie it was my favorite movie of 2006

At various times in the first third of the movie, mention is made of a upsurgence of people joining radical end-of-the-world Christian organizations in response to mankind's infertility; I think it is safe to extrapolate that there would be a coincedent upsurgence of people joining other religions, Christian or otherwise. The two soldiers who drop to their knees and cross themselves strike me as a confirmation of this assumption.

One of the things I loved was how unobtrosive the long uncut scenes were. They weren't showy so they managed to bring a sense of immediacy and naturalness to the film. I was increasingly drawn into this film. It was so physical and the narrative was a simple alegory, but the details were beautiful.

2 things:

1. anyone care to speculate on cuaron's preoccupation w/ feet?
2. "marichka" (pronounced, best i can remember, as "marika") = america? or is that a stretch?

I wonder how Bunuel would have answered this.

Pay attention to the animals from start to finish. Cows, dogs, cats, chickens, sheep, etc. The movie is so full of domestic animals it might as well be Ukranian.

They humanize the film, keeping your attention focused on the small, the fragile, the protectable and unprotected. Like the baby, they draw the line between ... not good and evil, really, but between life and anti-life.

I guess a pet explosion is inevitable in an infertile world (why the FDA just approved a weight-loss drug for dogs in our world, I'm not sure).

The three-years-ongoing war of Seattle is also mentioned at some point. The idea isn't that America is "gone", but rather that it's no longer a functioning semi-first-world nation.

i have drawn the line between reading your posts and ignoring them.

xp

Is there more than the shot of Clive Owen trying on the flip-flops?

I think yr. not alone in that. Not sure why you felt compelled to point the fact out to me. Thanks anyway.

Yes and it's killing me trying to remember who it was.

Also, I completely forget, but was the issue of the baby in the picture of Theo & whatever JM's character's name was ever adressed again? Was that picture more than 18 years old/was that baby born AFTER "baby Diego"?

yes, by michael caine and at the end when Kee names the baby dylan!

TONS. there's the one of the bottom of owen's feet as he's reclining on strawberry cough, some shots of him walking through the puddles in london, him going out into the mud in his socks at the revolutionaries' hideaway, a handful where he's soaking his feet after various ordeals, the one where he cuts his foot on something sharp after bricking syd between the door, plus polish dude gives him shoes near the end. there's some sort of footwear/preparedness parallel happening here.

also, re: the animals, i just kind of assumed it was what morbs said: their presence the natural byproduct of barren humans' need to parent. i suppose if you wanted to get super-allegorical you could make some sort of noah parallel too, what with the rowboat and that, but that'd be a little much. i did sort of assume that the animals were drawn to theo caused they sensed his paternal past though.

totally need to see this again!

Occurs to me that in making the pregnant woman & baby (Dylan, eventually) unique on earth and thus the hope for all of humanity, the film forces us to look at the world through a parent's eyes. It's basically a movie about having kids in a horribly inhospitable world.

Even as childless viewers, we see man's inhumanity to man as sickeningly absurd, insane folly with astronomical stakes. This where most war and action movies, even the most high-minded ones, tend to trivialize death and suffering by making them seem like a necessary product of something else.

Again, I think this is one of the reasons the film includes so much animal footage. It's easy to feel parental/sentimental about cute animals. By inducing this kind of parental anxiety in the viewer, the film adds weight to the threats and condemnations of its final act.

Walking baby Bazooka out of the the tenement still makes me tear up. There are very few films with the sense of decency and humanity on display here.

Thought the cars were absolutely spot-on. Twenty years from now there'll be the same Renault Megane, Suzuki Swift and a fucking Toyota Corolla, but with rubber crap and sensors and the front and useless little warnings telling you an "impact" is imminent that flash up on the windscreen.

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Ss/0206634/D001_00234.jpg

arguments upthread about the religious symbolism seem bunk for the most part, though the more i chew on it the more they might be true, at least a *little* bit (this isn't frickin 'stephen king's the stand' by any means which i watched on sci-fi channel last night thinking it was a bio-disaster film until i realized it was basically a 'left behind' movie) when i read on imdb where the title comes from:

"Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: Seeing that is past as a watch in the night."

speaking of dystopic-apocalypto films, has anyone read this book? i really want to check it out -- hopefully a library near me has it -- a bit out of my range just now:
http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Apocalyptic-Cinema-Charles-Mitchell/dp/0313315272

can't see these as clearly but one of the things i really look forward to in re-watchin it is absorbing the details better:

http://i.imdb.com/Photos/Ss/0206634/00189.jpg_rgb.jpg

It's certainly worth the Amazon used book price.

That has made me less excited to see a movie that I was looking forward too.

And damm it now I want to go and listen to Itchy Woooooooo all afternoon.