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

takedown is dumb

xpost oh, sorry eric! i realize you meant you appreciated/disagreed with that AV club article

Yeah, I understand the sentiment, but my take is that, if a flourish throws you entirely out of the film, then you probably weren't that far into it in the first place.

yeah, like this part:

But I fail to see how shooting the whole thing in a single take, rather than in an equally expert conventional shot-sequence, makes it any more tense, riveting, or even claustrophobic. The main difference, as far as I can determine, is that we gradually become conscious of how many things could have gone wrong, and how hard the crew must be busting its ass to pull this off.

i think this viewpoint represents <1% of all moviegoers. i would hate to listen to music with overdubs with this guy. "wait, you mean to tell me the guitar player is doing all that at ONCE? that's impossible!"

also, shooting it all in one take TOTALLY makes it more tense and riveting. his failure to see how that's possible is just a failure, period.

Yeah, but I still get how one could feel that way. Sequences like this are about heightening the investment. If you haven't put emotional/intellectual coin in, then you ain't going on this ride. See: everything Brian De Palma ever directed.

tbh the other really long take towards the end of the movie i didn't realize was a single shot until Joel pointed it out to me

and I love long takes, and the Onion guy is just spouting for no obvious reason i can see

even if I believe to my core that the essential power of cinema lies in how shot A cuts with shot B.

yeah intro to film studies was a good class, wasn't it. now fuck off.

we gradually become conscious of how many things could have gone wrong, and how hard the crew must be busting its ass to pull this off.

i don't think most moviegoers even notice a lot of these epic one-take shots because while technically impressive many of them don't draw attention to themselves, they just exist to show some kind of flow of information or a connectedness or an elegant entry or keeping you in the intensity of a scene without the respite that even a cut can bring. i mean none of the most famous single take shots (i'm thinking of casino, goodfellas, a couple from COM, the player, touch of evil, some others) imo take you out of the scene, they draw you into it more.

an intro to film studies that stops at Eisenstein!

I don't think COM is all that but the long takes in it are rad.

also with com in particular it seemed like a logical response to the insane cutting that most 2000s actiony movies got obsessed with

There's always the potential with long takes that they're a bit of masturbatory one-upmanship among filmmakers (see: Gaspar Noe), but they're also the part in movies where cameras dance.

Bela Tarr's career is entirely about long takes, and I love him for it even if he was making films about concrete mixers.

i like that the first long take in COM feels like a runaway roller coaster--almost like those fake roller coaster rides they'd have in malls in the early 90s, where you'd sit inside a machine that moved around while looking at a movie shot from the perspective of front row in a roller coaster.

i think part of my extreme michael mann/ronin/johnnie to fandom comes from their (relative) patience compared to greengrass and similar filmmakers. unfortunately action movies are getting taken over by excessive edit addicts or dudes who only want to make movies for comic con adults.

even if I believe to my core that the essential power of cinema lies in how shot A cuts with shot B.

Which, ahem, the "one-take" scenes in CoM also demonstrate the artistry thereof.

lol that guy's full of it from so many different angles

I much prefer his piece on how many damned cats there are in L'Atalante.

i wonder if he thinks haneke's single take scenes are "just showing off" too

showoff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oubsaFBUcTc

ISTR Ebert once making a similar complaint about some movie scene with a boat, and trying to figure out how they had captured the scene without getting the camera boat's wake in the shot, and it took him out of the movie. Maybe I'm thinking of somebody else.

Anyway in re the AV Club thing, I liked reading it because that's an almost universally-acclaimed scene in an almost universally-acclaimed movie, and this dude's all WHERE'S YOUR CLIVE OWEN NOW, MOSES?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ditPebZ8g

unseemly showmanship from Tony Jaa

haha

ISTR Ebert once making a similar complaint about some movie scene with a boat, and trying to figure out how they had captured the scene without getting the camera boat's wake in the shot, and it took him out of the movie. Maybe I'm thinking of somebody else.

It was this one.

Watching a movie is by definition an act of suspending disbelief

no it isnt!

lol that guy's full of it from so many different angles

― i wanna be a gabbneb baby (Hungry4Ass), Friday, July 19, 2013 3:12 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

nice

http://vjmorton.wordpress.com/2006/12/26/a-gelded-orphan/

I'm always suspicious of critiques that rely on direct comparisons with source material, especially when they're of a different medium.

SO. FUCKING. BLEAK.

Amazing how key footwear becomes in this movie

Top five for me.

Top 5 of all time, really?

RIP PD James too,

Definitely in my top five dystopian films but I don't know about beyond that...

top 5 dystopian films:

blade runner
akira
children of men
brazil
strange days

Yeah such a great film. Last time I can recall being knocked out in the theater by a big studio flick. "Gravity" such a wet rag in comparison.

Akira freaked me out too much to watch all the way through, Blade Runner I haven't seen recently enough to be objective about, Brazil I still need to say, Strange Days good call

still need to SEE

Last time I can recall being knocked out in the theater by a big studio flick. "Gravity" such a wet rag in comparison.

OTM on both fronts

also blade runner is kind of boring tbh

i saw BR for the first time at a midnight showing though after drinking a lot at a party, so that could be why i thought it was boring

not otm imo - blade runner is tense + compact xp

but yes children of men is amazing. cuaron did a wonderful job. so bleak, and so many good characters. i want to smoke weed at jasper's house. that whole set at his place was designed SO well and the character written and acted wonderfully

so many great little moments in this film too. clive owen with 2 pints (or was it 3?) at the pub was great

it was three pints definitely

that's one dystopia where you kinda have to be drunk all the time to get through the days

kinda like the one we live in :(

yeah god this is so good

charlie hunnam is good at playing hateable characters (cf here and sons of anarchy)

We're talking movies but this is a freaky as fuck book about another kind of dystopia (spurred by a plague):

http://www.npr.org/2014/03/06/285740456/-black-moon-imagines-a-sleepless-american-nightmare

I want to see this again. For a movie I only saw once, a lot of it has stuck in my head.

There's a cool philosophy book that came out recently that was inspired by Children of Men, called Death and the Afterlife, by Samuel Scheffler, which has as its principal thought experiment: How would your basic attitudes on life be different if you knew for a fact that mankind as a whole would not long outlive your own death? He uses Children of Men as a case study of how this might lead to a kind of generalized society-wide doldrums and inability to find significance in life, so that a main function of society becomes easing people's pain. I'm not so sure that we wouldn't just get used to the idea after a few months.

Yeah. I really love this movie.

'She's not gon' ta puke is she? Puking's bad. Very very bad'.

Yeah this is in my very top films. Can't believe it made such a small impression the first time I saw it. The second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth times though...