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

Lots of X.

also i LOVE erin brockovich. outside of out of sight, it's my favorite soderbergh movie, mainly for finney + roberts + eckhart being pretty much the most stand-up dude ever + those fucking kid actors who were INCREDIBLE. i'd say i watch that movie once every four to six months. and yes i own it.

going way back to the soderbergh comparison, i see what yr getting at generally, but i don't think a real comparison between the two is apt. i think of soderbergh as approaching films with a technique in mind -- the technique is the point more than the film itself. witness the good german or schizopolis or full frontal or even traffic. to some extent it's a technological (and this can also mean antiquated technology) exercise, and there have been points where he has had a mainstream script to do this (his best films, honestly) and others where it's genuinely art house. i think what yr getting at, anthony, is that this is a very stylized, "arty" film while taking on -- in a macro view -- a pretty standard plot: end of the world, man must survive. but i think that discredits the script to some extent, which i saw as being so effortless and tight. it def has that videogame feel of a to b as eli noted on the sandbox, but it's also a marvel in efficiency -- there's little fat. and part of that is the overall view/approach that cuaron took to this film. i felt like his techniques -- the long shots with the best cgi i have ever seen -- were meant for immersion, not as a demonstration in technique. that we all marvel at it afterwards is not the point.

the critiques of the ending i can understand, but i was so immersed and sold on this world presented to me that i would have accepted the love boat picking key up.

also also morbs you bringing up bogart's rick is SO right on. i was thinking that midway through the movie, and rewatching casablanca again i agree even moreso.

P.S. Anthony you said above that you didn't think the film had any kind of intent to gussy things up or pretend it was above its mechanics, but the use of terms like "conceal" conventions -- as opposed to, I dunno, "handle conventions effectively" -- is continually suggesting the opposite, that you think it's hiding or papering over these things.

I have an actual non-snarky answer to the "killing people as bedrock narrative task" question, but I have to go for a second, during which there will be 80 news posts.

these aren't opposites, though! They're emotional effective while attempting to hide its transparency!

this is otm - i wonder if ppl who didnt like this movie were just getting up too many times to pee or something

x-post I liked the movie, never got up once.

I'd have gone with Bazooka.

Setting up a whimsical bonding moment before AMBUSH is a staple move

This really got started with Bonnie and Clyde, at least in America, didn't it? or just after any lightness & laughs.

If Soderbergh's upcoming Che movie with Benicio del Toro had some sequences like these, I wouldn't object.

(xpost)

xpost

At this point, what storyteller does that not pertain to. Because I'm trying to discern how dude is using it as a point of differentiation.

That dynamic has very little to do with this film. Julian's death isn't a picking-off thing: it's a basic plot activator, because so long as she is alive, she's the person who's planning and commanding the whole activity; her death is like the murder of authority after which all descends into chaos, which strikes me as both a fine narrative activator and well in keeping with the whole system of the film. Jasper and Miriam's exits are calculated to produce a whole different effect than the "Villain Grows Closer" formula, one that's less about danger than about sacrifice in the service of, umm, a child -- that strikes me as normal narrative and thematic building more than the application of "formula." (And actually the hint of "we're in real shit now" upon Miriam's exit was fairly effective for me.) Theo's death in the end doesn't fit any "picking the characters off one by one" film formula I'm aware of -- it'd be more obviously in the "hero expires with satisfaction of having achieved objective" camp -- and in combination with the Russians getting shot, it seems to underscore something very different from the picked-off arrangement.

My real bone here, though, is that something like the "hero expires with satisfaction of having achieved objective" trope is not just automatically a formula and therefore a bad thing. It's a building block of countless stories since the whole beginning of stories. It reads as a "formula" when it doesn't belong, when it's unearned, where it's trying to remind you of the idea of "hero expires etc." rather than establishing that itself. (Cf using that string theme from "Romeo & Juliet" to shorthand "and now they're falling in love.") This doesn't mean that "hero expires" or "they fall in love" can't be legitimate and well-handled parts of a functioning narrative. Some of what you're saying here sounds to me a little like saying "that's so lame how this story conceals the conventional fact that they fall in love" -- to me, when well-handled, that's not "concealing," it's just using a basic narrative building block in a way that escapes the formulaic way it's usually, done. Which is a good thing.

Another way of putting this: when Caine goes down doing the "pull my finger" routine from the opening, that fits a well-known story convention -- character goes out defiantly doing the same stuff that made us like him. But there's a reason people like that convention, and depending on how a film treats it, it can read as either succumbing to lame formula or just effectively pushing the emotional button that gets pushed when we see this sort of thing happen.

xpost -- Shakey, are you keeping the air strikes in account?

And now...your moment of zen.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y113/im52xmax/skowie8F07-047.jpg

x-post Nabisco you make a pretty decent point, though I think you're so determined to protect the basic tenets of narrative (which I am not challenging) that you're not acknowledge the presence of cliche at all (just as I'm undoubtedly overstating it on the relative scale of cinema today).