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

Dynamics? If you don't build to something and release or vary your tempo then it all just fades into background music?

To which point, I'd say that something like Children of Men's long shots are effective precisely because so many other films are either whipping you back and forth with cuts or so boring cinematically that you're just watching people talk back and forth in shot and reverse.

I get the annoyance with conspicuous use of long takes, but I save my annoyance for things like True Detective. Those scenes in Children of Men are great, and they wouldn't be the same if they were full of cuts. I'm not going to complain about something that works.

I don't buy that essay. He even says the average viewer most likely wouldn’t even recognize its technical virtuosity

It's like, it ONLY bothers people who notice it and think it's showing off. The rest of us find it effective.

i've been a contrarian about this film since it was released, but i just watched it again because of this thread. i am still mostly unmoved by it (has anyone read the book? id be curious how they compare) but the one thing that's undeniable is those long tracking shots and the incredible tension they generate.

cop land was terrible wtf

xpost

Can't give you any specifics, but my mom read the book and I remember her complaining about numerous changes when the film came out.

In the book, the Julianne Moore character and Clare-Hope Ashitey characters are the same person.

cop land was just one of those: *hey big dummy is in something not completely terrible and he's not terrible in it let's give him a coookie* kinda things.

like The Wrestler. or a Charlize Theron movie.

im fully prepared to accept that the problem is with me, but the reason i ask about the book is because the movie (despite the many great things about it all noted in this thread) seems so intellectually thin to me -- but maybe this boils down to what's best accomplished via film versus what can be done in a novel.

not v useful but i vaguely recall reading abt 50 pages of the book and thinking it was p bad

xp What films would you be comparing it to?

stallone being a big dummy action man is one of the main reasons hes so affecting in copland

it's not a great movie or anything but it's a solid little crime movie

dirty fingernails/against type is catnip to people. i don't know why. look, they're acting! awwwww.....isn't that sweet? it warms people's hearts for some reason. even though the big dummies are, in fact, actors. shouldn't be that amazing.

re: other films to compare it to, maybe A.I.? some thematic overlap, world-building, but just strikes me as a much richer movie. (i wonder if making the pregnant girl in CoM less of a macguffin and more of a fleshed out character would solve most of my issues)

Counterpoint: A.I. was horrible

horribly great

i'm actually writing a screenplay now about a bucktoothed woman with a mullet down south who is obsessed with jean harlow. the woman and the ghost of jean harlow are played by the same actress. Charlize Theron is...Daisy May Harlow. $$$ in the bank!

why didn't i go to film school? any idiot can do it. i ain't got no connections though....

The only part of A.I. I didn't loathe was the bit where Haleybot malfunctioned and briefly turned his face into the gaping maw of hell.

i remember watching this movie and thinking the first 25 minutes or so laid some interesting foundations for this hypothetical world

then i was like

http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/aPG9p2n_700b.jpg

i can't figure out which is worse: A.I. or Bicentennial Man. it's a toss-up.

i just thought children of men was a cool action movie. it was scary! so much tension. but i never thought about it much after i saw it. i would watch it again though. cooler than most dystopian whatever movies.

The best thing about AI was the immersive computer game that the studio had built/released as a promotion, that had hundreds of thousands of ppl from all around the world cracking tiny bits of code and tracing tiny clues in multiple languages. And, like, calling the phone number in the code and speaking to actors hired to give certain messages and more clues and stuff. It was glorious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(game)

i've been a contrarian about this film since it was released, but i just watched it again because of this thread. i am still mostly unmoved by it (has anyone read the book? id be curious how they compare) but the one thing that's undeniable is those long tracking shots and the incredible tension they generate.

I also watched this again after reading that article / not being particularly moved when I first saw it, didn't really change my opinion. cool worldbuilding and cinematography, shame they wasted it on a movie w/o much of a plot. kinda felt like some really well-made post-apocalyptic video game, tons of attention to detail but ultimately you're just wandering around a maze protecting the princess from bad guys.

A.I. was splendid, of course. (easy question: who has made multiple great films, Spielberg or Cuaron?)

I assume CoM will stand as the last good Michael Caine performance.

this was a good movie that I don't really feel the need to ever watch again. It is very much structured like a video game, and while the attention to detail and the relentless forward motion made for compelling viewing, I'm having a hard time thinking there's anything meaningful that I would gain from repeating the fairly traumatic experience of watching it.

my wife was 8 months pregnant when we saw this in the theater lol

xp: It should be mentioned that Children of Men was very against type for P. D. James. Brit mainstream authors seem to do rather well when they dip their toes in spec fic. cf. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (a better novel than CoM, a poorer movie).

because the movie (despite the many great things about it all noted in this thread) seems so intellectually thin to me

i feel like maybe the problem was more like it had so many themes + ideas where it clearly tried to be doing something and failed to live up to itself? like a movie that tried to do less would seem more intellectual bc it wasn't trying so hard? i liked it a lot but i remember when i first watched it during the manger scene i was just like wtf is this bullshit. (but in other ways it does seem packed full of ideas, but maybe didn't figure out exactly what it wanted to do w/ them so it never really coheres?)

mainstream authors seem to do rather well when they dip their toes in spec fic

I tend to absolutely revile this shit, hard-pressed for examples I've read that I didn't loathe

I have never thought of this movie as a movie of ideas. Just a document of the end and then a possible beginning.

the road? xp

idk if he's mainstream tho feel like a lot of his work before the road was along similar lines. wanted to say atwood but she's another one who's more like a spec fic author who has entered the mainstream than a mainstream writer trying spec fic?

Brit mainstream authors seem to do rather well when they dip their toes in spec fic.

If by "do rather well" you mean "rack up fawning reviews and award nominations from critics who sneer at actual good SF," then yes, they absolutely do.

yeah I didn't read The Road. Burnt out on McCarthy's schtick years prior.

xp

don't get me started about Margaret Atwood

McCarthy's last book that was worth a shit was Blood Meridian. He's been coasting ever since.

Blood Meridian definitely the platonic ideal of the Cormac McCarthy novel. there was basically no point to his style after that.

lol u two i mean it's not a totally intolerable opinion but gmafb

All the Pretty Horses could have been published by Harlequin.

It should remembered that because the film came out in 2006, ie fairly early in the Perpetual War on Terrah, it had a certain topicality which might now have shifted into ah-fuck-it-reality-is-so-much-worse.

fwiw Atwood's not a "spec fic author who has entered the mainstream" she was never a part of that genre/community (of her own volition, by all appearances)

This thread made me line up Children of Men to see tonight, but the mere mention of A.I. nary put me off completely. DJP otm, A.I. is horrible. Single most disappointing movie I ever saw at a theatre. I was in complete disbelief at how Spielberg managed to fuck Kubricks work up so badly. Finish it somehow completely out of touch with Kubrick's idea of the film. It should have ended 30 mins earlier, frozen at the bottom of flooded NYC imho.

Still going to watch Children of Men now though, for the first time!

> you mean "rack up fawning reviews and award nominations from critics who sneer at actual good SF," then yes

Fine. SF authors are inspired by ideas, more mainstream ones by character, so for someone like me who reads a handful of fiction novels a year, I rather enjoy the latter ones slumming in spec fiction.

I'm still waiting for better authors than Bacigalupi/Vaye Watkins or gods forbid K. S. Robinson etc to stumble into the Cli-Fi space. One can only recommend Marcel Theroux & Emily St. John Mandel so many times.

for the 43rd time, the plot ofr A.I. as it was filmed is EXACTLY WHAT KUBRICK HANDED OFF TO SPIELBERG. (also, S.S. inherited the film BEFORE S.K.'s death.)

XP

Cli-Fi space

Ballard's not good enough for you, eh? Brunner's "Sheep Look Up", Aldiss' "Hothouse"... there's a lot of these books

David Mitchell goes there too in his recent books (although not v successfully imo)

(the Hawai'i sequence in Cloud Atlas being the exception)