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

Barely even the background, iirc!

Yep, the arrival at Bexhill is a harrowing scene, but not overdone I don't think.

I was noticing this time how well Theo's (functioning) alcohol problem is portrayed. It's never mentioned out loud, but is always right there, from the opening moments stopping to top up his coffee with whisky on the street through his continual furtive sips to finally sterilising his hands with same said whisky before the delivery of the baby. A couple of other moments... when he meets Luke in the pub to pass on the transit papers he ends up with three full pints in front of him and immediately before at the Ark of the Arts with his cousin Nigel there's a whole collection of bottles on the table in front of Theo and he makes sure to take his wine with him when they move to chat at the window. Small things, but I thought they all subtly added up to add authenticity to that part of his character.

There's an element of "why bother?" that courses through his character. That's a trait you see in lots of movies, in lots of anti-heroes, but in this one obviously the scenario is such that in a sense such an attitude is at least somewhat justified. He just wants to drink, go about his business and wait to die like everyone else. He's kind of a microcosm of society's collective rock bottom. But unlike a lot of those aforementioned anti-hero characters, we learn he was not always this cynical and broken, we learn how he became this way, which supports his shift to full hero once he gets a glimmer of hope.

Yeah, absolutely. This amazing scene comes immediately to mind in that regard. I love how this is shot with Clive Owen silently breaking down in the foreground as the blurred out conversations happens in the other half of the frame...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS8Ho_gZ6RQ

I fancy Clive Owen.

Not somewhat justified, absolutely justified. And yeah as a mainly straight dude Owen is hawt.

i rewatched this last night with friends and we kept talking about owen being hot

also i hadn't seen it in about a decade and what a film. although i did notice how many times owen walked into a room and a character started monologuing at him, like a video game

I only said 'somewhat' justified because this is a world where millions and millions of people have experienced similar tragedies. But yeah, that scene is killer.

I know we've talked about it, but it's hard to believe this movie more or less got ignored. Or for all I know mostly has stayed generally overlooked. It's kind of like the ... Elliott Smith of movies? Sad, tragic, often perfect, but dealt a bad hand by fate. Had to be reminded that "The Departed" won best picture that year (fwiw), but I imagine if the same slate of 2006 films were in play this year, this would have had a better chance of getting nominated, let alone winning. This or "Pan's Labyrinth," perhaps. Though of course both Cuaron and Del Toro got theirs soon enough.

the fact that just about everyone who's seen this film watches it multiple times makes that even weirder.

i used it in a course and quite a few students (so people who were kids when it came out) had seen it before, while also feeling like it overlooked

*was

I saw this in the theatre with a friend at his suggestion shortly after it opened. Went in cold, knowing absolutely nothing about it (which is generally my favourite way to see something), and judging by the title, expected some kind of period drama along the lines of "Bridges of Madison County." To instead get this was one of the best movie experiences I've had. I still have the ticket stub.

very similar experience here.

judging by the title, expected some kind of period drama along the lines of "Bridges of Madison County."

well, they're both horror films

And both based on fairly crap books
(yet the film version of Children of Men is indeed brilliant)

how do you all feel about - the ping pong ball bit?

think it’s the best

yeah its one of the best scenes

The levity certainly sets you up hard for the sucker punch.

It certainly does put pressure on the wound.

Apparently it took 8 days to film that sequence.

i believe it

There’s a doc about it on the blu ray. Prob also on YouTube. They had to build a crazy car rig.

8 days seems low!

I need to rewatch this soon.

I'm sure the video goes into that elaborate car rig they designed.

They only had that piece of road for 8 days, so iirc they spent a week rehearsing, then had time for three takes.

hesitate to post this because it mentions so many critic/theorist/historian names that i assume it's going to piss off everyone, but i enjoyed ("enjoyed") this piece

https://www.newstatesman.com/children-men-alfonso-cuaron-2006-apocalypse-coronavirus

It’s kind of all over the place. I read the conclusion twice and wasn’t sure what the point was, but if it’s “watch this movie” then OK

It's quite entertaining as a provocative piece painting a broad-brush extreme dystopian pessimistic mood. But the overall point and details jump around wildly.

It's wildly inflated: it's a piece saying 'hey the mood of Children of Men resonates quite a bit with the current devastated state of the UK', and then tries to assume an of authority to move onto considerations of if it's too late to halt the juggernaut of something not quite specified (coronavirus, global pandemics, climate change, global capitalism, fatalism and passivity?).

On the plus side, at least it didn't throw in the global spectacular consumer economy.

i read it last night, it seemed fine and uncontroversial to me, mostly a round-up of things people have already said

This film was very quick off the mark to use dubstep in the soundtrack. As it turns out that was one of the less credible projections for 2027, although it's mostly not mixed all that prominently anyway.

Well... I hope in 2027 when the entire world is firm in the grips of a massive dubstep revival that you come back to this thread and apologize roundly to everyone reading.

Lol yes - That scene read very much to me as the 2027 version of “old git blasting Led Zeppelin”

That's the vibe I got, too!

LOL are you grandad's talking about Jasper's "zen music"? That's Aphex Twin IIRC. The dubstep stuff is playing in the background of a few scenes and presumably supposed to be contemporary; Kode 9 & Spaceape in the pub I think, and Digital Mystikz Anti War Dub which I just checked prices on and if there's a revival in 2027 I'll really be wondering if I should have hung on to those DMZ 12"s a bit longer.

ahh i had never noticed that. well 90s house continues to be fucking everywhere, so....

Good on that!

Also Roots Manuva's Witness (1 Hope) in one scene, which will probably still be getting rinsed in 2027. I guess maybe in the world of the film pop culture stagnated when there stopped being young people?

that’s a really good point

Yes that works out rather well. I mean I think really the music was used as a signifier of 'near future urban dystopia' rather than any serious attempt to predict the pop charts of 2027, so I was being facetious.

Tell you what though, what if.. hear me out.. what if what happened is there was a technological singularity, say around 2012 and the world of the film is a simulation maintained by super advanced AIs (the titular 'children if men'.) and derived from media created in the period immediately before the onset of exponential AI development The main limitation of the simulation being that new humans can't be created.

There aren't really enough many 3-year-olds making dubstep, though - Baby Diego would've grown up with a whole generation above him making music (and the ones above that, as well - more so if they're not making babies!)

Lol it's a very bad, boring piece if you know even some of the terrain.

And in fact covid has actually made capitalism seem incredibly fragile, it's end closer and possible, and the last general election and movements around the world show that people are thinking of alternatives. The New Statesman plays it's own part in demonising and talking down these movements so ofc it will write about clapped out thrash like Children of Men.

"Cuarón was inspired by the 20th-century film theorist André Bazin, for whom fast editing diminishes a scene “from something real into something imaginary”."

Like this...doesn't sound right? Bazin was writing (and died) before the really long takes became a thing later in the 60s and then 70s Euro film? And he was more for backing a kind of realism in filmmaking (from my fuzzy memory).

Lol it's a very bad, boring piece if you know even some of the terrain.

"bad, boring"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/18/toxic-chemicals-health-humanity-erin-brokovich

I heard a shocking factoid recently: an average human body today contains at least 500 chemicals that did not exist before WWII.

At this point it's hard for me to read an article like that and muster the sense of panic she is trying to evoke. The future looks bleak for humanity, but it would be poetic justice that if we wiped ourselves out before we could finish making the world uninhabitable for most other species.