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

http://www.njscuba.net/artifacts/images/disco_ball_01.jpg

Venetian Snares would have been more intense, but he's simply not British enough, had to be Aphex. Almost all the music in this film, relentlessly national. When the choral music at the end kicked up, I started fighting the film a bit, but at one point the music geek in me realized 'oh hey that's John Tavener most popular living British composer' etc. and it clicked with the rest of the film.

One exception to the nationalism, they use several seconds of Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" during the final siege

The 'Ruby Tuesday' cover was by Italian Franco Battiato, who did some really weird & good albums in the 70's -- this cover is from his later Euro mainstream period, but points for Battiato

need to see this film again

Buncha doofuses. ;D

I ordered a copy for work and it arrived today, but do i catalogue it as Mexican or English? We normally go for country of director's origin / most notable work period (as with literature), but this is SO English, from the novel, the funding, the cast. Annoying.

It's gotta be Mexican, cos that's where the other Cuarón film we have is (Y Tu Mama), but that seems ridiculous. Would I put HP & Prisoner of Azkhaban there too?

ARGH.

Get two copies just in case...

Also, I decided I like imagining that Clive's character had just begun day-drinking/flasking his morning coffee shortly before we meet him. two days into his go-for-broke alcoholism experiment and then all this shit happens!

i think you need to put a call into dj martian

Where Hitchcock goes is a headache though, aye...

* theo breaking down in the woods was appropriate
* killing julianne moore was genuinely surprising. i figured they'd work on reconciliation and THEN she'd die
* the midwife speech was stupid and needlessly expository
* "The world they've set up has nothing to do with Iraq, so there's no one-to-one-correspondence being claimed for anything." UH. did we watch the same movie??
* the jasper death scene was a little wtf, just because, yeah, dude is running interference for you and you're BLOWING IT.
* i don't want to see this again soon, but i will eventually, just to better appreciate the technical aspects. the dialogue will probably seem much worse.
* animals LOVED theo.
* HEY KEE, BREASTFEED YR BABY.

It still caught me up and dragged me in, so that certain things (the betrayal of Julian by the Fishes) still caught me utterly by surprise, emotionally, even if I had seen it before. It was nice to have that utterly OHMIGODWHATWILLHAPPEN tension removed a bit, though (when you know that said person doesn't die here, they die later on) so that I could concentrate on the details. There was just so much going on.

Also, was struck by the film's utter Londonness (I would say Englishness, but it still felt like Future London was almost a character - even when only present in 2012 shirt) - Emsk and I were debating whether or not this film could have been made in an American setting, and I just don't think it would have worked. Jucara (sp?) and I thought it was quite religious in points, but Emsk still didn't.

I really *liked* the ambiguity of the ending even more, second time through (though I still don't see where Theo got shot) - and also I thought that the midwife scene was quite important, I thought it worked - it provided setting and emotional setting without giving any real explanation.

The Jaspar death scene was important for Theo to witness - his disconnection from everything he'd ever cared about, there really is no turning back for him now - but it did annoy me that it lost him time. Really he should have just seen it from a distance while driving out.

Sean Connery is kind of brilliant with his abject refusal to do accents other than his own; "Highlander" wouldn't have been nearly as awesome without him.

(xpost: Yes, there's acting in "Sin City"! Pulpy scene-chewing is still acting, even if you don't care for it; my gripe with Owen was that he wasn't in line with his costars. Brittany Murphy completely, totally and thoroughly showed him up and that should be kind of embarrassing for him.)

haha xpost