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

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I liked the fact that one of the big suspense set-pieces, the getaway from the Fish house, basically involved two non-functional cars and some guys on foot who were afraid to shoot. Best low-speed chase ever.

― Stephen X (Stephen X), Wednesday, 31 January 2007 19:23 (seventeen years ago) link

That was so good. Of course, many cars in the dystopian future would be fucked.

― Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Wednesday, 31 January 2007 23:57 (seventeen years ago) link

From way upthread:

Nothing really to add here, I just thought the escape from the Phish Pharm was one of the greatest non-powered car chases I'd seen in a while.
-- Steve Shasta (steveshast...), January 17th, 2007 4:33 PM. (Steve Shasta)

― Steve Shasta (Steve Shasta), Thursday, 1 February 2007 00:00 (seventeen years ago) link

mayhap i should see this again...

― CharlieNo4 (Charlie), Thursday, 1 February 2007 00:04 (seventeen years ago) link

It IS even better the second time. I realised quite how economical the script is, such a dense film for one that comes in at under two hours. It's now in the running for my favourite film of the noughties.

― chap (chap), Thursday, 1 February 2007 00:16 (seventeen years ago) link

Now I'm thinking maybe The Straight Story has some pretty good low-speed chase scenes but I don't remember for sure.

― Stephen X (Stephen X), Thursday, 1 February 2007 01:55 (seventeen years ago) link

this is at the prince charles from saturday, londoners.

Specifically: Saturday at 9pm, Monday at 6.20, Wednesday at 3.30, then next week Sunday at 9pm, Thursday at 6.15.

Go see it! It's great!

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 1 February 2007 12:43 (seventeen years ago) link

best use of flip flops in an action movie?

― Pandas At War (pandas at war), Thursday, 1 February 2007 14:12 (seventeen years ago) link

Yes. There is no subtext here I think - Clive Owen in flipflops is just empirically hilarious.

― Andrew Farrell (afarrell), Thursday, 1 February 2007 14:33 (seventeen years ago) link

its the way he has to do all the running about, all the while cursing the fact that he's hurting his feet.

― Pandas At War (pandas at war), Thursday, 1 February 2007 14:42 (seventeen years ago) link

And the way that they don't turn the injured foot into a plot device. It just is.

― Beth Parker (Beth Parker), Thursday, 1 February 2007 15:37 (seventeen years ago) link

well i guess it's a character thing.. he's the type of chap who would grudgingly do all this stuff, and swear about it under his breath

― Pandas At War (pandas at war), Thursday, 1 February 2007 15:43 (seventeen years ago) link

do i have anything to add to this?

maybe three or four things

1) more than a day later i'm still thinking about this movie every few minutes. harrowing!

2) is it a sign of my age that i sympathized strongly w/ the government / soldiers / police instead of the leftwing militia?

3) it's much more of a war movie than a scifi movie, all the kosovo comments dead on. closer to "saving private ryan" than "blade runner".

4) i liked all of the lovely textures in the movie. so many incredible fabrics, corduroys and plaids and military cottons, gorgeous knits and rugs, amazing woodgrains, peeling paint, rust, old porcelain etc etc. interior designer types will probably flip their lid!

5) i agree w/ whoever upthread said it's annoying to be afraid of someone getting shot in the face every few minutes. i walked out of the theatre thinking i should invest in body armor, bulletproof windows on my car, stronger locks on my doors and a handgun, which ideally wouldn't happen in a movie w/ an anti-violence message.

― vahid (vahid), Sunday, 4 February 2007 00:59 (seventeen years ago) link

also i agree w/ the comments about the movie having a strong videogame feeling. the scenes in bexhill running around trying to avoid soldiers + militia in particular reminded me of cutscenes from xbox or playstation games. but those have to draw on some sort of existing cinema language, right? what films do you trace those back to? i don't remember that sort of thing from any 80s movies but maybe i'm not thinking right.

― vahid (vahid), Sunday, 4 February 2007 01:14 (seventeen years ago) link

the thing that seemed videogamey to me (besides the obvious POV bits) was how the movie was divided into chunks - missions, really, i.e. "get the papers" "transport the girl", "escape from the fishes", "break into bexhill" .. interspliced with ruminative cutscenes (and i agree with most on this thread about the midwife's speech: i probably woulda hit "x" on the controller about halfway through it)

― Elsa Svitborg (tracerhand), Sunday, 4 February 2007 01:27 (seventeen years ago) link

Pretty much all action movies have that structure! (Star Wars: Find Obi Wan, find a ship, rescue the princess, destroy the pursuing ships, blow up the Death Star)

― chap (chap), Sunday, 4 February 2007 04:53 (seventeen years ago) link

three weeks pass...

Saw for the second time; fuck the Oscars.

Owen has rather womanly feet.

― Dr Morbius, Monday, 26 February 2007 15:27 (seventeen years ago) link

I wish I could see it again in the theater, for big-screen-sized tension and dizziness.

― kenan, Monday, 26 February 2007 15:54 (seventeen years ago) link

So I finally saw this, and appropriate enough in London on a big screen. Which I think is good; seeing something like this in situ, as it were, helps when you can walk outside and see what the set design readily grows out of all around you.

I don't know if I have anything to add beyond what's already been hashed out, though I admit this left less of a 'can't stop thinking about it' impact on me than Pan's Labyrinth; that said, I went into that movie cold where I had been hearing about Children of Men for months, and inevitably there's less surprise. But the one thing I came away with the most was how excellently shot and paced this was as an action/thriller movie in the grand vein. Certainly I see why there'd be complaints re: the cinematographer not getting an Oscar!

Amazing satiric touches too. The Ministry of Art sequence is one of many things straight out of Brazil.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, 8 March 2007 11:49 (seventeen years ago) link

Certainly I see why there'd be complaints re: the cinematographer not getting an Oscar!

Worse is the art direction not even getting a nod.

― chap, Thursday, 8 March 2007 14:18 (seventeen years ago) link

This was amazing. I particularly enjoyed:

- The use of simple images to shed light on the characters, like that short pan of Caine's character's old cartoons and his wife's photographs, or the old pictures and things that litter the apartment in Bexhill.

- Kee was great! I expected her to be whiny and annoying but she had all the best lines. "I'm a virgin..."; "Fuck knows."

- [Spoiler! Spoiler!]

I admired how they denied you even the basest elements of cheeriness at the end by not having Theo get to see the boat before he croaks, and then cutting to black before we get confirnmation that they're even the right people (obviously it's implied that it is since it would be too evil if they weren't, but...).

― Simon H., Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:15 (seventeen years ago) link

bizarro CoM thread:

http://www.ilxor.com:8080/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=59&threadid=147#unread

― Jordan, Thursday, 8 March 2007 15:19 (seventeen years ago) link

I do like Peter Chung's comment on the bizarro thread -- "the film's greatest value was in the act of viewing it." I'm not as dismissive or ambivalent as he is; rather it captures my state of enjoying the film as a well-made and well-acted movie, as I muttered a couple of posts back. Capturing chaotic disorientation in a formal narrative structure plus putting the Joe Bob Briggs rule of 'anybody can die at any time' into play is hard to pull off and Cuaron and company did it. (Weren't there five screenwriters or something?)

Having reread this whole thread in full now I'm a touch surprised at some of the intensity around it but only just. Its success beyond being a great action film -- something neither Blade Runner nor Brazil is, say -- is how well it articulates and recombines all the current big fears in one place at one time (aside from environmental collapse/global warming as such, though it's deftly suggested a bit, contrasting with how the landscape would creep back in following civilization's end -- there's a feeling of increasingly abandoned roads and byways, a greenness resurgent). As Slocki and others said that's part of the way of sf in general -- projecting current moods forward -- and it'll be interesting to see as a period piece some time down the road.

I also did like that somebody who passed me in the foyer after the film commented that I looked 'very Jaspery.' Less grey and no beard, though.

― Ned Raggett, Friday, 9 March 2007 08:51 (seventeen years ago) link

I liked how the curator cousin sez he couldn't save the Pieta, and then we see a Pieta-posed mother in Bexhill about an hour later.

― Dr Morbius, Friday, 9 March 2007 14:44 (seventeen years ago) link

2-disc DVD version due in the UK a week tomorrow, featuring "Comments by Slavoj Zizek", wtf?!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B000NJM27M/ref=pd_ys_cs_all_21/203-7551083-9947945

I'm pissed that I bought the first release of it now. I shall give that away and get this.

― Scik Mouthy, Sunday, 11 March 2007 18:22 (seventeen years ago) link

I'm gonna try to catch this in the theatre, it's still playing at the local second-run.

― Edward III, Sunday, 11 March 2007 18:56 (seventeen years ago) link

Definitely worth seeing in the theatre, preferably a burning one for the decay and to make Supreme Court first ammendment readers antsy and all.

― Abbott, Sunday, 11 March 2007 19:39 (seventeen years ago) link

Also got huge laughs from only the WOMEN in the audience at one point you will see, an experience I appreciated. Also the palpable tenseness and fear from the whole audience...plus hello big screen.

― Abbott, Sunday, 11 March 2007 19:42 (seventeen years ago) link

i just saw this and am still at 'fuuuuuuuuuck SO SO GOOD'

i got the new two-disc dvd. zizek doesn't mention biopolitics or other zizeky things, whatever they are, or what i thought was most important about the midwife character: new agey bullshit coming in. and her description of how people realize that the birth rate has dropped off was real. loved the idea of london's "sinner-winner" mentalist street preachers being taken seriously.

re the ending, which people find contentious: how else could they do it?

my suggestions:

-the rosemary's baby ending
-dawn of the dead ending (have only seen the 2004 version)
-the truman show ending

― That one guy that quit, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:19 (seventeen years ago) link

-the Happy Gilmore ending
-the Boogie Nights ending

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:22 (seventeen years ago) link

loved owen moving through london -- horseguards on the mall and everything, a kind of inner-london zone which is deaf to everything outside it.

― That one guy that quit, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:25 (seventeen years ago) link

I saw this myself last week, and I'd broadly side with the consensus, i.e. great. The Bexhill battle is one of the most terrifying, visceral, apocalyptic sequences in film (up there with the Bourne Supremacy car-chase). :-D

the Open Water ending, anyone?

― unfished business, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:27 (seventeen years ago) link

oh, xpost: the bit with King Crimson? Yeah, that ruled.

― unfished business, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:28 (seventeen years ago) link

zizek points out the link between this and 'and your mama too' -- cuaron's niftiness with foreground/background relations. the background of this one is something you look out for more, i guess -- reminded me most of 'the manchurian candidate '04' though this was much better -- but something similar was going on in 'and your mama'. iirc the v/o prompts us to think about the wider world round these two rich guys or whatever.

― That one guy that quit, Sunday, 25 March 2007 15:37 (seventeen years ago) link

Watched it again last night. The amount of obviously expository dialogue stuck out seemed even more flagrant, but now that I knew what would happen I could focus on just how OMG the long takes are. There's some stuff about the doggicam et al on the US DVD but I wish there was more.

Something else that really stuck out the second time was how ridiculously long it takes Clive to show any sign of having a bullet in his gut. I know he's trying to be chivalrous, but if he was shot by Chiwetel Ejiofor (which is when I assumed he got hit), I think he would have started making a mess long before he was sitting in the boat. How could he get down all those stairs without some serious wincing and a scream or three? I've never been shot in the gut, though. Maybe you can play it cool, take long walks, etc.

I wish it had ended with Clive showing her how to hold the baby while they were sitting in the boat. I think it provides enough thematic closure, without the obviousness of him getting an extended death sequence and greenpeace arriving.

― da croupier, Sunday, 25 March 2007 16:45 (seventeen years ago) link

but Clive Owen does the extended death sequences so well!

"D'you ever get the headaches?"

― unfished business, Sunday, 25 March 2007 16:51 (seventeen years ago) link

I know. He could have at least stressed the importance of supporting the baby's head before kicking off.

― Beth Parker, Sunday, 25 March 2007 19:49 (seventeen years ago) link

Maybe I'm misreading you, but it sounds like you think I'm saying they should have added Clive giving babyhandling advice. The advice is already in the scene, I'm just saying they should have stopped right after.

― da croupier, Sunday, 25 March 2007 20:24 (seventeen years ago) link

The foot thing would have done more for me if I hadn't already seen it in Die Hard.

― da croupier, Sunday, 25 March 2007 20:25 (seventeen years ago) link

Oh sorry. The Alzheimer's.

― Beth Parker, Sunday, 25 March 2007 21:35 (seventeen years ago) link

It was time to rent some DVDs and this one was among the new arrivals at the video store I stopped in last night.

One thing I noticed were all the different distinctive spaces, sanctuaries of various sorts. Much of the time spent travelling is spent moving from one sanctuary/safe-house/secured space (or relatively secured space) to another. Jasper's hideaway, full of records of the past, music (was there vinyl? I forget), books, art, etc. is in a way like the art ark (or whatever it was called). Later in the film, there is that Eastern Orthodox dwelling with the icons and old framed photographs.

Kee's character develops incredibly rapdily, from an unappealingly hostile refugee who seems ungrateful for what people are doing for her, to someone who is laughing along with everyone else in the car before the ambush has even occurred.

I liked it a lot. I agree with some people above about some weak points, but have nothing to add about that.

― Rockist Scientist, Thursday, 5 April 2007 15:39 (seventeen years ago) link

I was relieved it didn't end with Kee just floating out there without anything showing up, which I guess shows that I am secretly an optimist (since the arrival of the ship leaves me hopeful, even though it's also clearly very open-ended just how things will play out past that point, who/what the Human Project is, etc.).

― Rockist Scientist, Thursday, 5 April 2007 15:44 (seventeen years ago) link

zizek points out the link between this and 'and your mama too' -- cuaron's niftiness with foreground/background relations.

If only Mama had had as high a body count.

― Dr Morbius, Thursday, 5 April 2007 15:47 (seventeen years ago) link

i watched this for the second time last night. I noticed the dialogue stuff da croupier mentioned too. But aside from that it was every bit as great as the first time I saw it.

― The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall, Thursday, 5 April 2007 16:23 (seventeen years ago) link

And there was a part of me expecting that boat to not show up at the end.

― The Cursed Return of the Dastardly Thermo Thinwall, Thursday, 5 April 2007 16:23 (seventeen years ago) link

Saw this in theater, so motherfucking good. We caught the latest show, and on the just-after-midnight drive home through the city, the girl I was with started freaking out a bit, "I can't see any children, Nick, I need to see some damn children." We put Nickelodeon on as soon as we got home just to calm down.

My favorite part of any post-apocalyptic tale is the ephemera (posters, commercials, etc.) and it does not disappoint.

― en i see kay, Thursday, 5 April 2007 16:25 (seventeen years ago) link

After hearing how great this was for so long, I was disappointed by it when I finally saw it. The bleakness is too unrelenting and even laughable in some places. The one shot where I realised I'd had enough is where the car is driving through the countryside; the camera pans along a field and there we see a dead fox and two outflow pipes gushing out yellowy, gungy water. It's like Cuaron couldn't stand to have a single moment where the misery isn't stamped down on our heads. The cynisism wore me out.
The script was really patchy in places as well. Especially all the scenes in Michael Caine's gaff. Surprisingly really clunky.

Many of the scenes were really impressive but the film's impossible to love and I can't imagine wanting to revisit it any time soon.

― DavidM, Thursday, 5 April 2007 16:27 (seventeen years ago) link

"impossible to love" is surely disproven by, among other things, this very thread!

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 5 April 2007 16:46 (seventeen years ago) link

I was just reading an interview with Cuaron (actually a full-page NYTMag advertisement for the DVD cleverly designed as an "interview") in which he gives the obvious rationale for packing in the background detail -- pretty clearly less "bash you over the head with bleakness" and more "replace all expository blahblahblah with background / scenic detail that gets the job done." There is rather a lot of that, though, granted. Which was his ad-copy sales pitch for the DVD: "We put in so much detail! You can watch it over and over and things will keep popping out!"

― nabisco, Thursday, 5 April 2007 17:07 (seventeen years ago) link

Has anyone watched that DVD extra that seems to have nothing to do with the movie, but it nothing more than environmental hysteria and specious claims from doomsday nutters? That bugged the shit out of me. What is it doing on the DVD?

― kenan, Thursday, 5 April 2007 17:18 (seventeen years ago) link

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