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

Good discussions above. I saw this in the theater back in January, and just rented it last weekend and watched it twice more. I really love this film, Cuaron is a fantastic director -- Y tu mama tambien was great too.

Would anyone recommend the Harry Potter movie Cuaron directed? I've neither read any of the books nor seen the other movies, but I was thinking about renting this one just for Cuaron's directing.

Also, here's one of the many, many fantastic reviews to be found on IMDB message boards, this one on Children of Men:

"Unimaginative rubbish. It's dull, and it's pointless. The soundtrack seems like it was made by Merzbow."

mmm fantastic

Mark - Cuaron's Potter flick is by far the cream of that crop, & def. worth a see. & not knowing much about HP shouldn't be a hindrance.

I finally saw this on DVD last night and wow. I live pretty near Bexhill, it just felt so real, like this could really happen.

What it made me think of was something I read in an essay by Richard Rorty, where he described the greatest fear of one of the original American pragmatists, James or Dewey maybe. It was something along the lines that the greatest fear, if you take God out of the equation, is of the human race ending. That there will be no one to pass knowledge onto, that it all will have been pointless. He uses this image of the human race as existing on an iced-over pond, that we think we are so safe but at any moment it may break and we all may drown. The phrase I think I remember being used was "fellow sufferers", that's what Children of Men was about for me, the hope that though there'll be suffering it may in the end all be worth it.

The comments on those Rotten Tomatoes pages linked up thread are so depressing, many arguing it is little more than leftist propoganda.

I was suprised to noticed that the DVD includes "Comments by Slavoj Žižek", has anyone wathed these? Isn't Žižek anti-humanist or something, I only have a cursory knowledge of his stuff, because for all it's grimness COM was in the end I thought very humanist.

Also for in an odd way it was sort of like a superhardcore Dr Who episode.

Also "The Last Dance" by Disco Inferno. That song as a film.

thr zizek bit is interesting, i reviewed it. basically it takes little bits of footage from the film that resonate with real-world post-9/11 stuff, like the pens for refugees and the guantanamo stuff, and the armed guards at the railway stations, only abstracted from the film and without the main characters. they could even be off-cuts.

and over this zizek discusses the ‘paradox of anamorphosis’ and argues that ‘the true focus of the film is there in the background’.

he also appears in another doc on the dvd which is about the necessity of utopian thinking. i don't know if he's a humanist. probably he'd say "is it not precisely in the negation of humanism that we are at our most truly humanist?"... while being sucked off by a cult. studs masters student.

is your review online?

naw dogg that was a preview. be in this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/DVD-Stack-Nick-Bradshaw/dp/1847670040/ref=pd_bowtega_2/202-3019500-9727855?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1188397839&sr=1-2

ah so! srank you velly much!!

this movie lost money

Domestic: $35,327,768 51.0%
+ Foreign: $33,889,234 49.0%
= Worldwide: $69,217,002

Production Budget: $76 million

surely it'll make a fair bit on dvd?

i just bought the dvd so that should help

lol xpost

"probably he'd say "is it not precisely in the negation of humanism that we are at our most truly humanist?"... while being sucked off by a cult. studs masters student."

Ha ha that's brilliant nrq. OTOH he lambasts that very sort of pseudo-deep inversionism all the time. Not that that disproves your point whatsoever.

this movie lost money

don't all films lose money? I have heard that this is a key feature in how they are funded.

no some movies are hits

the hits pay for the large proportion of movies that lose money.

also lawyers get very, very rich arguing the toss over hollywood's accounting practices.

Watched it again. Well saw bits of it. Watched the extras with Naomi Klein, Zizek et al prophesising the worst. Would have liked someone with a slightly different outlook to have been interviewed, maybe. Zizek due was kinda right about the film happening in the background but kind of wrong as well. Theo's arc is important y know. It's also IMO about the importance of Solidarity (Rorty again). The opening oddly reminds me of the opeing of Shaun of the Dead, sleepwalking through London as the world falls apart, probably in more films but y know limited frame of reference. Is the bomb meant to go off on Cheapside? Walked past there today then saw some Asian guy being stopped by the police and then all the newspaper front pages with Maddie starring out... and Let's Shake Our Heads About Political Discourse In Switzerland Hell in a handcart, man.

i thought it was fleet street?

i know, zizek is basically overstating it. i was reading some stuff from the early '60s about how wisdescreen and depth-of-focus had made 'bringing the background into the foreground' a thing then, though the examples he was using escape me.

Did you read the piece by erk Johann Hari on Zizek in The New Statesman?

i think so. a few months ago?

hari doesn't know what he's talking about really, about anything. the fact he's been employed by the british press as an authority on anything is amazing. what'ss even worse is the americans employ him too.

this is the only hari piece worth reading:

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831

fuck that guy.

The article by Hari is itself postmodern in the sense that Hari speaks of something with limited or clearly 'googled' knowledge of the subject. Hari's article is nothing but a semblance of criticism, a parody. The work of a clown.

That Johann Hari guy bugs the shit out of me for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. He's been on loads of things over the last few months, from Big Brother On The Couch to Newsnight Review, and I have to turn over as soon as his big fat baby face appears. Maybe those articles above will pinpoint my irritation better than I can.

these are main reasons for me

- ignorance. of facts, of history, of ideas, of culture, leading to
- simplification. his mode of arguing hasn't changed since his pro-war stuff in 2002-03. "would YOU like to be governed by saddam? no? well then!"
- has lied. see recent 'private eye'.
- jeffrey archer connection.
- am simply mystified as to his position. why is he so widely employed? what are his editors thinking? leading to
- he is my age

yeah I think it's those last two points of yours, mainly. Plus he's probably younger than me by about 10 years.

A mate of mine. Lovely bloke.

glad to hear it.

This was probably a bad example to illuminate Hollywood's abortion taboo, though I do think such a taboo exists. Seriously, how many Hollywood films can you name where someone gets pregnant but has an abortion? Or films where someone has an abortion, but afterwards gets on her with her life and doesn't become totally traumatized by it?

(xx-post)

-- Tuomas, Monday, 24 September 2007 10:43 (Yesterday) Link

The film thread that refuses to die.

Haven't time right now, but there needs to be a Shoot'em Up discussion here. The Clive Owen eye roll at the start is so "Oh no not again", that it is all about CoM.

Come anticipate Shoot 'Em Up with me

t -6 hrs

boyfriend has this on in the next room

i'm too tipsy to read any of the stuff in this thread

he tells me it has julianne mmoore in it

is it good?

keep it short.

It's great, but don't watch it tipsy.

yea i just tried and had to leave the room

http://www.pastemagazine.com/action/article/6985/news/other/children_of_men_to_be_adapted_for_television

This movie totally ruined my day.

It did mine too when I saw it in the theater. It was so good I couldn't think about or do anything else the rest of the day.

I love this film.

Shame the book's not better.

I tried watching this just recently. Got a short distance beyond the scene where the pregnant woman reveals herself to MacGregor's character - maybe 45 minutes in. At that point it was so relentlessly grim I decided it wasn't the right stuff for me for now.

I did appreciate the obsessive care put into the composition of every scene, the attention to detail and atmosphere. But it didn't draw me in. The visual language of the film just didn't hook me deeply enough to subject myself to the relentlessly morbid atmosphere or emotionally half-dead main character.

I finally saw this last night. Back in '06, I saw the preview a dozen times and felt like it gave the movie away (when it turns out that it only gives away the first half-hour). If the preview had shown more of the details of the future and less of the plot, I probably would've seen it back then. I can only imagine how this would look on a big screen.

Was actually watching the Cloverfield commentary track, and that director talked about the influence of Children of Men as far as creating extended action sequences that appeared to be a single take. I'd heard about the extended shot toward the end, but the one early on with Owen/Moore/etc. is the car is just as amazing.

favourite film of the decade is now either this or Wall-E

I saw the preview a dozen times and felt like it gave the movie away

yeah the preview was horrible - totally made me NOT want to see it.

yea this is an incredible film. easily one of my favorites

i forgot who said it upthread but someone said something about being in mortal fear of being shot in the face throughout the whole movie. i had a conversation about this film with my wife yesterday and we agreed that while we both really enjoyed it in the theatre but that there is something like a moral imperative to reject art that is based on the fear of being shot in the face.

"based on" is sort of stretching it dont you think dude

ya just because someone wussed out doesnt make this a moral issue imo

not really, that sense of constant fear of being shot / blown up / betrayed / tortured is more or less what i took out of the theatre with me and the strength of that sense is what i figure to be the great accomplishment of the film.

i mean the strength of that sensation is what makes this movie different from, say, soylent green.

i don't really agree that the great accomplishment of this film is your visceral reaction to it.

not really, that sense of constant fear of being shot / blown up / betrayed / tortured is more or less what i took out of the theatre with me and the strength of that sense is what i figure to be the great accomplishment of the film.

― moonship journey to baja, Tuesday, March 24, 2009 6:03 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i hear this, don't completely agree with it, but certainly don't agree that its a moral imperative to oppose this impulse. i think there is a place for horror / shock / etc in art