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Films Watched November 27 - December 3
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) - This could have been just another standard futuristic thriller. It's easy to hear the deep-voiced sound bytes in your ear: "IN A WORLD where hope is a thing of the past, ONE MAN will protect the future!"* It would have been so easy to make that movie. Any director could have delivered it. But instead of letting any director do it, Universal hired Alfonso Cuarón. I was already a big fan of his before this film. Even when his work doesn't come out 100% cohesive, there is always something wildly ambitious behind it, and that ambition has been gaining increasingly dramatically with every film he's made since Great Expectations. Children of Men is Cuarón's most ambitious picture yet, and every single ambition in it is fulfilled or even surpassed.
First and foremost (because they are the most readily noticeable) are the "technical" achievements. The entire film is shot with handheld cameras and several very complicated scenes are handled in single takes. Cuarón and his cinematographer (and long-time friend) Emmanuel Lubezki manage the improbable task of making very complexly choreographed scenes actually feel chaotic and spontaneous, giving the film as a whole a realistic, almost documentary-like immediacy. It's a refreshing change from the ordinary -- instead of building up a car chase with lots of quick, flashy cuts and pulse-pounding music, Cuarón shoots the entire sequence in a single shot from inside the protagonists' vehicle.
In fact, Cuarón spends quite a good deal of the film doing things out of the ordinary, clearly making every effort to avoid delivering the easy movie. A lot of this comes down to Clive Owen, who for the entire film's length is repeatedly stopped from being the typical action hero he probably was in the script. He's a tired, hopeless, emotionally fragile man who wears sandals and never once picks up a gun. He's not an antihero by any means, but he's probably the least heroic hero I've seen in a mainstream film in eons.
Like the best science fiction, Children of Men uses its fantastic setting to examine contemporary problems. I won't get into them here because they don't really require an explanation, but I do have to commend Cuarón and his entire design team for constructing a future that actually looks and sounds like a believable world not very distant from our own at all, which makes the film's themes and ideas very direct. One criticism I keep hearing, even from people who like the film, is that too much is left unexplained: who is fighting who, how the society works, what everybody's connection is to everybody else, etc. I actually think this is just misplaced wonderment -- the world created here seems so vast and real that people simply want to know more about it, regardless of whether it's actually important to the film itself. I don't think any of the information excluded to the film is actually important to what it is trying to do; moreover, its very exclusion may be important.
This is easily one of the very best films I've come across this year, and it's refreshingly intelligent in a time when most science fiction premises are just excuses for action films with bigger explosions. I loved it. Don't let the questionable trailer (which basically condenses the film into a hallmark card) keep you away.
*In fact, the film's actual tagline is "The future's a thing of the past."
The Matador (Richard Shepard, 2005) - I was surprised at how oddly structured this film is. It feels more like a play or a short film expanded into a feature. Specifically, it has two distinct acts, plus a couple of little bits tacked on at the beginning and the middle that aren't actually necessary. What you're left with is a couple of attractive performances in a mildly enjoyable little romp that made as big an impression on my head as a cottonball dropped from six inches above my hair. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's fluffy and barely noticeable. If it actually was a two-act play or a short film I think it might actually be a good deal more substantial.
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) - Another lukewarm response from me. There's nothing especially bad about it, I just didn't particularly care for it. This is generally how I always feel about anything Superman-related, though. Although lots of superhero stories are hokey, Superman always seemed particularly so to me, and the things that turn me off of this film are the same as the things that normally turn me off of Superman, so I can easily understand people who do get into Superman really enjoying this. But any time I start nitpicking a film that obviously doesn't intend to withstand any sort of logical scrutiny, some crucial connection is clearly missing. (For example, of everything in the movie, what irritated me the most were those remote-controlled roll-down maps Lex Luther used during the obligatory "supervillain monologue" he delivers to a captive Lois Lane. When did he have those maps drawn up and installed, and why does he even need them in the first place? They seem to serve no purpose other than to illustrate his diabolical scheme to Lois Lane, who he hadn't even planned on capturing. Come to think of it, that whole scheme is kind of lame: he's going to create a new continent out of Kryptonian crystals, destroying most of North America in the process, then selling the new continent to people who need land. Even if billions of people are going to die in the process, it's hard for me to take a nemesis seriously whose evil master plan basically amounts to selling real estate.)
I watched a couple more that I'm having trouble writing about. Next week, maybe.
Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) - This could have been just another standard futuristic thriller. It's easy to hear the deep-voiced sound bytes in your ear: "IN A WORLD where hope is a thing of the past, ONE MAN will protect the future!"* It would have been so easy to make that movie. Any director could have delivered it. But instead of letting any director do it, Universal hired Alfonso Cuarón. I was already a big fan of his before this film. Even when his work doesn't come out 100% cohesive, there is always something wildly ambitious behind it, and that ambition has been gaining increasingly dramatically with every film he's made since Great Expectations. Children of Men is Cuarón's most ambitious picture yet, and every single ambition in it is fulfilled or even surpassed.
First and foremost (because they are the most readily noticeable) are the "technical" achievements. The entire film is shot with handheld cameras and several very complicated scenes are handled in single takes. Cuarón and his cinematographer (and long-time friend) Emmanuel Lubezki manage the improbable task of making very complexly choreographed scenes actually feel chaotic and spontaneous, giving the film as a whole a realistic, almost documentary-like immediacy. It's a refreshing change from the ordinary -- instead of building up a car chase with lots of quick, flashy cuts and pulse-pounding music, Cuarón shoots the entire sequence in a single shot from inside the protagonists' vehicle.
In fact, Cuarón spends quite a good deal of the film doing things out of the ordinary, clearly making every effort to avoid delivering the easy movie. A lot of this comes down to Clive Owen, who for the entire film's length is repeatedly stopped from being the typical action hero he probably was in the script. He's a tired, hopeless, emotionally fragile man who wears sandals and never once picks up a gun. He's not an antihero by any means, but he's probably the least heroic hero I've seen in a mainstream film in eons.
Like the best science fiction, Children of Men uses its fantastic setting to examine contemporary problems. I won't get into them here because they don't really require an explanation, but I do have to commend Cuarón and his entire design team for constructing a future that actually looks and sounds like a believable world not very distant from our own at all, which makes the film's themes and ideas very direct. One criticism I keep hearing, even from people who like the film, is that too much is left unexplained: who is fighting who, how the society works, what everybody's connection is to everybody else, etc. I actually think this is just misplaced wonderment -- the world created here seems so vast and real that people simply want to know more about it, regardless of whether it's actually important to the film itself. I don't think any of the information excluded to the film is actually important to what it is trying to do; moreover, its very exclusion may be important.
This is easily one of the very best films I've come across this year, and it's refreshingly intelligent in a time when most science fiction premises are just excuses for action films with bigger explosions. I loved it. Don't let the questionable trailer (which basically condenses the film into a hallmark card) keep you away.
*In fact, the film's actual tagline is "The future's a thing of the past."
The Matador (Richard Shepard, 2005) - I was surprised at how oddly structured this film is. It feels more like a play or a short film expanded into a feature. Specifically, it has two distinct acts, plus a couple of little bits tacked on at the beginning and the middle that aren't actually necessary. What you're left with is a couple of attractive performances in a mildly enjoyable little romp that made as big an impression on my head as a cottonball dropped from six inches above my hair. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's fluffy and barely noticeable. If it actually was a two-act play or a short film I think it might actually be a good deal more substantial.
Superman Returns (Bryan Singer, 2006) - Another lukewarm response from me. There's nothing especially bad about it, I just didn't particularly care for it. This is generally how I always feel about anything Superman-related, though. Although lots of superhero stories are hokey, Superman always seemed particularly so to me, and the things that turn me off of this film are the same as the things that normally turn me off of Superman, so I can easily understand people who do get into Superman really enjoying this. But any time I start nitpicking a film that obviously doesn't intend to withstand any sort of logical scrutiny, some crucial connection is clearly missing. (For example, of everything in the movie, what irritated me the most were those remote-controlled roll-down maps Lex Luther used during the obligatory "supervillain monologue" he delivers to a captive Lois Lane. When did he have those maps drawn up and installed, and why does he even need them in the first place? They seem to serve no purpose other than to illustrate his diabolical scheme to Lois Lane, who he hadn't even planned on capturing. Come to think of it, that whole scheme is kind of lame: he's going to create a new continent out of Kryptonian crystals, destroying most of North America in the process, then selling the new continent to people who need land. Even if billions of people are going to die in the process, it's hard for me to take a nemesis seriously whose evil master plan basically amounts to selling real estate.)
I watched a couple more that I'm having trouble writing about. Next week, maybe.