What did I do today other than see “Children of Men”?
January 23rd, 2007Today was supposed to be my first day of productivity. Whoops. Maybe I can redeem myself a little tonight.
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Don’t worry – no spoilers ahead.
I just saw Children of Men in Boston with Ryan. Overall the film is worth seeing and is quite moving at times, though not necessarily very pleasant to watch. I especially liked seeing London reimagined in this dystopic future on the brink of anarchy. I *heart* London, particularly since my summer there, and not since 28 Days Later have I had the pleasure of seeing the city taken liberties with — London buses girded with protective mesh, electric cars and pedal-carts (a la Bangladesh!) on the street, the Tate Modern as a private residence (or was it a government building?). And there’s a brilliantly executed set of extremely long-running sequences during a violent uprising in a refugee camp – it was difficult not to feel transported to and caught up in the worst sort of urban warfare as seen in Sarajevo, Beirut or Mogadishu at the height of their civil wars. I marvelled at how carefully timed and meticulously executed those scenes were – if you see the film, remember to mentally applaud the cameraman (and perhaps other crew) who had to do all that running with a camera and keep it pointed in the right direction. And what happens to Julianne Moore’s character is cleverly unexpected enough that it sounds an exceptionally jarring and tragic note to reinforce the sense that the world is now a place where there is no real future.
Enough praise – on to the picky bits. The difficulties of translating a book into a screenplay were well in evidence in the inconsistent treatment of the plot which vacillated between being overly pedantic and being excessively oblique. Scattered through the film were explanatory “conversations” where characters had awkward monologues to tell the audience things that everyone in the film sould already know and find patently obvious (the midwife’s rambling about the discovery of the mass infertility, for example). Yet at the same time I got the clear sense that large chunks of information were being brushed aside or skimmed over because they were too unwieldy to delve into properly. And maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I felt as if key explanatory details were lost in the blink-and-you-miss-it introductions to the more peripheral characters and events (and the mumbly accents didn’t help). Overall pacing also suffered from plodding sections where nothing seems to happen, but without any compensatory cinematography, intimacy, mood-setting or revelation of information – the film could have lost about 20 minutes and been better for it, or spent that time developing the story more densely or more clearly.
Like many of the films I am drawn to watch for their premise (think Poseidon, Flightplan and The Stepford Wives), Children of Men is not bad, but doesn’t necessarily deliver it’s full potential in exploring the implications of the central premise. Among the best parts of the movie were those which started to take the set-up through to its logical conclusions - such as the scene in the abandoned school, or the successful evocation of the baby’s significance as a momentous, world-changing miracle. Most of the other parts of the film felt like a (skilful) rehash of scenes from other war or disaster films like The Pianist or Independence Day.
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And to answer the question that’s the title of this post, I also bought a pair of sunglasses (to replace the brown aviators I dropped irretriveably into a latrine in Madagascar last Spring Break), and my very own domain name! At $7.20 from GoDaddy.com, that’s the best impulse buy ever! So now you’ll be able to have the pleasure of reading this blog after being redirected from jasonyeo.com - congratulations (to me)! 
PS: I love this video on YouTube – as a very amateur violinist, this video makes me very happy.