Children Of Men

[diggler]

most of the time, what i meant to post has already been posted. i'm slow.

i do admire how well you keep track of my posts though

[MacGuffin]

it seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

[polkablues]

it seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

Wow... using the specious reasoning that cinematic quality can be determined by release date, this movie's going to great after all!

[Redlum]

Aargh. Pleasure delayers!

[modage]

it seems like the kind of movie that will be forgotten quickly.  the september release date only goes to confirm that.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date.

Wow... using the specious reasoning that cinematic quality can be determined by release date, this movie's going to great after all!

fantastic news!  hopefully a non-sucky trailer to follow!

[A Matter Of Chance]

I think it's certain lines of dialogue that makes things like this seem silly. When people say things like, "We will get you to the Human Project" or "Even since women stopped making babies," it seems rediculous, regardless of how pertinant it may be to the perticular film.

But this still looks great.

[MacGuffin]

[Redlum]

I don't think I've watched a trailer as much or as longingly as this one for about a year. I expected it to be great (to the point of having a general feeling of well-being and confidence as I took my seat)...and it was.

Technically its a perfection of some of what Spielberg did in War of the Worlds but much more realistically executed with beleivable characters and a stronger narrative to back it up. The vision of the future is a near-perfect extrapolation (in movie terms) of our current situation and I would imagine coming out of a cinema in London after seeing this would be odd to say the least.
The long, uncut sequence you've probably all read about is mesmerising and far bigger than anything I imagined.

Clive Owen is perfect as the reluctant hero. He is more than that though - disenchanted but never a bore; his sense of humour (and the films) makes him really likeable. Claire Hope Ashitey as the mother to be is a strong female lead and nothing at all like the weak, dewy-eyed girl in the trailer. She sharply puts the usual, boring cries of christian allegory to bed (although I'm sure the new US Christmas Day release will be a marketing opportunity too deliscious to refuse).

Don't expect the film to be any more of a commentary on current issues than you can draw from the surface of level of each scene for yourself. There are no significant explanations or expositions as to most of what goes on. The viewer is placed in the same confused and jaded barrel as everybodyelse and its that immediacy is its biggest success and what ultimately stops the film from falling victim to "silliness".

[Ultrahip]

i agree with a lot of what flagpole says, but for me i thought the music choices were quite nice. i mean, how much good music couldve been produced when everyone was worrying about extinction? i bet everything written post-no-baby-time sounds like an amateur 'sea changes.' the long full metal style shot i thought was amazing. yes maybe too showy but it didnt take me out of the picture at all. it was increasingly chilling. and the "messiah" moment i found to be absolutely transcendent. flagpole you seem to not like the only sequences in the film that are not EXTREMELY subtle. everything but these two pieces were so played down! agree on the 28 days later vibe, and also that this is better. and as variety pointed out, this is what dystopia london should look like, not that v for vendetta bullshit.

michael caine=just gosh wow

but how bout julian moore? didn't see that coming...

[Redlum]

Spoilers

spoilers
people still have jobs, why? to pay for self suicide kits? i doubt that's the only purpose. people were still watching greyhounds a somewhat normal thing, life goes on...til it doesn't, but you know that.

Remeber this is Britain! The only country in the world to hopelessly soldier on! Everywhere else in the world was in total chaos. Interestingly (edit: perhaps not), a friend was telling me how when he was playing an infuriating computer game called 'Rise of the Nations', the only country that would not surrender to his Nuclear super-power and his impending global domination was Britain.

the baby and the ping pong ball were digital right? if so, that was fucking brilliant.

Yeah that baby was a combination of anamatronic and CGI - see Here. I think all the effects in this film are outstanding and almost completely invisible. Surely the best we'll see this year.

I thought the music choices were excellent. Especially King Crimson - "In the court of the crimson King". People would be even more nostalgic for the old stuff than they are now.

[Thrindle]

Ahem, excuse me, without the word "SPOILER" attached... can you please give me your thoughts on the movie?

I actually want to see this, without having it ruined.  Thus, all of your posts went unread.  Give me a spoil-free review dammit!   

[Redlum]

Here's a good review Cronopio suggested to me. It starts with a nifty F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that does a nice job of summing up the feeling of the film.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1879597,00.html

Children of Men
Philip French

In his great essay 'The Crack-Up', written at a personal low ebb in 1936, Scott Fitzgerald said: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.' When facing the future knowing that hope invariably turns to disappointment or when confronted by depressingly apocalyptic science fiction, I always think of Fitzgerald's words.

Inevitably, they came to mind last week seeing the British SF movie Children of Men, directed by versatile Mexican Alfonso Cuaron, who last worked in this country on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the darkest and, many believe, the best of the JK Rowling films. Children of Men is adapted by Cuaron and American television writer Timothy J Sexton from an uncharacteristic 1992 novel by the genteel British thriller writer PD James, a woman of conservative views and strong Anglican convictions.

The setting is the hideously polluted, run-down London of 2027 in an authoritarian Britain, the only functioning nation in Europe and, possibly, in the world and, thus, a magnet for refugees. A brutal paramilitary police force is barely in control of a general chaos. Its chief role appears to be rounding up immigrants, referred to sneeringly as 'fugees', either shooting or forcibly deporting them. The principal countervailing force to a corrupt government is an underground resistance group known as the Fish, made up of immigrants and their British sympathisers, called 'Cods'; they seem to be internally divided between agitators seeking to influence a demoralised public and outright terrorists.

This is familiar stuff, the subject of recent British films as different as Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and James McTeigue's V for Vendetta. The former presented a Britain suddenly reduced to barbarism as a result of a plague and a dangerous, denuded, rubbish-strewn London; the latter gave us a future Britain in which a dictatorial government ruled through violence and a masked avenger incited the public to fight back.

A similarly oppressive atmosphere is palpably rendered in Children of Men by production designers Geoffrey Kirkland and Jim Clay, one American, the other British, and Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The picture is of almost unrelieved gloom, nearer to Nineteen Eighty-Four than to the first great British futuristic picture, the Korda version of HG Wells's Things to Come. There is, perhaps, some consolation for local audiences in feeling that London is once again the hub of the Empire and that they are at the centre of the apocalypse, rather than observing it from the periphery. Old patriotic emotions are aroused by the sight of a future Britain devastated on screen rather than the spectacle of Los Angeles being laid waste or Martians landing in New Jersey instead of, as HG Wells told it, menacing the Home Counties.

The movie that Children of Men most brings to mind is the 1990 adaptation by Harold Pinter of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Both are examples of what might be called obstetric or gynaecological dystopian sci-fi. The Handmaid's Tale, as a film at least, is a glum, portentous feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four set in an America run by right-wing fundamentalists, where blacks, homosexuals and radicals are either exterminated or deported to death camps abroad. The few fertile women are forced to serve as handmaids, bearing the children of the nation's leaders whose wives are barren. Children of Men moves rather more briskly but has a similar theme. For no specific reason, no child has been born in this ghastly new world for 18 years, which is to say since 2008. Pollution, genetic experimentation and uncontrollable diseases are suggested as the causes. I believe PD James hints at a judgment of God, her novel being Christian and moral, whereas Atwood's is social and political.

But this impressive, properly pessimistic film doesn't need conventional comic relief. What the narrative demands, and what Cuaron provides, is moral ambiguity and a teasing hopefulness that suggests the possibility of redemption.This is quite an achievement.

[MacGuffin]

Interview : Alfonso Cuaron
Source: Moviehole

When filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron got together with the art department of "Children of Men" to discuss coming up with a realistic futuristic milieu – he didn't mean flying cars, holographic bank-tellers or push-button bicycles.

"When you start talking to artists about doing a film that is set in the future, everyone tends to get a little bit excited and start thinking in terms of Bladerunner", laughs the Mexican writer/director. "I love that film, but this was to be the anti-Bladerunner"

"Children of Men" is a post-911 thriller in which a world one generation from now has fallen into anarchy on the heels of an infertility defect in the population. One man, a former activist, agrees to help move an inexplicably expectant woman to a haven at sea, where her child's birth may assist scientists save the future of civilization.

It was important to ground the film in reality, so palpable technological advancements would have to be at a minimum, insisted Cuaron.

"It was difficult, because people with amazing concepts and imagination came in and suggested some wild things – but I just didn't want imagination in this movie, I wanted reference. I wanted a future that didn't automatically tell the audience it was the future, the audience had to figure it out for themselves – for instance, though the cars are from the future, they look almost normal, its hard to spot their differences", the director, whose other credits include "Y tu mamá también" and "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", says. "We didn't want to do a future that was about the future – but about the present".

Not surprisingly, Cuaron became interested in the picture after 911. "I started writing the project in 2001 – and yes, the mental factor in the writing of this film was September 11 obviously. Because of those events, it was important to set the film in more of a 21st century, than a 20th century, because the world as we know it has changed considerably since then."

The film, he says, may differ a little from the P.D James authored book of the same name – because, well, he doesn't know it. "I have to mask a confession. I've never read the novel. I was afraid I would start second guessing things. It was the script that sparked my interest – and it didn't at first, I have to admit, but I eventually found something in it that really grabbed me. Again, I think it was how emblematic of our times it is."

Fortunately, the studio was familiar with the book and they insisted the film remain pretty close to it. "It took place in England, and the studio felt very comfortable about the premise and the integrity of that aspect. That was good, because it would be very hard, especially visually, for this film to take place in America – if only because part of the premise of the film is that the world has fallen apart and England is an island that's separated itself and is run with a very regressive democracy. You could not set that in America. The film would have been much different. England doesn't have the kind of control that you have in America, ya know?"

When studio executives informed the director that they wanted a big name for the film – he never expected Clive Owen's name to be on the list. "When the studio gave the greenlight to the film, they immediately started talking about Clive Owen for the lead - I was so thrilled! I was a fan of Clive. I thought they would suggest a very big star, and even though Clive is becoming a very important leading man, he's an actor more so than a star. I was really thrilled. He really understood this character was not a superhero, but a complete regular Joe. He grounds the film."

An unlikely casting choice was Michael Caine as Jasper, a retired newspaper cartoonist that spends a lot of his time smoking pot.

Caine himself didn't even think he was right, until "we were doing make-up, hair and costume at his house", explains Cuaron. "[And] once he had the clothes and so on, on, and stepped in front of the mirror to look at himself, his body language started changing. Michael loved it. He believed he was this guy".

Caine decided to play the character as an older John Lennon, says Cuaron, and "It is the first time that he farts on screen, and the first time that he smokes joints on screen", he laughs.

Cuaron, who decided to do "Children of Men" over a film version of Yann Martel's "Life of Pi", was as nervous about the film working, as Caine was about the role – but it all came together.

"I was very nervous. You've spent five days on a scene, and by the fourth day you still haven't rolled camera, and on the fifth day the first take doesn't work?" says Cuaron. "Magically it always comes together in that last moment when everyone is stressed and worn".

[MacGuffin]

HOW'D THEY DO THAT?
It was a long shot, but the effort paid off in exhilaration
Source: Los Angeles Times

THE scene would be complex by any standard — for roughly 15 minutes we follow Clive Owen as he navigates three blocks of intricately choreographed urban warfare in a deconstructing British society, circa 2027, as envisioned in director Alfonso Cuarón's "Children of Men." Typically a scene like this would be shot in multiple takes and from different angles, with editing magic turning it into a seamless narrative.

But Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki decided they wanted "Children of Men," their fifth collaboration and due in theaters here Dec. 25, to have a more realistic aesthetic. To get there, they used long, extended shots and wide lenses so characters could always be seen in context. Natural light and lots of hand-held camerawork ruled the set. Inserts, those additional shots to "fill in the blanks" in a scene, were verboten.

The result is a film that departs from cinematic convention, providing some of the longest uninterrupted and yet most synthesized live-action sequences in recent history. And with violence that seems raw and real, not glamorized.

In the case of the 15-minute scene, Lubezki, George Richmond, a British Steadicam operator who'd worked on Oliver Stone's "Alexander," and a focus puller followed the actor — in one section running backward up stairs — as he raced through what amounted to a three-block-wide live set teeming with armed extras in riot gear.

Cuarón, who usually stands next to the camera, ran behind until certain sightlines required that he duck out of view, although a wireless device and a portable video monitor kept him connected to the action.

As Owen ran through the maze of buildings and abandoned buses, across streets and past moving tanks, amid gunfire and explosions, the hand-held camera, operated by Richmond, followed right behind, capturing the 15-minute action sequence in real time.

"The energy is so different than if you're just shooting a little moment where a scene plays out in front of the camera," Lubezki said. "Everybody begins to believe they are in the middle of this war and people start screaming and shooting. By the time the camera got to block three, the extras are really going nuts and you have to be careful that a tank doesn't roll over an extra and you aren't injured by close-range gunshots."

The movie was shot for 60 days on location in wintry London, then in a studio outside the city. A typical day provided six hours of naturally gray light. The company spent two hours a day traveling, setting up and eating. The remaining four hours were used to rehearse, then, if they were lucky, nail a take before the light faded. The hope was that the camerawork, natural light and push to replicate the texture of reality would allow the audience to experience the sense of inescapable desperation and oppression that comes from living in a brutal world facing extinction.

It seems to have worked. The futuristic dystopian thriller, starring Owen, Julianne Moore and Michael Caine, first drew notice when it premiered at the 63rd Venice Film Festival in September, earning Lubezki an award for outstanding technical contribution.

[pete]

WOW LONG SHOTS!  What is that?  That's NEVER been done before.