Children Of Men and Idiocracy
Well, this review has been sitting around on my hard drive for a couple of weeks due to extensive shenanigans caused by Norton Internet Security 2006 and bad ATI drivers. The short version of the story is that I’d get these weird errors when closing Windows like can’t stop cpp.exe and a bunch of other crap. On top of that, an ATI PC video recorder device I got came with a bunch of old ATI drivers which I even updated, but they still managed to crash my computer out to some ridiculously low resolution at 4 colors any time it found some graphic content it didn’t like which, unfortunately, included Grid Wars (a great Geometry Wars ripoff I was playing). Anyway...
The other weekend, I used a little slight of hand to get MM out to the cinema to see Alfonso Cuarón's "Children Of Men" (based on the book by P.D. James). I knew very little about the movie or the source material and mainly went because i'm a huge fan of Cuarón's work (one of the best road trips ever in "Y Tu Mamá también" and arguably the best of the Harry Potter film adaptations to date, "The Prisoner Of Azkaban").
Great Britain in 2027 looks like the worst of World War 2 war torn Europe plastered over with crass Western commercialism and peppered with pockets of bourgeois wealth (a rich socialite lives in high rise palace with a life size recreation of Pink Floyd's "Animals" floating over a conveniently placed factory next door). A world-wide epidemic has eliminated mankind's ability to reproduce, so the remaining generations of increasingly paranoid, hateful, and racist citizens slowly count the days and hours until the entire human race becomes extinct. Theo (Clive Owen) is a news reporter who’s begrudgingly dragged back into a life of radical activism by his ex-wife who is helping an underground movement smuggle the world’s first pregnant woman out of the country to the safety of the mythical Human Project. What happens along the way would give away too much of what makes the movie special and unexpected, so I’ll skip the plot details and focus on what I liked about the movie.
Children Of Men has an undeniable sense of place; a near-future stunningly realized both as a setting and a society. If you look back at movies like Blade Runner or the Fifth Element, they used sheer density of vehicle motion and color in tight, three dimensional space to define their futuristic city settings. Children Of Men has a more grounded approach using only a slightly more futuristic setting than today and eschewing flying cars in favor of density of emotion and class struggle (a pointless, but desperate exercise considering the rapidly approaching end of the human race). The only real sci-fi elements in the city are 3D advertising elements projected onto sides of buildings which aren’t so impossible to imagine after watching the Tokyo city streets reflected in a cab window in Lost In Translation. In a possible nod to both Blade Runner and the Fifth Element, Children Of Men throws a Chinese rickshaw into its opening street scene.
Children Of Men is part thriller, part action movie, and part social commentary. That being said, one of the greatest things about the movie is that the characters portray a very realistic combination of believable emotion met with believable action. Little details become essential components of the main character like the various pets (which MM pointed out are substitutes for children) that are affectionately drawn to Theo or when very visible cracks appear in his normally aloof exterior (a desperate, uncomfortable kiss with an old flame or an uncontrollable burst of tears). Sure there are some visually impressive, meticulously choreographed action shots which track for minutes on end without cutting away, but these always serve as frames for the characters and never as just throw away visual effects shots like most Hollywood pictures. Within these shots, characters retain their humanity and never do anything super human or unbelievable.
Strangely enough, Mike Judge's "Idiocracy", a comedy, proved to be a perfect companion piece to Children Of Men. Idiocracy is centered around the concept that Darwnin's law of survival of the fittest has not favored the intelligent or the strongest, but rather those who who can simply reproduce faster and more often.
Some bad language, but gosh darned funny!
500 years in the future, the world's IQ level has dropped dangerously low leaving a world full of idiots who survive on a combination of unplanned pregnancies, overbearing commercialism (water has been replaced by a Gatorade-like substance which has electrolytes to satisfy thirst, but ends up killing crops world-wide), mind numbing television, and a steady diet of fast food. Two normal citizens from the 2005 (an average military man and a prostitute) are frozen in a military cryogenics experiment and end up being abandoned only to awake in this dumb, futuristic state of the world.
Idiocracy wasn't promoted at all. There was no website for it (that I could find at least), no advertising, and no sense of it ever having appeared at a movie theatre near me. I have a theory on this. Western comedy has a 5% dumb factor. What I mean, is that given any sitcom or movie, there's an allowance for only a small percentage of the cast to portray dumb characters while the remainder of the cast has to be intelligent. The dumb characters are used for comic relief, plot devices that rely on buffoonery, or as some sort of tool to make the intelligent characters feel better about themselves. The dumb characters are a mirror held up to show us what we shouldn't be by the smart people who show us who we should be. It's a comfort thing. A comedic safety net facilitated by Gilligan, Homer, Peter Griffin, and a ton of other men (how come there aren’t many dumb female characters?). Idiocracy completely inverts this whole paradigm by making 2% of the cast smart (in an average way) while the rest of the cast is completely stupid. This is probably scary to a lot of people.
So, we have two ends of the spectrum here: a drama about an intelligent world falling into chaos because it can't reproduce and a comedy about a stupid world falling into chaos because it can reproduce. I ended up liking Idiocracy for many of the same reasons I liked Children Of Men, albeit comedic angles on the same concepts and issues. For a comedy, Idiocracy did an amazing job with its sense of place ranging from a skyline of incomplete freeways and tied together skyscrapers to a Costco the size of a small country. None of the shots are particularly realistic. They have a 1960's Star Trek matte painting look to them that may seem cheesy to a lot of viewers, but actually go a long way in creating a world that looks as practical as it does improbable. You'll never look at Fuddruckers the same way! As far as the characters, they stay remarkably consistent; none of the dumb characters ever get smarter and none of the average characters (regardless of their intellectual advantages) ever actually save the world. Infact, there is no typical happy ending to the movie and it ends just as bleakly and inconclusive as it begins.
The other weekend, I used a little slight of hand to get MM out to the cinema to see Alfonso Cuarón's "Children Of Men" (based on the book by P.D. James). I knew very little about the movie or the source material and mainly went because i'm a huge fan of Cuarón's work (one of the best road trips ever in "Y Tu Mamá también" and arguably the best of the Harry Potter film adaptations to date, "The Prisoner Of Azkaban").
Great Britain in 2027 looks like the worst of World War 2 war torn Europe plastered over with crass Western commercialism and peppered with pockets of bourgeois wealth (a rich socialite lives in high rise palace with a life size recreation of Pink Floyd's "Animals" floating over a conveniently placed factory next door). A world-wide epidemic has eliminated mankind's ability to reproduce, so the remaining generations of increasingly paranoid, hateful, and racist citizens slowly count the days and hours until the entire human race becomes extinct. Theo (Clive Owen) is a news reporter who’s begrudgingly dragged back into a life of radical activism by his ex-wife who is helping an underground movement smuggle the world’s first pregnant woman out of the country to the safety of the mythical Human Project. What happens along the way would give away too much of what makes the movie special and unexpected, so I’ll skip the plot details and focus on what I liked about the movie.
Children Of Men has an undeniable sense of place; a near-future stunningly realized both as a setting and a society. If you look back at movies like Blade Runner or the Fifth Element, they used sheer density of vehicle motion and color in tight, three dimensional space to define their futuristic city settings. Children Of Men has a more grounded approach using only a slightly more futuristic setting than today and eschewing flying cars in favor of density of emotion and class struggle (a pointless, but desperate exercise considering the rapidly approaching end of the human race). The only real sci-fi elements in the city are 3D advertising elements projected onto sides of buildings which aren’t so impossible to imagine after watching the Tokyo city streets reflected in a cab window in Lost In Translation. In a possible nod to both Blade Runner and the Fifth Element, Children Of Men throws a Chinese rickshaw into its opening street scene.
Children Of Men is part thriller, part action movie, and part social commentary. That being said, one of the greatest things about the movie is that the characters portray a very realistic combination of believable emotion met with believable action. Little details become essential components of the main character like the various pets (which MM pointed out are substitutes for children) that are affectionately drawn to Theo or when very visible cracks appear in his normally aloof exterior (a desperate, uncomfortable kiss with an old flame or an uncontrollable burst of tears). Sure there are some visually impressive, meticulously choreographed action shots which track for minutes on end without cutting away, but these always serve as frames for the characters and never as just throw away visual effects shots like most Hollywood pictures. Within these shots, characters retain their humanity and never do anything super human or unbelievable.
Strangely enough, Mike Judge's "Idiocracy", a comedy, proved to be a perfect companion piece to Children Of Men. Idiocracy is centered around the concept that Darwnin's law of survival of the fittest has not favored the intelligent or the strongest, but rather those who who can simply reproduce faster and more often.
Some bad language, but gosh darned funny!
500 years in the future, the world's IQ level has dropped dangerously low leaving a world full of idiots who survive on a combination of unplanned pregnancies, overbearing commercialism (water has been replaced by a Gatorade-like substance which has electrolytes to satisfy thirst, but ends up killing crops world-wide), mind numbing television, and a steady diet of fast food. Two normal citizens from the 2005 (an average military man and a prostitute) are frozen in a military cryogenics experiment and end up being abandoned only to awake in this dumb, futuristic state of the world.
Idiocracy wasn't promoted at all. There was no website for it (that I could find at least), no advertising, and no sense of it ever having appeared at a movie theatre near me. I have a theory on this. Western comedy has a 5% dumb factor. What I mean, is that given any sitcom or movie, there's an allowance for only a small percentage of the cast to portray dumb characters while the remainder of the cast has to be intelligent. The dumb characters are used for comic relief, plot devices that rely on buffoonery, or as some sort of tool to make the intelligent characters feel better about themselves. The dumb characters are a mirror held up to show us what we shouldn't be by the smart people who show us who we should be. It's a comfort thing. A comedic safety net facilitated by Gilligan, Homer, Peter Griffin, and a ton of other men (how come there aren’t many dumb female characters?). Idiocracy completely inverts this whole paradigm by making 2% of the cast smart (in an average way) while the rest of the cast is completely stupid. This is probably scary to a lot of people.
So, we have two ends of the spectrum here: a drama about an intelligent world falling into chaos because it can't reproduce and a comedy about a stupid world falling into chaos because it can reproduce. I ended up liking Idiocracy for many of the same reasons I liked Children Of Men, albeit comedic angles on the same concepts and issues. For a comedy, Idiocracy did an amazing job with its sense of place ranging from a skyline of incomplete freeways and tied together skyscrapers to a Costco the size of a small country. None of the shots are particularly realistic. They have a 1960's Star Trek matte painting look to them that may seem cheesy to a lot of viewers, but actually go a long way in creating a world that looks as practical as it does improbable. You'll never look at Fuddruckers the same way! As far as the characters, they stay remarkably consistent; none of the dumb characters ever get smarter and none of the average characters (regardless of their intellectual advantages) ever actually save the world. Infact, there is no typical happy ending to the movie and it ends just as bleakly and inconclusive as it begins.
posted by weezie at
8:46 AM
3 Comments:
I fear for my will to live, but I want to see both of these movies.
I spent more than a few hours playing Grid Wars. That's good stuff. Hang on to your copy though, because the same people responsible for the shitty OS you are complaining about got the author to remove the program from his website (follow the incitti link).
Take a look at any Scary Movie and you'll see that studios have no problem releasing, and audiences have no problem seeing films with no smart characters at all. But your theory is not what this comment is about. The reason why this movie did not get any advertising is because it attacks corporations, real-life as well as fictional. Starbucks, Cost-co, Carl's Jr., Fudruckers, Gatorade, and many more. Fox dumped the film for it's strong and sometimes foulmouthed anti-corporate message.
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