Shame on whoever decided to release this film in the U.S. on December 25. From what I could tell from the various Top Ten lists I read, many critics did not have the chance to see (and/or fully digest) it, and it appears to be getting lost in the barrage of year-end releases. I don’t have much to add that hasn’t already been noted by Leo, Rumsey, Jenny, and Tom, but allow me to join the chorus of praise, and state that if I had seen it prior to our Year-End feature, it would have certainly been at the top of my list.
by Beth Gilligan | Source: Universal Pictures 35mm print
09 Jan 2007 10:14 AM | Comments (6)
I wish I could share in the general enthusiasm. It might improve on a second viewing, but first experience proved it to be a technically amazing but nonetheless hollow endeavor. At least I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt that it was in fact an unrecognized overload rather than too little; then again, watching anything the same day as Inland Empire seems, in my book, a recipe for misappreciation.
The only thing I could manage to do after my last viewing of Inland Empire was to lie supine in front of a kung-fu double-feature and watch the bodies float around the screen like amoebas. I would not have been prepared for yet another rabbit-hole descent through a dire, mythologized present, more conventionally narrativized though it may be.
But really there is only limited common ground for Children of Men and Lynch’s film, the two very best films of 2006 (in my opinion), both from very different camps. I’ve been hedging my bets all over the place by claiming Lynch’s to be the “best American film of the year” and Cuarón’s to be the “best studio film of the year,” but there seems to me an essential difference in the intent of each film that overshadows any similarities they might share. Cuarón may be attempting something more conventional than Lynch in terms of narrative and cinematic experiences overall, but his commitment to external reality, you might say, is no less convincing or even impassioned than Lynch’s commitment to internal reality. This is to say that Children of Men is the more political film and Inland Empire, for lack of a better word, the more metaphysical. Both films employ a pseudo-vérité aesthetic that owes a great deal to DV (Cuarón mimicking it; Lynch subverting it), and even use it to somewhat the same end (i.e. drawing the spectator into the action with a manipulation of the reality effect created by DV and the long take). But the effect of each film is completely divergent.
This is to say nothing of the vast difference in their financing and production strategies, which are at once more obvious and less easily parsed. But even if, when compared to Lynch’s implausibly self-sufficient self-branding, Cuarón seems hopelessly conventional, with his five-screenwriter script, fancy-pants DP, CGI warscapes, A-list cameos, etc., he still is able to exploit the massive industrial apparatus of contemporary, big-budget filmmaking to create a film that is at once as politically aggressive and smart as any that has come out of Hollywood (broadly speaking) in years. Toss in the fact that its characters are beautifully and sympathetically realized, and that it is a taut and compulsively watchable thriller, and I see no reason why, given the right amount of rest and recuperation, Cuarón’s epic studio picture shouldn’t compare favorably to Lynch’s homespun cinematic IQ test.
Throw into that the fact that seeing them on the same day was merely a matter of chance….phew. I will have to seee Children of Men again; even if I’d disliked the film, I’d have to for it’s technical accomplishments alone. Scenarios like this one convince me that single viewings of films such as these are practically useless. I’m going to hold off on my review until I’ve worked in #2. My hopes are that it shoots up considerably in my eyes; I liked the film, but I’d sure like to be in on what everone else seems to be experiencing.
From what I understand, Universal’s decision to release Children of Men on Christmas was merely their way of “dumping” the film during a time of the year when, theoretically, everyone would be too sloshed on egg nog and holiday festivities to notice. Though I’ve yet to see Cuaron’s critical darling—I’m slowly but mindfully trudging my way through the novel—I’m already willing to sit through multiple viewings, if to do nothing more than embarrass the old, out-of-touch farts at Universal.
Yeah, you really have to hate these studio execs. I’m sure there are some good ones out there – like whoever approved of PJ’s budget for Lord of the Rings, and anyone with integrity enough to make decisions that surely got them fired immediately thereafter – but the rest of them (and by this I mean the people who think that movies like Zoom and The Santa Clause 3 make for good entertainment): fuck ‘em.
I have no idea why this film is getting no love from the awards either. I haven’t really heard a legitimate critic of it; unlike say Babel.
Anyway I’m doing my best to get the word out. Just in case there are Oscar voters scouring the internet for obscure blogs about the year’s best movies.
rob
9 January 2007
7:47 AM
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