Back in LA - Children of Men and lots MORE

- So I'm back in LA after a very restful and relaxing time spent in CT over the last week ten days or so. Overall it was an excellent getaway. I had a fun New Years' spent in White Plains, NY, with Erica and her friends, saw a few other friends in CT, and caught up with family for much "quality time." I watched many a movie, and spent many hours engrossed in vicious one-one-one virtual combat with my brother. Yes, Matt and I hit up our usual hot spots like Luna's Pizza, and spent much time driving around, endlessly flipping the car radio station in hopes of stumbling across a good song on CT's terrible selection of stations. Doctors and dentists were seen, much sleeping was done (not sure if I ever really got off of West Coast time), and many meals were eaten at a cornucopia of Southern New England's finest eateries (Bloomfield, CT: proud home of a Ruby Tuesdays). Yes, I hit up the unparalleled pizza of Bertuccis and sampled a fribble or two at Friendly's, and even downed some pasta at Vinny T's. Yes, Manchester CT is practically mini-Boston now, with not only its own location of the famous Beantown Italian eatery, but the Buckland Hills mall is now home to a Newbury Comics! While the Buckland Newbury didn't quite have the same authentic feel or ridiculous selection of music, DVD's, and comics as in Boston, the same vague smell of used CD's laced with pot smoke still permeated the joint. Good ol' Newbury comics - I look forward to the day when there's one in every mall across America.

Some samplings of some DVD's I sampled while in CT:

X-Men 3 - watched with Matt and my dad as my dad had not yet seen it - still enjoyed it very much, Ian McKellan rules

V For Vendetta - man, this should probably have been higher on my Best of 2006 list - I actually love this movie more after a second viewing - Remember, remember!

Punch Drunk Love - I still really like this movie and think Adam Sandler is awesome in it, though my brother hated it for some reason

Bubba Ho-Tepp - friggin' awesome Bruce Campell B-movie with some of the funniest lines I've heard in any movie in a while ... "they crap soul residue," "Mr. Haaf!" -- my brother and I repeated these lines all throughout the week

Black Samurai - pretty terrible blaxploitation movie starring Jim Kelly, with some amusing villains and some funky tunes - good for some laughs

The Untouchables - wow, what an uneven movie - some of the sequences (the baby on the steps action scene in particular) are ridiculously awesome, but the movie constantly veers from hardcore gangster flick to cartoonish actioner ... still, I can see why some consider it a classic

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 3 - the dead guy's shirt ep is hilarious, this show is great - I could easily watch a whole season in one sitting if I had the time

- Anyways, like I said, overall I had an excellent vacation and despite an all-day, at times turbulent flight back to Burbank yesterday, I feel pretty recharged and ready to get back to business.

TV STUFF:

- So long to THE OC. The announcement of the show's cancellation is no big surprise when looked at objectively, but at the same time, the show was SUCH a breakout hit when it first premiered, it's amazing to see how far it's fallen, both in popularity and quality. I watched Thursday night's episode and enjoyed a few scenes here and there, but overall it felt like watching a show on its last legs. Still, I hope that the show can pull itself together for a great final string of episodes. I'd love to see Julie Cooper reemerge as an out and out villain and go out in a blaze of glory, to give the show some real oomph before it goes.

- I had been looking forward to the KNIGHTS of PROSPERITY, but was pretty disappointed with what I saw last week. Donal Logue is reliably great, but the rest of the cast and the characters they play are completely cartoonish, and not in a good way. The jokes are occasionally semi-funny, but feel like the kind of humor that a few high schoolers could come up with after watching a few episodes of Married With Children or something. Just a very thin premise barely held together by totally one-dimensional and not particularly funny characters. I may sample one more episode, but this was a big letdown.

My Grade: C

- THE SIMPSONS was almost decent on Sunday, but was worth watching for a few laugh out loud jokes that had my brother and I cracking up, notably Moe, Lenny, and Carl trying to decide if they should walk outside in the rain to get to their car. Otherwise, most of the ep fell flat, and was yet another sign that the Simpsons movie may be in some serious trouble.

My Grade: C

- THE OFFICE was okay on Thursday, but overall I have to say it was probably the weakest ep of the season thus far. The whole Michael-Jan romance really stretched credibility and signaled a pretty jarring departure for Jan's character. I also don't really like the core idea of this woman helplessly falling for Michael - to me it is just really getting away from the fact that he is supposed to be a kind of pathetic, lonely loser. Also, the Jim-Pam drama was layed on waaay too thick this week. A whole scene of Pam crying? The Office is at its best when drama is played out through little moments - quick facial expressions, awkward glances, etc. I wish the show would stick to that. Anyways, there were still plenty of funny moments, and Steve Carell had some hilarious lines ("Sex!"). I'm just nervous that some this was an ep that relied way too much on tampering with the show's premise and characters rather than sticking to what works.

My Grade: B

CHILDREN OF MEN Review:

- I've heard all kinds of reaction to this movie, from people who hated it to those who have deemed it the top film of 2006. I was expecting to fall more towards the latter camp, as I have become a huge Clive Owen fan since his great work in Sin City and Inside Man, and in general am a big fan of REAL science-fiction - you know, not the kind that is basically a fairy-tale or cowboy shoot 'em-up set in outer space, but the kind that has its feet firmly planted in reality. And really, when was the last really good hard science fiction film? And no, I Robot, despite being based on an Asimov story, doesn't count, as the transition from words to film in that case was a perfect illustration of the difference between science-fiction and "sci-fi." So I was really looking forward to Children of Men, as it seemed to be a return to a style of movie that hadn't been seen in a while - something grounded in reality with a premise that makes you think "what if?"

And it's no big mystery to me why this film is garnering such rabid praise from certain contingents. It has to its credit a few amazing performances, as well as some of the most remarkable cinematography in a movie in years. It is also, as I mentioned, one of the few real, serious, speculative fiction movies in a long while - one whose premise is more grounded in human drama and today's headlines than in CGI aliens or gigantic explosions. Before I start on about what I DIDN'T like, let me highlight some of the reasons why this is a movie well worth seeing:

- The Premise: Children of Men hinges on a disturbingly interesting idea - that sometime in the near future, women stop having babies, and in turn the human race is slowly but surely heading towards extinction. While the movie never fully exploits the potential of this tantalizing idea, there are numerous concepts that DO serve to paint a strikingly realistic depiction of a world headed toward oblivion. Everything feels right here, every detail paints a convincing portrait of a fully-realized near-future dystopian England. From the grafitti on the city walls to the everpresent Quietus suicide pill to the realistic timeline that is established, the movie works so well because everything about it feels real and grounded.

- The Performances: Clive Owen is great here as our leading man - even without a fully realized character (the script's fault, not his), Owen does an incredible job of portraying a man who finds purpose in his life even as, initially, he, like everyone else on the doomed planet, is merely counting down towards The End. Similarly, Michael Caine is as good as always here. Finally getting away from the wise mentor role of his last few movies, Caine plays a strung-out, aging hippie who serves as a friend and counterpart to Owen. These two performances really drive the movie, but they are aided by an outstanding supporting cast as well.

- The Look: Director Alfonso Cuaran has done an amazing job of immersing the viewer in his fictional future. As I mentioned, every detail of the film pops with life and authenticity, and the stark and muted colors lend an air of foreboding meloncholy to the visuals. Where Cuaran really distinguishes himself though is with a number of action sequences that are done or at least give the illusion of being done in single-takes, with the camera staying in one postion, bobbing and weaving, as the action occurs around it. The first such scene is a riveting car chase, as Clive Owen, Julianne moore and company try to evade a bunch of maurading rebels. The pinnacle of the film though is a spectacular, lengthy sequence that takes place in a walled-in prison camp for illegal refugees, as government forces descend on the revolting immigrant population. With a full-on war from hell going on all around him, the camera follows Clive Owen as he attempts to navigate the warzone to find and protect his charge - the first baby born in decades. The entire sequence has the immersiveness of a next-gen videogame, and is truly the movie's showpiece.

With all that being said, Children of Men never fully realizes its immense potential. Despite great acting and directing, the movie's plotting leaves a lot to be desired, and I'd be really interested to hear the opinion of someone who was fully satisfied with the final script here, becasue for me, it just didn't get the job done. For one thing, the premise, as great as it is, quickly becomes very muddled. The core of the movie is the idea that women have become unable to have children, but as powerful as this idea is, it soon becomes overshadowed by the tension between the British government and illegal refugees, or Fugees (yep you read that right), who have fled their own failing homelands and sought refuge in England, which still has some semblance of (police-state enforced) order. This is interesting as a subplot, but it takes up a ton of time in the film at the expense of many plot points that never really get addressed. In a movie so grounded in reality, it is pretty frustrating to get so little insight into the hows and whys of the plague of infertility. The specific effects of the problem and its immediate reprecussions are never really addressed - we're never quite sure how things got from Point A to Point B. Also, the movie presents a number of factions that never quite make sense. We are led to believe that the government in this dystopia is corrupt and evil, but we're never really shown why, exactly. The alternatives factions vying for control of the first newborn baby in decades are similarly shady. The band of rebels initially led by Julianne Moore have ambiguous goals and seem to quite the mix of idealists and flat-out thugs.

And finally there is the Human Project - a mysterious group that is supposedly the saviour for all mankind and the only place where the baby will be safe and sound. Just one problem - we never are given any real idea what the Human Project is, what it does, or why it should be trusted above all others. I thought about this ambiguity for a while, and obviously it is intentional and done in the name of creating some grand metaphor for hope and whatnot. But any way you slice it, it only hurts, not helps, the movie, to have one of its main plot points be kept so frustratingly ambiguous. And ...

SPOILERS ...

The ending of the film, almost any way you look at it, is just jarringly disappointing, and drives home the fact that somewhere along the way the film lost track of what it was supposed to be about. Look, I am all for subtle, open-ended plot resolutions when appropriate and done well, but I don't think a single person in the packed theater I saw the film in was thinking "wow, great ending." I mean who DIDN'T want some kind of revelation about what the Human Project was or what it hoped to achieve? What we were left with was a big fat question mark that, had this been a serialized TV show, would have had a "To Be Continued" slapped onto the ending. The ending didn't really leave me with any real profound thoughts or grand revelation, just a big "huh?"

END SPOILERS

Finally, as I alluded to, much of the characters' motives are basically left up to our imaginations. We never really get why, exactly, Clive Owen is risking life and limb to help out the world's only pregnant woman. Why not, as he first suggested, simply turn her over to the government? As I said, Owen is great and full of twitchy charisma, but his character is, annoyingly, kind of a cipher. Julianne Moore seems moslty wasted as well - her relationship with Clive Owen is never given much spark to it, and she's out of the picture before she makes much, if any, impact.

So yeah, Children of Men = well worth checking out and is a movie that has much to be appreciated. But sorry guys, this isn't the next Blade Runner or anything, and in terms of fiction with similar themes, I'd suggest checking out the superlative Y: The Last Man series of graphic novels. On the other hand, this isn't a movie that can be dismissed, because while it never quite comes together to achieves greatness, many of the elements are there.

My Grade: B+

- Alright, that's all I've got for now. I still need to do a Rocky Balboa review, and I may check out a screening of Paul ("Robocop") Verheiden's latest, Black Book, tonight. Until then ...

HAPPY NEW YEAR.