Filmmakers have embedded their political views in their work from the birth of the industry (e.g., The Birth of a Nation) and director Alfonso Cuaron, along with his writing partner Timothy Sexton, use this 2006 movie as vehicle that asks viewers to think about the potentially calamitous effects of human activities on ourselves and our home. While the plot may be overly complex, the question asked is brash and unmistakable.

In Children of Men, Cuaron and Sexton (along with P.D. James, who wrote the 1992 source novel) ask, what if some of the chemicals we use, biological agents with which we experiment and thoughtless sexual activities we pursue combine to eradicate human fertility? Destroy it so completely that by 2027, the year in which the movie is set, no child has been born for more than 18 years and, despite worldwide quests for cause and cure, no one is remotely close to an answer. Indeed, Children opens with the suicide of Diego, that last baby born, who simply cannot handle a level of media attention that dwarfs what we see given to Britney, Paris and JLo.

A miracle is needed and perhaps that’s what’s happened. Theo Faron (Clive Owens), a UK bureaucrat, is kidnapped right off a city street, only to find that his abductor is his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore). Emotional bond intact despite 20 years having passed–they split up over the death of their baby son–Theo agrees to help her underground/terrorist group move a woman past internal security. First he agrees to do it for a money but after finding out the woman, in the country illegally, is pregnant (our miracle) Theo is driven to complete the mission.

Julian’s group has its own internal conflict, though, which surfaces immediately after the three (plus the girl’s midwife) get out into the countryside. Chiwitel Ejiofor, always excellent, plays the leader of a militant faction, Luke, but Theo, paranoid and suspicious of everyone, acts quickly to get pregnant Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) out of harm’s way. They run to his parent’s hidden rural home (the unrepentant hippy dad is Michael Caine), conveniently nearby, and then to a coastal refugee camp from where they hope to connect with a semi-mythical hospital ship run by the Human Project (humanity’s last, best hope?).

It’s all rough and tumble from here. Luke and his men have hardly given up, tracking them to Caine’s place and then the camp. The refugee camp is hardly a summer holiday all on its own, especially since they feel the need to hide Kee’s nearly baked state. Plenty of action and turbulence right up until the last frame keep our protagonists’ fate in doubt and no attempt to answer the bigger question is (smartly) ever made.

PR and advertising for Children position the film as a 21st century compliment to Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s post-apocalyptic distopian thriller, a reasonable proposition. The film is visually all dreary shades of grey, with England as rainy as Seattle, a hero dragged against his will into life and death skullduggery and no-longer wanted immigrants updating cybernetic replicants.

The biggest negative for me in this movie is what feels like unnecessary plot complications in the form of Luke’s faction. Given the anti-government tone of the opening scenes (manifested by brutal treatment of the refugees), I would have continued with them as the opposition throughout. Second, the overwhelming amount of gun play and explosions. Last is the minimal screen time for Ms. Moore, contrary to what the publicity leads us to expect. Where I might rate Blade Runner a 4 (out of five), the best I can do for Children of Men is a 3.

recommended

Garret recommended this 2004 French action flick months ago but it just turned up on On Demand. If you saw the Daniel Craig Casino Royale last year, remember the opening sequence where Bond chases a man through an African city and that action style, known as Parkour, came from this movie and specifically from David Belle. When I saw that Luc Besson co-wrote the script there was no question but to watch it right away.

Belle co-stars in Banlieue 13 with Cyrill Rafaelli, Bibi Naceri and Dany Verissimo; Naceri co-wrote the script with Besson and Pierre Morel directed. Honestly, though the movie was subtitled, I could have enjoyed the movie nearly as much with no dialog since the plot was ridiculous, anti-government paranoia mashed up with a drugs gang, and only serves as a minimal framework from which the action sequences were hung.

In Paris three years from now (six after the picture was released) the government has erected walls around the worst crime districts of the city and cut off all services to those left within. Taha (Naceri), a crime boss, is turned over the police on the last day before they pull out completely by Leito (Belle) but the cops arrest Leito and turn his hot younger sister Lola (Verissimo) to Taha’s tender care. Somehow Taha’s crew captures a neutron bomb in transit, so the Feds send in Police Captain Tomaso (Rafaelli) with Leito, liberated from prison, as his guide. Taha has turned little sis into his drug-addled slave, so that’s his motivation.

Anyway, the real treat from this movie is, as I said, the action and so visual I’m not sure I can describe it well with a few words. Parkour is a stunning combination of gymnastics, running and a sort of boxing-oriented martial arts fighting style; you can watch this movie and easily be thinking that a lot of the more acrobatic moves are done with wires. But you’d be thinking wrong as everything was done by the performers.

Imagine a track meet, a bunch of sprinters who hate each other and instead of running around a gravel circle they race through and across buildings and alleys. They jump over bannisters to go up and down stairwells, barely break stride as they leap from rooftop to rooftop, run right onto and over cars coming straight at them. Throwing nasty punches and kicks, dodging trucks and scaling fences along the way. At full speed!

recommended

Star Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg reteam for this alternative musing on the same thoughts behind their 2005 film A History of Violence (which I saw but apparently forget to write up here). Maybe it’s the improvement from having done this before, changing the setting from rural America to London’s urban core, that the sympathetic innocent is Naomi Watts rather than Mortensen, or that the capacity for violence of Mortensen’s character is not ever concealed, but I prefer Eastern Promises to the first movie. Maybe Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things) is just a better writer than Josh Olson.

A teenage girl, who speaks no English, dies giving birth to a daughter and a hospital midwife called Anna Khitrova (Watts) takes home the girl’s diary looking for clues to her identity. The writing seems to be Russian and Anna’s uncle Stepan is a Russian emigre, but he and her mother give her grief about it so she goes to the restaurant whose card was inside the diary.

There Anna meets Semyon (Armin Muller-Stahl), the owner, who agrees to take a look at the photocopy of the diary. He’s also, it turns out, patriarch of a family which belongs to the Vory V Zakone, a Russian mafia variant, and the girl was a prostitute who belonged to him. Nikolai Luhzin (Mortensen) is one of his soldiers, working for Semyon’s son Kirill (Vincent Cassell, familiar to US audiences as Clooney’s rival thief The Fox in the Ocean’s 11 movies), though he introuces himself to the pretty Anna as “just a driver.”

Just as in History of Violence, family is the fulcrum on which all else balances. Semyon and Kirill bring Nikolai into theirs–during the scene where he becomes a ‘made’ man the Vory V Zakon leaders insult Nikolai’s real parents and require that he renounce them–and Anna risks not only her own safety but her family’s as well.

The plot is dense, much of it delivered through the emotional tones of the actors’ performances and Knight supplies a number of twists that elevate Promises above the philosophical trap into which Cronenberg might have easily been snared. Plus, you need to remember this is a David Cronenberg movie and that means you won’t walk out without a shuddering over a few gruesome scenes; here he uses throat cuttings, perhaps attempting through repetition to push through the instinctive disgust to find a deeper meaning.

recommended

I never saw the ’80s TV show and wasn’t even that excited to see this big movie of the summer during its original run. The Big Guy popped up with a suggestion to see Transformers in IMAX, though, and that seemed like just the right idea, even if it was only playing up in the City.

The storyline is nothing exciting or surprising and, to be honest, there were a few bits I’d have left out to make it better. The truth is that Transformers is incredibly well-suited to the huge screen and massive sound system because of its scale, color and movement. Michael Bay knows how to make this kind of movie, though not all his efforts are as good: Bad Boys (I & II), The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor. Surely having a screenplay by the team of Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman (Mission Impossible: III, The Legend of Zorro, Alias and the upcoming Star Trek film) is responsible for a bit of the quality as well.

Among the cast I liked Shia LeBeouf, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, Anthony Anderson, Jon Voight and Rachel Taylor. The actors voicing Optimus Prime, Bumblebee and Megatron (Peter Cullen, Mark Ryan and the omnipresent Hugo Weaving!) were really entertaining too.

The big deal, of course, are the special effects. The way the transformations occur is stunning and fun. Fast too, thank goodness for the really cool computers and software we have these days, eh?

recommended

An impressive, different 2005 movie from a first time director and first time writer, Shadowboxer stars Cuba Gooding, Jr., Helen Mirren and Vanessa Ferlito as an offbeat family. Mirren and Gooding are lovers, though Mirren was also sort of his stepmother, who make a living as an anonymous, efficient team of killers for hire. Mirren, as the film opens, is dying of cancer and they take one last job together: killing Ferlito along with several men who work for her psychotic mob boss husband (Stephen Dorff, always good at the crazy roles).

When Mirren gets to Ferlito’s room and is about to finish the contract, Ferlito stands up and her water breaks. Yeah, she’s ready to give birth to Dorff’s kid, that’s how nuts he is. Mirren takes Ferlito with them, unable despite decades of homicide to take out a pregnant woman and her nearly born child. Dying has given her perspective.

Gooding is, of course, insane as well since he saw his father kill his mother and, shortly thereafter, his father get murdered too. Not to mention having the stepmom turn into his lover and instructor in the deadly arts. He has no ability to make decisions for himself; Mirren has done that all his life and, after the cancer takes her away, Ferlito does (though without realizing quite what’s happening).

Macy Gray and Joseph Gordon-Levitt give nice supporting performances as Ferlito’s best friend and doctor to both Mirren and Gooding and Dorff’s crew. Lee Daniels is the first time director and William Lipz the first time writer and I think the credit can be split fairly evenly. This is a decent movie, though not great, with interesting characters, a different sort of take on contract killers and romance and the meaning of family and good visuals and pacing.

recommended

This 2006 piece of dreck comedy was so boring that I hit stop after 15 minutes (right after Will Arnett’s character’s trial opens). I expected more from Let’s Go to Prison since it stars Arnett and Dax Shepherd, was written by the Reno 911/Night at the Museum/The Pacifier team of Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant and was directed by the funny Bob Odenkirk.

not recommended

Denzel Washington and Tony Scott do not generally make for a thrilling combination (e.g., Man on Fire) despite the quality of their work otherwise. So I skipped this 2006 release until the other day when the supply was really low and it was available in HD on demand. Deja Vu exceeded my expectations but that’s only because they were so very, very low.

Washington plays Doug Carlin, an ATF agent in the New Orleans office, when one weekday morning someone blows up a ferry full of kids and soldiers and their families, killing over 500 of them. Carlin catches the eye of FBI agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer, who gives a paycheck-oriented performance) after he points out that one body was actually found dead five minutes before the explosion and Pryzwarra adds him to his very special investigatory team.

Special because the team is using, for the first time in the field, what they explain to Carlin as a very high power satellite surveillance system that allows them to show in ultrahigh def exactly what happened anywhere within the target area from any angle, with high fidelity sound as well. The catch is that the system can only show what happened four days and six hours in the past, because it takes that long to process the input, and the data flow is so large that it cannot be recorded.

Pryzwarra and the system’s slacker savant developer, played by Adam Goldberg, try to hide the true nature of the device from Carlin but he’s too slick and figures out that it’s actually a camera which sees directly into the past. Or rather, creates a sort of tunnel into the past, through which they can send a signal. Probably a piece of paper, with a warning of the impending explosion, and maybe even a person. A person?! That’s so whack they never had the nerve to test the idea.

The biggest problem is that everything in the movie rests on this magic camera and, despite the explanation that Goldberg’s scientist character eventually provides, is something even this inveterate science fiction fan won’t accept. It’s a combination of a bad take on string theory and inconsistent technology, and the script by Bill Marsilli (whose previous credits are for a couple of kid’s TV cartoons) and Terry Rossio (a better track record but presumably brought in to fix Marsilli’s work) can’t overcome this basic failing.

not recommended

Released just months after V-E day and the end of World War II, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is fixed clearly on the post-Hitler Nazi threat, among the earliest manifestations of a pop culture meme that continued for decades in movies like the Dustin Hoffman/Lawrence Olivier thriller Marathon Man and Robert Harris’s classic ‘what if England lost’ novel Fatherland.

John Huberman is convicted of treason for being a German spy in early 1946 and his daughter Alicia (Ingrid Bergman) attempts to drown her sorrow in liquor and men in Miami. One night T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant) shows up at one of those parties at her bungalow and, in the morning when she wakes with a nasty hangover, suggests that a better way to get past her dad’s disgrace is to work for him to infiltrate a Nazi gang in Rio de Janeiro; Devlin wants her because one of the conspiracy’s leaders has held a crush on Alicia for years and is himself getting old enough to feel real pressure to marry and settle down.

The two fly to Brazil where a chance encounter with Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains) is arranged; a few lunches and dinner later, after Momma Sebastian (played with a delightfully nasty edge by Leopoldine Konstantin) can meet and give her blessing, he pops the question. Neither Alicia nor Devlin are happy about this since by now they are in love but the bosses don’t know that, nor would they care even so, and instruct her to accept.

While the conspiracy is disposed of by the end–could you imagine some other outcome?–the survival of the two lovebirds and their romance is far less certain. Hitchcock is the master of suspense and Notorious is considered one of his best films, Ben Hecht wrote a very strong script (he won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar) and Grant, Bergman and Rains all give terrific performances (Rains was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, losing to Harrold Russell’s outstanding effort in The Best Years of Our Lives) so this is a movie you really ought to see when the chance comes around again on DVD or cable.

recommended

Released in 1971, The French Connection was part of the post-hippy hardedged wave of films including The Godfather and Serpico that did a hard reset on American, and especially New York, cops and robbers police procedurals. This movie, directed by William Freidkin and written by Ernest Tidyman from Robin Moore’s novel, revels in the mundane emotions of a cop’s job, the long stretches of boredom punctuated by a foot chase that leaves everyone heaving for a breath and imperfections generated by base emotions like jealousy and spite, as well as the dirt and hassles which pervade modern American urban life.

Gene Hackman stars as NYPD Detective Poppy Doyle along with Roy Scheider as his partner Det. Cloudy Russo, Tony Lo Bianco as Sal Boca and Fernando Rey as Alain Charnier; Marcel Boffuzzi has a great cameo as Charnier’s muscleman Pierre Nicoli and Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso, the real life cops whose exploits were the basis of the film, also have small parts.

Doyle has about exhausted the patience of his boss and squadmates in the Narcotics Bureau, not to mention his liver’s capacity to clean booze from his blood when he notices a small time hood called Sal Boca throw around serious cash having dinner and drinks with some far larger fish. On a hunch he and Russo tail Boca and his wife, only to see them switching cars and scrambling to get home in time to open the greasy spoon they run in Queens. “Exercising discretion” the stay on Boca for a few more days until he meets up with Joel Weinstock, a man known for financing major drug deals.

This is enough, barely, to get their Lieutenant’s approval for a bigger operation with the FBI drug squad. Meanwhile, Boca really is trying to put together a French drug connection with Charnier, a Marseille mob boss, with financing from Weinstock. Staking out Boca brought Charnier onto their radar but he’s wily and experienced at detecting a tail.

Hackman establishes the screen persona here that he went on to use so effectively over his long, acclaimed career, ornery, convinced of his own correctness and resentful of authority and so it isn’t too surprising that he won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance. Scheider is also good playing the softer, suffering partner, willing to take risks and still clean up after Doyle and he was nominated for Supporting Actor but lost to Ben Johnson (for Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show). Rey and Boffuzzi are also really effective and Lo Bianco does well with, to be honest, the one major character not given much meat.

Friedkin and Tidyman also won Oscars for directing and adapted screenplay, respectively, and the movie took the Best Picture award for the producers. 36 years later much of what they accomplished here may seem less exciting but at the time was innovative; consider that three of the other Best Picture nominees were The Last Picture Show, Nicholas and Alexandria and Fiddler on the Roof, all quality films to be sure but nothing all that original, though the fifth was Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which was even more creative and rush-inducing.

recommended