Why I should have seen it already:

My Dad watches this movie at least once a month. Also, everyone seems to be flabbergasted when I mention I haven’t seen it yet.

Now that I have:

Babies have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Since babies are the only thing in the world cute enough to keep people from killing each other, people start to kill each other! The whole world has fallen apart and Britain has become a totalitarian state with a firm anti-immigrant stance.

We meet Theo (Clive Owen), the only person who seems immune to the hypnotizing effects of babies and young people. He barely bats an eyelash when the youngest person in the world is killed while everyone else cries about the jerk dying. They don’t seem to mind the cages in the streets filled with sobbing elderly foreign people. Nope, those cages are just great. And the crying old people? Even GREATER. But a celebrity dying? Tears! Tears up to their ears!

Anywho, Theo’s life sucks. Fortunately he gets to hang out with Jasper (Michael Caine), his awesome hippie friend, in his awesome log cabin. Seriously, what a great cabin in the woods. It’s all board games and books and loud music and catatonic victims of government torture and happy dogs.

The bessssst.

Later, Theo’s old flame (Julianne Moore) shows up. I’d give you her character’s name but she’s going to die pretty soon so why bother. She works with a group of poorly named rebels: The Fishes. She wants Theo’s help getting a girl across the border. Theo says no but then the next scene he’s in a pub going along with everything the Fishes say. Make note, in Britain “flat” means “apartment”, “lift” means “elevator”, and “no” means “yeah Ok”.

Theo meets the young woman who needs to get across the border, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), along with a woman way to old for dread locks (Pam Ferris) and everyone gets into the car. During the car ride stuff goes wrong. Then Theo’s ex-wife dies! (See? Told ya.)

Back at the Fishes’ base, Kee shows Theo her pregnant belly after talking about cow boobs. She tells Theo that his ex-wife told Kee only to trust him. So she trusts him. Like, right away. She puts all her faith in Theo when he learns the Fishes were behind the attack which killed his ex-wife and want to use Kee’s baby as a rallying symbol for a revolt. Theo and Kee and dreadlock lady BOOK IT.

Slowly.

It’s a very slow but very intense chase scene where Theo is pushing a car down a hill. It’s my favorite scene of the movie! The frustration and stress and silliness make this scene what escaping from the Fishes would really by like.

Later, it’s revealed whoever helps Kee is cursed to die. Jasper sets up a way to get her to The Human Project who are scientists trying to fix the world’s lack of babies. Then Jasper dies. Dreadlock lady helps Theo and Kee get to the bus to take them to the refugee camp where they’ll meet a contact. Then dreadlock lady dies off screen. A dude tries to take Kee and Theo to his personal boat after seeing the newborn baby. He gets shot in the head by the Fishes. Eventually every remaining character besides Theo and Kee are left in a city which is obliterated by bombs. At which time, Theo gets tired of all the rowing and bleeding he’s been doing and dies.

Then The Human Project comes! Sorta in the knick of time!

The Verdict:

Dang, what a great movie. The atmosphere and the documentary-like steady cam shots made everything on screen feel actual and tangible. The camera is always present in the physical space without jostling around and making it hard to focus. Even when the film turns into an urban warfare action flick, the steady came never wobbles enough to make you lose your lunch.

The locales of Children of Men are these wonderfully mundane places with something wrong about them. For instance, Theo is walking through an abandoned and decaying elementary school, with crayon drawings still up on the walls, when a wild deer runs out of a classroom. The school could have easily been dark and dusty but we have seen that in zombie and apocalypse movies before. Keeping it brightly lit with sunshine and that dang deer popping up unnerved me more than echoy footsteps and shadows could.

The visual style is great too! Everything in the city, from the buildings to the people, is gray. But when the film goes to Jasper’s house it seems like the warmest dang place in the world. I cannot stress enough how much I’d like to live in Jasper’s house. Heck, I’d even force the straight-edger in me to tolerate Jasper’s pot growing/selling/smoking/talking about.

Children of Men‘s narrative is always moving forward. Even the lulls are there to deliver information which will pay off for the characters later. There is an extended scene where Jasper tells Kee and dreadlock lady about Theo’s deceased son. Later on, Theo instructs Kee on how to burp her daughter as he dies.

As for characters, Kee is pretty likable despite all the misery following her around. Jasper’s the best clearly, and his crooked-cop-friend-who-speaks-in-the-first-person, Syd, won my heart. Even after he is killed via a car battery to the face…

Theo’s a little bland though. You don’t really know much about him besides his past, and those details are never all that specific. He also really throws himself into the protection of Kee. You are never given a reason as to why he’d do this but the movie moves so quickly you don’t often have the chance to wonder.

This is a small complaint in regards to this awesome film though. It manages to be “intense” without being “gory”. So maybe one of these days my mom will watch it with my dad. (Probably not.)

Tags: Children of men, clive owen, michael caine, Netflix Queue of Shame

Why I should have seen it already:

It’s frequently referred to as one of the great Jack Nicholson roles. Though mainly I know of the film because Homer Simpson once referenced it.

Now that I have:

Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private eye who’s a little bored with his regular routine of catching spouses cheating on each other. He yearns for something different, something exciting. But then Evelyn Mulwray shows up and asks him to find out if her husband is cheating on her.

So what the heck, he does.

He follows Evelyn’s husband, Hollis, who is in charge of all the water in California or something like that. I think he finds the water? Or he makes it? He’s like a combination of Aquaman, Moses, and a nerdy guy.

Regardless, Jake follows him all over the dang place. He follows him to reservoirs, he follows him on romantic boat rides, he follows him to the ocean at night where Hollis just likes to be creepy. Jake eventually grows tired of waiting for Hollis to finish up his business with the Pacific and does my favorite part of the whole movie. Jake takes a pocket watch, sets its time, and leaves it right behind one of Hollis’s car tires. The next day Jake returns to retrieve the clock which has stopped on the time Hollis drove away. So clever!

Wait, aren’t pocket watches expensive? That’s a pretty expensive way to be lazy. Jake is probably the guy who turns the AC down super low so he can sleep with his heavy comforter during the summer.

(Also, yeah! THAT was my favorite part. What does that tell you about Chinatown?)

Anyway, Jake gets pictures of Hollis hanging out with a young lady. This causes a scandal in the news. Hollis’ water-controlling days might be over! Jake figures his business with the Mulwray family is over. BUUUT… turns out the lady who hired Jake wasn’t actually Hollis’ wife Evelyn, and the real Evelyn is ticked off!

Then Hollis dies. Then there’s a lot of talk about water. Water politics! Water treason! Water double-crosses! Water secrets!

Jake, wanting to know more about the water secrets, visits the real Evelyn and establishes a personal connection with her so it doesn’t feel as wrong when he eventually has sex with her in the film. Jake also notices something shiny at the bottom of her garden’s pond. He ignores it, but he makes a mental note to return to it later in order to solve the murder.

Anyway, around this point I had trouble paying attention to the film. It was pretty boring. Let’s just say Jake has a few run in’s with the law, a dude cuts his nose real like jerk, you almost see a dead guy’s penis, the lady who was pretending to be Evelyn turns up dead, Jake and the real Evelyn have sex, we learn the young lady Hollis was hanging out with was Evelyn’s daughter, we learn Evelyn’s father Noah Cross wants the daughter for himself. Why? Because she’s his daughter too.

Yeah… let that “Eww” sink in.

The film ends with Cross revealed as Hollis’s murderer. Why? Something about water. I. Don’t. Know.

Cross wants his incest-daughter back but Evelyn won’t let him. Evelyn drives away with her daughter and the cops shoot at her because… aw man I don’t know. Seriously, at this point in the film nothing is making any sense to me. The cops just open fire on this slowly driving away car in the middle of a neighborhood. I guess they just wanted to feel productive?

Well, they manage to accomplish something (Shoot Evelyn in the face) and Cross takes away his screaming incest-daughter. The cops feel like super jerks and let Jake and his friends go. I don’t even remember why they had them caught in the first place.

Probably something about water.

The movie ends with an innocent lady shot by the police and a incestuous child rapist and murderer getting away scott-free.

…Child ra– …Hey wait a minute!

The Verdict:

I’m not going to lie to you, I was unaware this was a Roman Polanski movie until his name came up during the credits. From that second on, I approached Chinatown with the expectations of “SO GOOD, it excuses you from the rape of a 13 year old girl”.

It did not meet those expectations.

I mentioned being bored in the movie’s description and I’m going to again right here. I WAS BORED. At one exhausted point I thought to myself “Surely, I must be nearly the end of this movie about water politics”. I was only half way through the film.

Viewing moments like that (as well as the raping of a 13 year old girl) kills movie experiences for me.

For a film trying to be noir, there aren’t many noir things about Chinatown. Jake isn’t hurting for money. Most of the film takes place during sunny California days. Jake doesn’t take many lumps during the film. The worst thing that happens to him is the nose thing, but it’s stitched up for the rest of the movie. Also he sleeps with a sexually abused woman, then hits her a couple times, and is still considered the “good guy”. So he gets off pretty easy for a noir hero.

Nicholson does great in his role, he adds a cockiness to Jake’s constant ignorance which is somehow endearing. Jake never knows what’s going on but he manages to smile and B.S. his way through the movie. Yet he’s a character who doesn’t manage to hold an entire film on his shoulders. Jake would have been more interesting as a member of an entourage, rather the lone hero.

Other than that, they seriously say “It’s Chinatown” a lot in this movie. Each time, they totally lost the chance to shrug up their shoulders and look into the camera. That’s a missed opportunity. That’s bad directing Mr. Polanski.

So, go to jail already.

Tags: chinatown, Netflix Queue of Shame