What luck, two great Children

Hey, we're lucky, two great movies open this weekend.

Little Children, a suburban drama from director Todd Fields, follows two unhappily married folks and the local pedophile as they all try to grab some happiness. Unlike a lot of movies with intertwining stories, each one of the plots is engaging. Fields knows how much weight to give each character and how much humor to blend in with the pathos. It's a perfect little movie with a lot of humor and humanity, but still left me queasy and drained. If you've got the stomach for something serious this weekend, go see it.

Now how is a drama about suburban life more depressing than a dystopic future where humans have lost the ability to procreate and society has broken down around them? Maybe it's that effervescent Michael Caine who can makes every movie better. Now Children of Men is no cheerful holiday fare, but director Alfonso Cuaron knows better than a humorless navel-gazer like Darren Aronofsky. Yeah, we're the last generation of humans. Yes, society broke down and millions of people are being held in camps, but you can still find something to smile at. Like Michael Caine getting stoned! Anyway...if there's a great movie about the alienation of modern life and xenophobia paralyzing the world, it's not Babel. It's Children of Men.

I saw "Children of Men" this weekend and had a first: after the movie, I went into the restroom and sobbed for about 10 minutes. I think it had something to do with the director's style. The last half hour of that movie involves the two (and 1/4) main characters trying to escape a battle-torn refugee camp. The point of view is seated so closely to the main characters', that the viewer feels oppressively entrenched in the action. In other words, you are right there. This feeling is further underscored by the randomness of violence in this movie. There's no music to prepare you for it, bombs go off and people get shot just like in real life--without warning. The immigration allegory in this movie is explicit--taken to its most illogical end--therefore, I was able to view it from a certain emotional distance. The less explicit Iraq allegory, though, present in that painful, drawn-out last half hour, didn't allow me that luxury.

Me again. I finally saw Little Children and thought it was pretty darned awesome. (Great book, too.) I think it was Flannery O'Connor who talked a bushel about inevitability--when the things that happen to characters aren't so much expected or coincidental as they are an inevitable collision. I felt like this movie did a good job of portraying that. And Todd Fields is masterful when it comes to creating tension--the painful kind as well as the hilarious kind.

Have you seen Field’s In the Bedroom? Not a perfect movie, but the use of silence was artful. It was the first time I'd seen a director visually translate the white space that occurs in prose (in this case, Andre Dubus’.) And that he didn't use that same trick in Little Children tells me that he was paying close attention to Perotta’s text and what made it unique. Field’s directorial style doesn’t eclipse the writer’s.

For the record: the football scene in Little Children just made my top 10 right next to the diaper-theft scene in Raising Arizona.

I saw the movie 19 Jan. From reading the early reviews, I half expected a new variation on Nevil Shute's classic "On the Beach". While it has elements from several of his other novels, I guess it's pretty much the opposite. Shute based his novel on the idea that the British (Australians) would maintain tradition and good behavior until the silent end. I guess both agree that the world ends "not with a bang, but with a whimper"[TS Eliot]. As I remember, Shute never even addressed the underclasses, or the boat people, etc. I thought CofM was way too dark about the situation, though. I would expect the British to be much more competent about maintaining order and good attitudes. In my analytical mind, I couldn't understand why none of the other mammal species had reproductive problems. I found it hard to believe that teachers and social workers would form some sort of resistance, just because their clients no longer needed them. Everyone seemed to be well-fed and full of energy. I wouldn't have expected that. I couldn't see how a new baby would be a threat to anyone, that it would need any sort of rescue. Who's wealth and power would be threatened? In other overpopulated societies, it's the elder people who are left behind. And don't you think that other centers of civilization would be pulling back together in other parts of the world. I guess, I can't buy it, and I wonder what the message really is, and who is being accused and being put on the defensive here? In Nevil Shute's period, we knew it was nuclear missiles and the fear of incompetence amongst those responsible for their management.