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Children of Men (2007, Alfonso Cuaron)
What if winter is over? Not just because spring came early this year and we didn’t happen to get much snow, but over for good, forever? The snowy, bitingly cold six-month winter seasons of our childhood, a thing of the past?
What would the result be and how would we react?
It’s easy to project that the outcome wouldn’t be good. Global warming would speed up, agriculture would be knocked off its axis, entire countries would be submerged as the rising temperatures melted the polar ice caps and ocean levels began to rise.
It would be a bad scene, and it’s reasonable to imagine that people would become desperate and all hell would break loose, and the world – or at least large portions of it – would descend into chaos.
Those frightening thoughts – too real this winter, with little snow or ice marking the season – were rushing through my head as I left the cinema after watching Children of Men last week.
The film, based on a novel by P.D. James and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (Great Expectations, Y Tu Mama Tambien) is based on a premise that is so easily imagined it’s spooky.
The story is set in 2027, in England, in a world where humans have stopped giving birth, and no new babies have been born in 18 years.
The grim reality of the situation is brought home at the beginning of the film when the news is broadcast that the world’s youngest person – somewhat of a celebrity – has been killed.
Clive Owen’s character, Theodore Faron, greets the news grimly, but callously, and you get the impression – as he pours booze into his coffee – that he’s beyond caring about much.
England has fulfilled many of 1984’s prophecies. Near-constant public service announcements urging citizens to turn in illegal immigrants, constant surveillance, and the public exhibition of caged “fugees” all indicate it’s a grim state of affairs and apathy could get you killed in short order.
Theo gets a full dose of the reality of the situation when he is kidnapped by the Fishes, a rebel group fighting for the liberation of the imprisoned refugees.
His former partner and the mother of his dead child, Julian Taylor, played by Julianne Moore, whom he apparently hasn’t seen in years, is one of the leaders of the group.
Theo gets drawn – unwillingly at first – into the fight, which in some ways becomes his own battle for meaning and substance in a world that doesn’t seem to have much left of either.
Theo’s purpose – his sole goal – becomes protecting and delivering to safety a newborn baby, a “miracle child” -- the one life that can possibly bring hope and restore faith for the human race.
The lawlessness and chaos is portrayed brilliantly in an almost Mad Max style of delivery. And as the people around Theo begin to get killed off one by one, you get the full sense of the fragility of life and the desperation of the people.
But in one compelling scene, especially, you see proof that this world is not yet beyond redemption. A blizzard of fighting is taking place in a refugee camp where immigrants have been sequestered – with the military bringing in heavy artillery and waging war, seemingly indiscriminately on the largely innocent population.
As Theo and the child’s mother Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) attempt to escape a building surrounded by tanks and soldiers, the baby’s cries suddenly pierce the chaos, and the stunned soldiers and fugees stop fighting and stand in awe – almost worship – as the child is carried through their midst.
It becomes clear that this life, which Owen is risking his own to protect, has the ability to restore peace to a hopeless world, in Christ-like fashion.
My only real criticism of the film is the incredible abruptness of the ending. I wanted more. But perhaps it’s fitting. And it is definitely refreshing not to have all the ends tied up neatly, and as a result I’ve spent the last few days constructing what may have happened next – which I take is a good sign.
There are moments when the film is hard to watch – but it’s always in context and fits with the extreme sense of urgency as the characters race to accomplish their goal surrounded by madness.
But the few gruesome scenes weren’t as disturbing, to me, as the sheer plausibility of the story. The realistic portrayal of exactly how our world could be in just 20 years if we don’t stop screwing with it, and start fixing it.
It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
I’ve been on an old movie kick lately. In the past two weeks I’ve rented "Casablanca" and "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," and on the day before Christmas Eve some friends and I met up at the Bloor Cinema to watch "It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen."
Now, all three of these films are guaranteed to warm my heart and remind me of just how great, great cinema can be. But Frank Capra’s 1946 black-and-white masterpiece, "It’s a Wonderful Life" hit a whole new level.
Of course I’ve seen it dozens of times, but it’s one of those films that can be brand new all over again depending on your mood, the atmosphere and the people you’re with.
In this case, my mood was very festive because Christmas was just around the corner. The atmosphere – the Bloor – was perfect, complete with hot apple cider, baked goods, hot chocolate with Bailey’s and a crowd that clapped and cheered and sighed and cried at all the right moments. And the people I was with, of course, were the best part – good friends spreading their Christmas cheer, including two friends who for some reason had never seen it before!
No matter how many times I watch it, IAWL still has the power to bring tears to my eyes. It’s just such a compelling story. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a quick synopsis: George Bailey is about to leave his hometown of Bedford Falls to go to college, when he is asked to stay back and help run the building and loan company that his father started, and to stand up to the town bully, Potter, who is trying to take it over.
George agrees to stay, despite his dreams of travelling the world. He eventually falls in love and starts a family, and his presence in Bedford Falls makes the town a better place.
When things go badly, however, and the small loan company suddenly faces bankruptcy because of a simple mistake, George Bailey comes unhinged, gets drunk and mean, and considers giving it all up. At that very moment, in Ebeneezer Scrooge fashion, a stranger comes into his life and shows him what Bedford Falls would be like without him, and as a result how valuable his life actually is.
After the film we went out for a beer, and my girlfriend asked me what scene was my favourite. I had a tough time answering. There’s a scene where George and Mary Hatch, played by Donna Reed in her first starring role – meet again after their initial romantic spark has begun to fade. George comes to her house, and she has set everything up just so, in order to impress him and remind him just how lovable she is.
But George is in the midst of self-pity and bitterness at his fate, and the fact he feels trapped in the small town he once vowed to leave far behind him. While he’s there, a suiter calls for Mary, setting up one of the key moments in the film. George and Mary share the same phone talking to the caller, and despite George’s anger and Mary’s disappointment, a palpable chemistry develops between them as they talk. Volumes are spoken without hardly a word being shared between them, and eventually the phone conversation is forgotten and their romance is firmly re-established.
The scene is a key to understanding the battle going on inside George Bailey. He's deeply conflicted. He loves Mary, but he’s desperate to hang onto his dreams. “I want to do what I want to do!” he tells her harshly. That theme plays out through the entire film, when he’s forced to give up plans to go to college to run the business, when his dreams of travelling the world fall by the wayside, and when the depression hits and he calls off his honeymoon to save the building and loan.
The climax of the film comes when all those disappointments have added up and disaster strikes, and Bailey realizes that this time, all of his best intentions can’t pull him through, and he hits rock bottom.
In the wrong hands, this film could have become just another feel good story with a positive message. But Frank Capra’s directing, and James Stewart’s believability make it more than that – it almost becomes an illustration of the human condition. That’s due in large part to the honesty in the storytelling. There are heartbreaking, harsh moments, such as when George screams at his daughter to stop practicing Christmas carols on the piano, or when he grabs his son and holds him in a violently tight grip, tears streaming down his cheeks, only to shout at him a moment later.
But that stuff is real: George loves his family but when everything goes wrong they are the ones he lashes out at. That honesty lends a genuineness to the film and makes the ending so much more compelling.
Like "Casablanca" and "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," IAWL is one of those timeless films that can be seen over and over again, and can break your heart every time.
"Consumption": Kevin Patterson, 2006
Dr. Kevin Patterson has been fascinated with the harsh, barren landscapes and lonely seascapes of the Arctic since he first travelled there to practice medicine more than a dozen years ago.
Since then he's made regular pilgrimages to the tiny, isolated communities perched on the edge of Hudson Bay, first as a family doctor, then as a specialist in internal medicine, treating illness and disease.
At the same time, he's learned about this remote, rugged corner of the globe through the stories of the people who live there.
Those tales, many consisting of the heartbreaking life experiences that have come to define the Inuit culture in many ways, help form the basis of Patterson's first novel, Consumption.
Stranger than Fiction (2006, Marc Forster: Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball)
As a writer, it’s easy sometimes to get caught up imagining the way my autobiography is one day going to be written. Or, sometimes I’m even so vain that I second-guess my decisions, considering the likely possibility that one day someone will probably want to write a biography about my life. And I wonder about how well some of my dumber decisions are going to play out on the page.
There’s even a letter or two I decided not to mail because I wasn’t willing to one day be remembered for those words.
Yikes! Honest eh? I’m exaggerating a bit, I hope, but the point I’m getting at is that Harold Crick, Will Ferrell’s character in Stranger than Fiction, gets the random, unexplained opportunity to hear someone else writing the story of his life as he lives it out.
This is a thoughtful, smart film that will let you glimpse a side of Ferrell’s acting ability you probably haven’t seen before, helped out by scene-stealers Maggie Gylenhall and Dustin Hoffman.
In the trailers, this film was sold as anything from a flat-out comedy to a dramedy and a dark fantasy. It’s a little of each, but doesn’t fit neatly into any of those genres, smoothly mixing laugh out loud with heartfelt tearjerker moments.
Crick is so boring and normal when the film begins he’s almost a cliché. He’s almost painful to watch, going about his structured IRS tax assessor’s life, counting stairs and tooth-brush strokes and measuring the minutes of the day with his faithful wristwatch.
But somehow he’s still lovable, and he becomes more so as the plot progresses, particularly when he starts hearing a woman’s voice narrating, or writing, his life, and the things she says in her literary-sounding English accent begin coming true with startling accuracy.
So Crick does what most people do when they start hearing voices. He goes to a shrink, but that doesn’t work and he eventually winds up in the office of Jules Hilbert, a literature professor played expertly by Dustin Hoffman. He steals every scene he’s in with little eccentricities like his passionate obsession with the line ‘Little did he know.’ -- “I once taught an entire university course based almost entirely on ‘little did he know,’” he tells Crick, thus beginning their quest to find the writer writing his life story, and, we eventually find out, planning his “imminent demise.”
Along the way Crick meets Ana Pascal, a cute, ornery, down-with-the-man tattooed bakery owner played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. She’s the Queen West to Crick’s Rosedale, but she’s kind and lovable and he’s sincere and earnest, and somewhere along the way, as Crick’s search for the essence of his like leads him down new paths, she decides “I think I might like you.”
The crux of this story though, the real battle, comes when Crick and Hilbert find the author who is writing his life story, and has just overcome writer’s block to pencil out an ending that, like all her other works, ends in tragedy.
And the story that is meant to end with Crick’s demise is a literary masterpiece that won’t be the same if he lives. The question is, will the ending be sacrificed, or will Crick pay the price for literary beauty?
You should go and find out.
Catch a Fire (2007, Derek Luke, Tim Robbins)
I attended the Toronto press screening for "Catch a Fire," a new film starring Tim Robbins, Derek Luke and Bonnie Henna. It's the fascinating true story of a normal, working class man with no political beliefs who became a political activist/terrorist and helped bring down apartheid in South Africa. I was able to interview Shawn Slovo, who wrote the film based on interviews with the real-life Patrick Chamusso shortly after his release from prison. She is also the daughter of Joe Slovo, the leader of the then-outlawed African National Congress's military wing. Click here to read my review.
Half Nelson (Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps)
I watched Half Nelson with a friend who hates Ryan Gosling. He has a huge crush on Rachel McAdams and he’s actually met her on a few occasions, and they've had great conversations. On one of those occasions he also met Gosling, whom he says was a jerk.
But, he tried to put his preconceived notions aside and I tried to forget Gosling’s past roles in The Notebook and my personal favourite, his stint as Shawn on Breaker High, and we both tried our best to go into the film with an open mind.
And to be honest, it was easy to forget everything that came before, because Gosling is refreshingly new and genuine in this role. He’s amazing as Dan Dunne, a high school history teacher in inner-city New York.
He’s charismatic and riveting as a teacher and basketball coach who hates establishment and admits that the education system and his role in it are both part of the “machine” that is keeping the people down. He seems to believe in the potential he has to change lives and make a difference though, and it’s easy to accept that he’s the right person in the right place to actually do it.
In his classroom lectures he keeps coming back to this notion that there is conflict in everything. In one scene he describes the American civil rights movement to his black students. Butting his two fists against each other as he stands in front of the class, he suggests that at one time the people in the south who believed blacks were equal citizens were a minority. But they kept resisting against those who disagreed, and eventually, the minority became the majority.
The metaphor is a microcosm of what is going on in his own life.
He’s addicted to crack, and it’s increasingly becoming the majority that is smothering the minority – affecting his decisions and his actions and dragging him down, and robbing from his ability to connect and make a difference in his students’ lives.
He’s convincing in both of these separate roles, and continues to be believable as these elements of his life merge closer and closer together as they battle to overwhelm one another.
One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes when one of his students, Drey, played by Shareeka Epps-- a player on the girls’ basketball team he coaches –- discovers his addiction. He’s a broken man at this point, and she stays with him and takes care of him as he pleads, “please don’t leave me.”
The story hinges on this relationship and the trust that builds in their unlikely friendship, along with their mutual connection to the drug dealer who supplies Dunne’s habit.
And Drey is also in the midst of a struggle in her own life, with opposites doing battle inside of her heart. She’s at a crossroads, and you get the sense that her relationship with Dunne is the factor that is going to lead her down one path or the other – with vital consequences for the rest of her life.
Half Nelson is gritty and pulls few punches. There are some awkward and even painful scenes to watch – one where Dunne chaperones a high school dance while high on cocaine, another where he pays a late night visit to a female teacher, also while high.
This struggle, this ongoing battle that Dunne goes through, is always present. Even when he sinks to some of the deepest depths, redeemable qualities are almost always present, like when he arguably risks his life to look out for Drey despite the fact his own life is a complete mess.
"I had to do something, right?’ he asks.
Like Dunne’s life, and Drey’s, there are lots of unanswered questions and uncertain endings when the credits roll. What is certain though, is that both have real conflicts in their lives, real temptations pulling them away from what’s right, and their choices and dilemmas reflect real life crossroads that we all face -- decisions that have severe consequences.
Their problems are deep rooted, and the film doesn’t sort everything out and tie it up in a neat package because these are issues that simply can’t be solved neatly and quickly. In that way the film is painfully honest and serves as an accurate mirror for real life.
Broken Social Scene takes care of most of the soundtrack, using beautiful walls of sound and distortion to paint the emotional scenery for the film.
I recommend this movie.
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