Top Films of the Decade: #13 Children of Men

Children of Men
(2006)



Children of Men is a film of stunning individual moments. The operatic car chase. The countryside escape. The breathtaking birth. The frenetic war zone. The infant whose mere presence -- if at least for a minute -- sparks a cease-fire.

Those fucking long takes. They kill me every time.

Like another one of this decade's greats, Inglourious Basterds, Children of Men parades scenes of walloping cinematic power like marquee floats in one grand, ticker-tape spectacle. I'll focus here on the film's strongest selling point: its visual bravura. These images, of course, propel a dystopian story with clear allusions to Bush-era politics, but I'll leave those musings for someone else.

At its best moments, Children of Men connotes key information not in any traditional way (i.e. dialogue, close-ups, music cues), but through its images alone. This approach forces viewers to remain alert and active, to not let the film wash over them. It also creates a dense visual world, one where peripheral billboards, TV screens, and graffiti harbor as much meaning as the expression on a character's face.

Director Alfonso Cuaron rewards us when we give him our full attention. Consider the birth scene, shot in a long take with substantial distance from its subjects. Clive Owen's character, an established alcoholic and burnout, scrambles to deliver the first child born in decades. He begins by sterilizing his hands. Look closely, and you'll see with what: a splash of his beloved Jack Daniels.

It took me four viewing to notice this detail. Cuaron could have highlighted the motion with any number of dramatic cues -- a close-up, a look of pause on Owen's face -- but, instead, he presents it as just another action in the frame. The moment, of course, signifies his awakening from boozed-out apathy. It's the kind of moment most commercial directors would sledgehammer, but, in Children of Men, it remains buried. And here's why:

"Cinema has become a medium you can watch with your eyes closed," Cuaron argued while promoting this film. With that in mind, I read Children of Men as an interjection. As movies gravitate toward a televisual style that stresses the 3 C's (Conversation, Cuts, and Close-ups), Children of Men illustrates the unique powers of purely visual storytelling. Unlike escapism, this film makes you work. Cuaron packs his frames with meaningful objects and gestures, then leaves us to spot and decipher them ourselves. Our eyes must remain open. His images, meanwhile, leave us wide-eyed.

Top Films of the Decade: #14 WALL-E

WALL-E
(2008)



Really, praising Pixar's a little unnecessary at this point. Who can deny the studio's output? In 15 years, Pixar has released 10 features -- nine critical darlings, 10 box-office behemoths. Can you think of another studio (or director, or actor, or producer) in the history of moving images whose work brings critics and their children to tears, in equal measure, time and time again?

WALL-E offers so many of Pixar's trademark treasures. All the obsessions are here: The Old versus The New, the value of collective action, the ills of materialism. Let's unpack those.

1) The Old and The New. Clearly, WALL-E is a love story between two machines -- a relic of the past and an emblem of the future. Analog and digital. Mechanical and computerized. Squint and you've got Woody and Buzz. But notice also how the film's structure mimics this divide. WALL-E begins as a throwback to silent-era storytelling, complete with broad comic and emotive gestures. With dialogue-free images of barren landscapes, the first half-hour echoes another cinematic depiction of the past: Kubrick's "The Dawn of Man" sequence from 2001. The film, much like 2001, then catapults into space, hurtling viewers out of the past and into a foreign future. We move from WALL-E's quaint, Chaplin-like world to a dystopian image of our current society. The effect is beautiful.

2) The Value of Collective Action. WALL-E attacks convenience culture like few films I've ever seen. Today, in 2009, we lurch more and more toward an individualistic society. We like cell phones, not landlines. Water bottles, not public taps. iPods, not the outside world. WALL-E takes a funhouse mirror to these tendencies, presenting a warped but not impossible logical extreme to our current lifestyle. We see a world of maximum comfort, convenience, and efficiency -- all at the expense of genuine human contact. WALL-E's climax, like Finding Nemo's, shows the positive outcomes of collective behavior, the kind that forces you to interact with your fellow man.

3) The Ills of Materialism. Convenience culture, like a living organism, creates waste. WALL-E forces viewers to confront this fact. It still amazes me, the audacity it takes to set the first half-hour of $180 million summer movie in a landfill. If the movie's critique of materialism is a bit on-the-nose, I for one forgive it. What a striking image: A society, founded on consumption and waste, leaves its ultimate mark on Earth -- skyscrapers of shit.

Top Films of the Decade: #15 United 93

United 93
(2006)



In his unassuming way, director Paul Greengrass reshaped English-language cinema this decade. Many, I'm sure, would argue for the worse. His jittery-cam technique, pejoratively labeled run-and-gun by David Bordwell, has become the go-to tool for crafting tension and urgency. Greengrass' imprint marks even the biggest of blockbusters (i.e. Star Trek). No doubt, the trend infuriates lovers of classical cinematic norms. I won't mount a defense of shaky-cam here; such matters often fall on taste, anyway. I will, however, argue for United 93 as the perfection of the form.

In a way, United 93 was a sequel to Greengrass' Bloody Sunday. Both films used the same techniques -- nonprofessional actors, hand-held cameras, location shooting, naturalistic lighting -- to present an ambiguous historical event with documentary-like claims to authenticity. Both movies also portray a dichotomy between personal heroism and institutional incompetence. The Battle of Algiers and Italian neorealism have clearly shaped how Greengrass makes films, while this decade's love of reality TV gives United 93 its uncompromising sense of dread. You can't really defend jittery-cam on intellectual grounds; cinema, after all, is artifice. A shaky image is as constructed as a stable one. But, employed as a technique like any other, the Greengrass style hits you with enormous visceral shock. Just as noir lighting evokes moodiness, the Greengrass style evokes immediacy, terror, the unexpected -- even the cameraman could get knocked to the ground. Commercial cinema means manipulating audiences for a desired emotional effect. Given the amount of time we spent watching reality TV and YouTube this decade, I can't imagine a more direct way of achieving that emotional reaction than what Greengrass has done here. United 93 shook me in ways I didn't know films could.

Counting down the top 15 films of the 2000s

Later today, I'll begin a top 15 countdown of what I believe to be the best films of the 2000s. So let's get right to it.

The Biden Birther Manifesto featured on "The O'Reilly Factor"

In my obituary, this will likely get mentioned in the first four paragraphs.

The Biden Birther movement

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Thoughts on Funny People

Funny People is a bizarre, 146-minute dramedy about dying and dick jokes.

(Minor spoilers)

Let's start from the beginning: I adore Judd Apatow's previous work. His first two features (The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up) were unambitious and beautiful for it. Both had logical beginning- and end-points from which to hang a narrative based on improv comedy. In Virgin, the story begins when Steve Carell's friends learn about his virginity. It ends when Carell loses it. With Knocked Up, we start with Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl having unprotected sex. We end with Heigl giving birth.

These plots sound facile on paper, but Apatow's genius lies in how he riffs off a simple premise. Judd's work is strongest when he crafts a charming story, fills it with believable characters, collects a pool of razor-sharp comics, and lets them loose on his material. Within this formula, Apatow acts more as ringmaster than director. His films unfold like a form of controlled chaos. Effortless, plot-driven stories collide with the sloppiness of individual scenes. Such is the pattern with Judd's first films: Tight overarching narrative, loose distinct sequences.

And, for me, this works. The films are long, but their narratives remain in perpetual motion. Judd drives the story, while his actors -- through their breathless asides about Munich, Steely Dan, and pot -- careen it into a ditch, scene after scene. The sequences breathe with the slow-flow of real life; they don't feel like mere plot points.

After two films, Judd already seemed like an auteur. Both his features explored this idiosyncratic structure, creating a style of American comedy uniquely Apatow-esque.

Which brings us to Funny People. Judd's apologists will applaud this movie for its "mature" and "complex" narrative. But the difference between complex and incoherent, mature and self-serious, is a big one. With Funny People, Judd bites off a miniseries' worth of material and streamlines it into a feature. Imagine "Freaks and Geeks," Judd's beloved 1999 TV show, as a feature film. Imagine the character arcs and narrative turns paraded one after another. Much of the charm would evaporate, wouldn't it? Suddenly, each scene must have an overt purpose, because when you're dealing with a half-dozen characters in a shorter run-time, those Apatow-esque digressions give way to the bottom line: plot.

Let's take one scene from Funny People to illustrate. Toward the end of the film, Adam Sandler, Leslie Mann, and Seth Rogen watch a video of Mann's daughter performing a Cats number. As they watch, Sandler repeatedly flips open his phone to read texts, then cracks a crude comment about how the clip would have been even funnier on acid.

More than any moment from Judd's previous films, this sequence paints in broad strokes. The scene exists solely to illustrate how Sandler can be a jerk. It functions as a plot point, nothing more. Later in the film, Mann uses this moment as ammo for why she should stay with her husband -- because Sandler didn't cry during her daughter's performance. Had Sandler just faked interest like a normal person (his character is, after all, a "good actor"), it follows that Mann wouldn't have had second thoughts, and the course of the film would have shifted dramatically. But, instead, Sandler play the scene like an ass, because that benefits the plot. Sandler acts illogically for the convenience of our story. Judd then overplays an already-dismal hand, cutting to multiple reaction shots of Rogen and Mann looking disgusted. With zero subtlety, Judd telegraphs his plot point: Maybe Sandler isn't ready for a family after all. Maybe Mann should stick with her husband.

Not every scene plays this clumsily, but the greater point remains: Large Cast + Commitment to Character Development + Multilayered Plot + Limited Run Time = Corners Cut. At least in this case.

Had I made Funny People, I would have cut the number of scenes and padded the length of the ones remaining. Apatow, god bless him, is the only director working in mainstream comedy who provides too much character development. As an extreme reaction to There's Something About Mary's brand of surface-deep comedy, Judd adores his characters and their every motivation. And, here, it's to a fault.

For the sake of telling a modest story effectively, I'd cut the follow scenes and subplots:

• Rogen's romance. I'd cut the entire thing. Again, this feels like one giant plot point. These scenes exist because Apatow wants to establish that Rogen has a stronger moral compass than Sandler, at least when it comes to women. He needs to do this, of course, for the convenience of his plot. Rogen takes the moral high ground in the film's climactic airport sequence, and Judd wants to avoid having this character trait come out of left-field. So, he uses Rogen's romance to show that Seth has a traditional, romantic streak. He's the kind of guy who thinks asking a girl on a date means you're officially "dating." I'd tone down Rogen's moral hysteria in the last 45 minutes, thus eliminating the need to prime viewers for his antics with a forced romance.
  
• Sandler's family. Cut the scene with his sister and the one with his parents. Unlike the conversations in Knocked Up between Seth and his dad, these scenes play like lifeless, obligatory stabs at character development.
  
• Eric Bana's affair. This doesn't eat up much screen time, but it's lazy and a cheat. To make viewers feel better about Mann's behavior, Judd throws in a few lines about Bana straying. Develop this further, and you'd have something. As is, it's a shortcut to show that Mann is unhappy in her marriage, and a cheap ploy to create viewer sympathy for her. Plenty of people have feelings for past lovers, even if their current partner isn't a schmuck.
  
• iTunes playlist scene. No human being would storm out of a room because 30 seconds of some acoustic guitar ballad (one which they've presumably never heard) sends them reeling. Further, no one would ever put an acoustic guitar ballad on a mix designed to cheer up a friend.
  
• Celebrity cameos. Judd has a lot of power these days, and with a $70 million budget he can afford to indulge in excess. But these scenes rarely added to the story, and, even worse, they weren't particularly funny. One of Knocked Up's clunkiest moments involved a Ryan Seacrest cameo. Here, we get Eminem taking easy stabs at his anger-management issues. Scenes and entire characters feel rushed, but boy was that Norm Macdonald cameo worth it.
• Dick jokes. I've yet to hear a good argument for the movie's wild tonal shift between sentimentality and crude humor. Some might say the tension between the two is "interesting," but I'd more call it nonsensical. What are dick jokes meant to signify? The man-child mentality? If so, why does the film's mature character (Rogen) pop just as many dick quips as the movie's adolescent anti-hero (Sandler)? These jokes flesh out the film's unique tone -- subdued and languid, with the occasional burst of juvenilia -- but my question is why? I fear Judd inserted them to keep our attention, which doesn't say much for his meandering, aimless storyline.
  
• Opening credits. You have video of Sandler making crank calls when he was a young comic, and I'm sure this footage means a great deal to you. So does the whole film. Funny People is clearly your labor-of-love project, your Synecdoche, New York. But just watch the clip again, Judd. It's just not that funny. Would have been hilarious if you were there, no doubt. But, on screen, to open your film, it's a red flag for what we're about to get: a heaping scoop of self-indulgence.Save yourself 90 seconds and cut it. It'd make a killer special feature for the DVD.
  

Now, I've been pretty hard on the film, but this comes from disappointment more than anything. Were this Judd's first film, I might be writing about an uncompromising new voice in American comedy. And there's a lot to like here. The film does have laughs and a few touching moments, including a lovely scene with Sandler at Thanksgiving dinner. Jonah Hill makes me laugh every time he opens his mouth. But, in the end, I'd have to agree with the critical community: Funny People is a shambles. It's one big cauldron of Judd's trademarks, taken to the extreme, and with little regard for coherence.

Perhaps this comes down to taste, but I tend to prefer modest films that execute their goals with precision over behemoth, mixed-bag ambition projects. I prefer Eternal Sunshine to Synecdoche; No Country for Old Men to There Will Be Blood, The Orphanage to Pan's Labyrinth. I'd call Funny People a failure, but one worth seeing.