Fans Start Grassroots Oscar Campaign for "Children of Men"

[posted by Sheigh] Readers of Something Awful, a comedy website that houses a very active group of forums, have kicked off a grassroots marketing campaign for "Children of Men" in an attempt to land the movie an Oscar for best picture. They believe the movie is being "completely ignored by Universal and dumped quietly at the box office despite glowing praise from critics."

Using a cocktail of top sites -- SA, YouTube and Digg -- and a video compilation of glowing critical reviews from MSM and the net, they hope to attract Oscar voter attention days before ballots are due. In seven hours and counting the effort has close to 1,000 Diggs, close to 300 YouTube views and blossoming commentary on SA.

Campaign mastermind blairerickson writes:

Well with at least another week to go before Oscar nomination ballots are mailed in, I think it would be helpful to do as much as possible to at spread the Best Picture buzz for "Children of Men" across the internet. Though the film is being snubbed by its studio, perhaps a last minute grassroots hype campaign could change the tide.

(His video compilation is cut to Jarvis Cocker's "*unts are Still Running the World" which plays over the end credits in "Children of Men.")

(Thanks David Poland and David Hudson/cphillips for crediting your local source. Appreciate your diligence --  24/7 365. Check out JS's comment below for a sound thrashing of COM.)

Comments

[JS]

Enough of this crap.

Children of Men, despite being a critical overachiever, does not work. More is being read into the film than the text carries and, aside from paper-thin plotting, shallow ideas and a few obviously bad filmmaking choices (stop pulling the camera away from the main action to show things that are already in plain site), there are three fundamental conceptual flaws:

1) The setup. Every woman on Earth is suddenly incapable of carrying a pregnancy. Okay. This is, quite simply, a biological impossibility. Period. While some critics have applauded the picture for not giving a background to the situation (the entire first act is pure exposition, from the TVs to the really fake-looking billboards to the awful dialogue of people explaining things to each other that they'd already know simply to satisfy the audience), this wasn't a dramatic choice. It was practical. Because there is no rational explanation. It can't happen. By stating a big concept and not developing it, this is the dramatic equivalent of Three-card Monty or WMD in Iraq. They state their big idea and move on as fast as they can before people can think about it: we're here, now deal with it. Unfortunately, the filmmakers don't deal with it. All they've come up with is a cliché chase story. And that's too bad, because, implausibility aside, a situation like this leads to some interesting hypothetical questions: how has this affected the major organized religions, what does purely hedonistic intercourse -- sex removed from it's biological function (aside from transmitting disease) -- do to human behavior, is there still need for an educational system, does the tax code have to be rewritten for families, is there a functional need for marriage, has AIDS infection become a disaster, has prostitution been legalized, have men developed impotency issues, why hasn't technology/science found a way to artificially incubate/clone humans, has this affliction affected other species or just humans, will the wealthy find a way to procreate while depriving the masses?... All of these avenues are a great deal more interesting and, pun aside, more fertile, in terms of drama, than what has been presented.

2) The ending. When the Tomorrow boat arrived the audience laughed out loud. Yes, this is cheeseball symbolism. (As was Quietus to coitus, and Sexhill replacing Bexhill on a sign.) And it doesn't work dramatically. When you're dealing with issues of mortality on a scale like this, your answer cannot be definite. It was obvious early on that Owen was a doomed martyr, so to speak. But when the film keeps asking over and over whether the Human Project is real or not, well...by ending with a triumphant YES! you've proven that all this movie is, is a studio chase picture shot in a handheld pseudo-realistic style. It's the style of art over the substance. The artistically correct conclusion is to leave the ending open. The hero is dead in the rowboat, the woman is holding her baby, and they're adrift in THE FOG: will they or won't they be saved? It's the same bullshit feel-good lie we've always been fed. And by shooting the picture in a handheld manner, a dubious style at this point (Handheld made sense once, 40/50 years ago, because less sophisticated audiences immediately recognized it in relation to the news footage they'd see, but nowadays, it's nothing more than a stylistic choice no different than any other. It's unfortunately become a trend of late, no doubt influenced by the war on TV and homemade mini-DV -- though by shooting on a format like Super-35, such a decision is pretentious at best, fraudulent at worst.), the picture seeks to conceal its dramatic weakness through "immediacy." Other recent pictures that have, to varying degrees of success, fallen into the same trap are United 93, L'Enfant, Gridiron Gang, Half Nelson and Babel. By shooting in a STYLE people associate with reality, audiences (and critics) are blinded to the reality of the egregious fast-moving/fast-cutting manipulation the filmmakers are subjecting them to -- disguising shrill melodrama as believable representation.

3) Finally, the most important question raised by the picture's scenario is never really addressed: should humanity survive, and does it matter? If this film were truly on the level of Kubrick, which some critics have haphazardly suggested, this is what it all would come down to. THIS is the true moral conundrum of this setup. Refugees? That's a complete tack-on issue the filmmakers were interested in dealing with. It's not inherent to the situation. The race issue is only interesting or relevant if...by eliminating procreation from sex, has this multiplied the number of interracial sex/relationships? Or, would this lead to greater spread of genocide? Would leading developed nations, under pressure to survive, be driven to a psychosis of maintaining "purity"? (In the movie, deportation seems more a function of Britain playing a political card.) But back to the main question. And this is why the picture never rises above typical mainstream entertainment. Should humans survive? Should a species that treats its own as we have, that's selfishly destroyed the environment as we have, that actually believes a God has created it to rule over the planet and that it is not of the planet like everything else, that lives in denial of these things as we do -- what is the moral answer? Even if this woman gives birth and humanity finds a way to continue, will it have actually learned anything? Or will it go on doing exactly what it's always done: be human? This isn't just about circumstance, it's about genetics. Taking this a step further, out of dramatics, does the moral question even matter? Isn't this ultimately about biology and survival of the fittest?

[sheigh]

I am Barbara Covett and you get five gold foil stars for such a carefully considered + thought provoking comment.

Let's do a YouTube response to the video, but we'll put an HVX-200 on sticks and just address your question: Does the tax code have to be rewritten for families (without children). I think that'll be dugg thru the roof.

[JS]

Not into YouTube. But I certainly won't say no to the HVX if you're paying.

(Though I assure you, Ms. Covett, I'm not into children, so you won't have anything on me.)

[B Weiss]

Jamie Stuart's comments are not insightful. I wonder why he'd even bother to take the time to write at such length over such non issues.

Attacking a movie over the plausibility of its premise would render about 99% of all movies irrelevant. Likewise the PD James novel the movie is based upon came out of news stories around the millennium that male fertility rates in the developed Western world were dropping at an unbelievably, statistically improbable rate.

Your criticisms of the ending are unfounded. Viewers find this film either to be far too bleak or to have some sense of deserved hope.

As for attacking handheld camera operating, that's just head scratching. It's quite obvious the film's sense of mise en scene and its use of unbroken takes, seamless CG, lack of closeups and convential AB coverage, and naturally lit photography is revelatory.

As for your final statement, the film wants you to ask yourself that. I think it quite ingeniously somehow refuses to capitulate to easy answers or moralizing and indeed the characters who cause the most damage do so guided by differing extremes of ideology. You walk out of Children of Men with questions; about what the nature of hope means to you, of what a world without a future (metaphorically and eschatologically not so far from the general tone of world events now) poses, and whether or not despite the absolute most horrific despair would you be able to carry on as Theo does, to commit to believing in something no matter how hopeless?

Your criticisms are ill founded and reek of reactionary contrarianism.

[JS]

Obviously, if I'm asking/saying these things the movie didn't question/answer/enlighten any of it. I found there to be virtually nothing revelatory about this film or its ideas or its aesthetics that hadn't been dealt with in A Clockwork Orange, Mad Max, Blade Runner, Dark City, The Matrix, 28 Days Later, A.I., Minority Report, or War of the Worlds. Among others. In fact, this movie is so conceptually second-rate and paper thin to most of those movies, I'm having a hard time understanding what the critics find so astonishing.

And truth is, so far nobody HAS written anything convincing about it. They're just gushing. Time to plug the hole.

Is it a bad movie? No. But in relation to the praise being given it, somebody, whether it was me or whoever, needed to step up and explain that you're all out to lunch. I stand by what I said. You haven't convinced me.

[ann]

Good to read of this grassroots support, Anne, and thanks for your response, B. Weiss - you said all that I was thinking, only much better, so just as well I was delayed in writing. (If you want to hear some profound words on the courage to act in seemingly hopeless circumstances, listen to Gregory Peck, Brock Peters and Cleophus Thomas on the DVD commentary of To Kill a Mockingbird. Thomas says "the mistake is to despair when despair is rational.")

Seems to me that this year, three directors - three fathers - gave us an amazing triptych on children in a dystopian past, present and future, with Pan's Labyrinth, Babel and Children of Men.

Besides what Weiss mentioned, the Children of Men had me thinking that there's a lot of lip service to the "miracle of birth" - but what if, in all our actions, we truly treated every baby in the world as a miracle, with the same reverence given to the one in this film, with no hierarchical caste system between the wealthy and the destitute, "our kind" and the Other? One of the women says "very odd, what happens in a world without children's voices," and at the end, as the credits finish and the song fades away, we're left with the words "shantih, shantih, shantih" (peace, peace, peace) and the sound of children laughing and playing. At the end of Babel, the director dedicates the movie to his two children, with words to the affect that they are the brightest light in the darkest night.

The Gotham Awards got it right with their tribute to Cuaron, Inarritu and del Toro. And if the Academy doesn't get it?

It won't be the first time.

[David]

There have been a few other naysayers.

Look here: http://davidchute.journalspace.com/?cmd=forward&entryid=426

And here: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmRlMmI2NDViZWI5MDdjZGFmN2MyZTliOTM1NDZjYWM=

[ann]

JS says those who like this film are "just gushing," but to me it seems like a lot of gushing from those against it. And above, David cites Hibbs' "brilliant" (cough) review in the National Review titled "The Children of Hollywood's Deformed Imagination: Alfonso Cuaron Is No PD James," which actually begins with high praise and then spends the rest of the article in the stillborn debate of "book vs. movie" that turns into a defense of conservative ideology.

Cuaron has said he wasn't looking to make science fiction, that he wanted to address contemporary issues. That was the filmmaker's choice in interpreting the material. Cuaron is not trying to be PD James and movies are not books. This is not news. And a "streamlined film"? It was nearly 2 hours, and yes, out of the multitude of issues Cuaron could have addressed, he did have to narrow it down. Screenwriters and directors do that. It's called an adaptation.

Has this devolved for some into a political argument, as a commentor on david chute's site calling it a "leftie fantasy in which do-gooder NGOs save the world from immigrant bashing fascists"? Huh? You assume a humanitarian group called "The Human Project" are lefties? And use NGOs as a pejorative? Interesting. I mean, we're looking to the National Review for cinematic insight? Is that sort of like getting the definitive take on Brokeback Mountain from The 700 Club?

Hibbs speaks of the chant of Shantih - peace - as "context-less." Really? A world at war gives no context for the chanting of peace? Is that a conservative position? He takes an unsourced Cuaron quote and devolves it into Whitney Houston singing "I believe the children are our future." Besides the fact that I couldn't order dinner in a second language, much less wax eloquent describing cinematic philosophy like Cuaron (see his interview in filmmakermagazine.com for a better quote), Hibbs' patronizing reduction reminds me of a boy who flips through a National Geographic magazine for boob shots. If that's really all Hibbs got out of what Cuaron said, it seems to be more about Hibbs' mind than Cuaron's vision.

In the filmmaker magazine interview, Cuaron talks about wanting "the audience to invest their own sense of hope into that ending. So if you're a hopeful person you'll see a lot of hope, and if you're a bleak person you'll see a complete hopelessness at the end." And I guess if you're a conservative person you might see liberal dragons so you have something to slay when the lights come on. But why go there?

You might see that everyone has their shadow. The supposed activist heroes trying to save the baby against dark forces have their own dark side. When one of them shoots two policemen, it is not taken lightly. The camera leaves the main characters and focuses on their tragic fate. Divisions crumble further with rows of soldiers or police who could easily take the baby, but stare in wonder, and let them pass unharmed. Someone tells the pregnant woman not to trust anyone - no organization, no person - except for Theo. So, some could say, trust no one but God. And "lefties" don't save them in the end, but people with hope in tomorrow.

I saw a mere shell of a world without children, and the mere shell of man who knows viscerally what it is to lose a child. When told that cigarettes kill, he gives an almost imperceptible nod, like that's the point. But at the end, when he could be focused on his own crisis, he gets this small spark of joy out of the simplest memory - how to burp a baby. The movie is filled with these very real, very moving, subtle moments from a man who summons the will to act under extraordinary circumstances because he's got his priorities straight - life. That's not political. That's not polarizing. That's humanity. That's us.

[David]

It's shocking, I know, but thera actually are viable alternate points of view on some of these issues. Though maybe not where you live.

[John Callender]

JS's comments do indeed reek of contrarianism. When any movie is getting lots of over-the-top praise, there always seems to be a smallish subset of critics who bash it, and bash it in direct proportion to the amount of praise the film is receiving. It's a way for the critic to assert his or her own importance. "You may think this work is of a high aesthetic order, but _my_ aesthetic sensibilities are so heightened that I find this to be trash. _My_ praise is reserved for more-worthy fare."

Yeah, well, good for you, JS. You have a long list of questions that you think Cuaron should have explored instead of the ones he did. While it's impossible to say that the movie you've imagined would have been worse than CoM, it sure sounds like a pretentious mess to me. But since you haven't actually created your movie, I guess we can only take your word for it that it would have been a superior achievement to Cuaron's.

On your point about the movie's premise, you write, "This is, quite simply, a biological impossibility. Period." Wow. Not only are you the greatest filmmaker ever to (not) be recognized for your talent, you're also an expert in medicine and genetics and public health, with mental powers so great that you can know, with a certitude that sounds to me more like the product of a humanities major than of any direct experience with the practice of science, that a particular event is simply impossible. But consider: Since the film presents the mass infertility as something that the world's scientists have been unable to account for, wouldn't it have been illogical for it to be something that could be readily explained by a random layman?

On the ending, why do you choose to interpret it as definite? When I saw it, I immediately thought that, since the whole movie has been from Theo's perspective, the boat looming out of the fog could be his dying fantasy, rather than a reality. I note that the boat remains in the distance; we never see its crew making contact with Kee. In effect, with the employment of a little more imagination and constructive engagement with the movie, you could have had exactly the ambiguous ending your aesthetic requires. But again, when I try to picture the version of the movie that you believe would have been superior, it sounds much less hopeful and less fulfilling than the version Cuaron actually delivered.

[Daniel]

I think the movie doesn't need much defending against some people's nit-picking criticism; it stands on its own. Besides the technical achievements the movie great because of what it left out. I don't want to be force-fed the world. The world itself that the movie takes place tells its own story. All the viewers need is context for the story, not an extra hour to explain the socio-economic ramifications of the premise; we're smart enough to fill in the rest. I really am of the philosophy that less is more.
I've just been telling everyone to see this movie.

[Patrick]

I just wanted to take time out and say, that the movie was really good, it was intense due to the camera and i was really surprised by the special effects, especially in relation to woman after 9 months of Pregnancy. Children of Men is a movie worth watching.

[John Callender]

Obviously, what the Academy was looking for was a slapstick sequence involving Theo and company stealing Jasper's body from the Fishes and smuggling it in the trunk of their car. Or maybe a feel-good ending involving Kee doing a risque song and dance number at the Little Miss Bexhill contest.