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Cuarón Imagines a World Without the Children of Men

Cinematic futures tend to be awful places. Depicting a not-too-distant 2027 where humankind faces imminent extinction due to an unexplained plague of infertility, director Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men is just about as dreadful as such visions become, yet still offers hope.

Clive Owen (Inside Man) stars as Theo Faron, a low-level bureaucrat in Britain's Ministry of Energy. Theo is afflicted with the same hopelessness as the rest of humanity owing to the fact that no children have been born in 18 years. He also still is grieving the death of his own son during a flu pandemic. As one of the last states maintaining any kind of order, England's social services are crushed under the weight of illegal immigration, and all Theo or anyone else can do is wait for the inevitable: the complete collapse of society.

Until one day, when Theo's ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore, The Forgotten) ‹ now a freedom fighter against the martial law under which England organizes foreigners into deportation camps ‹ reappears to enlist his aid in smuggling a very special person out of the country: a young girl who is the first to have conceived a child in nearly two decades.

Cuarón (director of arguably the best Harry Potter entry, The Prisoner of Azkaban) maintains a personal story against the backdrop of broad events by maintaining focus on Theo. There's hardly a single shot without Owen, who is frequently the best thing about many of his films. Cuarón is generally careful about directorial intrusion encroaching on Owen's performance, except in an amazing sequence as Theo escorts Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey), the miraculously pregnant girl, to a safehouse in the country. It's a seven-minute sequence which, if it's indeed the single take it appears to be, is the most extraordinary car ride in a film since Spielberg's playful pirouette around an SUV in War of the Worlds. The sequence is emblematic of Cuarón's masterful balance of story, character and action.

Cuarón's future is plausibly convincing without benefit of spaceships, androids or rayguns. With mankind about to wink out of existence, there's been no reason to invent such tools; no one will be around to use them. Instead, there is the squalor you'd suspect from a crumbling global society. Aside from Kee and her possibly miraculous pregnancy, the only genteel aspect of Theo's world is his friend, Jasper ‹ Michael Caine (Batman Begins) in an atypical turn as a jovial aging hippie.

Children of Men made me reflect on the recent The Nativity Story, as they bear thematic and theological similarities. It also made me reflect that, with global warming, declining energy supplies and skyrocketing costs of living, the bleak future it depicts is closer to reality than Star Trek ever will be.

Swank Shepherds Gang Youths in Freedom Writers

One of the most familiar film genres, so familiar that I'm tempted to invoke the adjective "tired," is the classroom drama where a idealistic teacher must find common ground with incorrigible students. And don't you just know in the end they'll abandon their juvenile delinquency in favor of scholarly pursuits within the movie's two-hour run time?

Most teachers I've met have quickly dismissed this scenario as more wildly implausible than Night at the Museum, but writer/director Richard LaGravenese's Freedom Writers has the distinction of being a true story, which, now that I think about it, is what they said about 1995's Dangerous Minds, the film Freedom Writers most closely resembles.

LaGravenese's direction is prosaic, almost pedestrian, only really taking off in one remarkable sequence in which Hilary Swank (Million Dollar Baby), as real-life teacher Erin Gruwell, reads the personal journals she has assigned her gangster students to write. Gruwell sits alone in her classroom and, as she gets to each journal, the image of that student materializes in his or her seat, delivering a gripping monologue quoted directly from The Freedom Writers Diaries, the book that inspired the film. LaGravenese could have made a vastly more effective film just doing that, but instead, right on cue, he trots out every stereotype and cliché he can find, including the disillusioned principal (Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake), content to babysit her students until they're old enough for prison, and the disgruntled husband (Patrick Dempsey of TV's Grey's Anatomy), tired of being ignored as his wife works three jobs so she can buy extra books for her students.

Nevertheless, the film succeeds almost solely on the determination and charm of Swank, who, as Gruwell, achieves a spunkiness quotient good for three or four movies. If all teachers were like this, or even a handful of them, school districts wouldn't need hundreds of millions of tax dollars to buy property and build extravagant new facilities. All they'd need is some gumption and a few composition books.

The Good Shepherd Replaces Mafia with CIA

Nurtured for a decade, Robert De Niro's pet project shows he learned much from mentors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. The Good Shepherd is possibly the ultimate spy film, but it bears no resemblance to James Bond; not surprisingly, it's closer to The Godfather.

Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), like Vito Corleone, is an amalgam of historical characters, in this case mostly CIA counterintelligence czar James Jesus Angleton. As Coppola revealed about Corleone ‹ perhaps not coincidentally, the character De Niro played in The Godfather, Part II ‹ Wilson's destiny is determined by a childhood tragedy involving parental separation. Later, as an alumnus of Yale and a brother of Skull and Bones, Wilson's ascendancy is assured. But he's sidetracked from regular military service and a career in politics by an offer to oversee covert operations during World War II, followed by the chance to help create the CIA in the postwar world. Like the patriarch of the Corleones, Wilson finds the seat of power dominated by loneliness, for no one can be trusted.

Yet, there are differences between the Corleones and in the spooks of The Good Shepherd. Whatever else you can say about the Corleones, Coppola made you love them like a real family, whereas hardly a single character in The Good Shepherd has any passion whatsoever. To be good at his job, Wilson must be emotionless, and it's a credit to Damon, under the circumstances, that he can hold your interest for the film's nearly three-hour running time.

Damon is surrounded by a grand cast, including Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, Joe Pesci, John Turturro and De Niro himself as various cold warriors. The weakness is Angelina Jolie as Wilson's wife. In a film where the very point is the mundane everydayness of real spies, the introduction of her character is so brash that it completely disrupts everything, even eliciting unwanted laughter from the audience.

The cleverest aspect is the frame that envelops the story: The Bay of Pigs invasion has failed after someone in Wilson's organization betrays the United States. We follow Wilson's methodical investigation, as he flashes back to the events of his life that have led him to this point ‹ structurally, not unlike the flashbacks of The Godfather, Part II.

When it comes down to it, maybe the only real difference between The Godfather and The Good Shepherd is an economy of scale: When a Mafioso betrays his family, dozens may die; when a CIA agent betrays his family, it could be thousands. Maybe millions.

Black Christmas Slaps Brakes on Holiday Spirit

Like the kids, I too suffer post-Yule letdown, so I decided to see something that would make me glad it's all over. What better to bury the holiday spirit than Black Christmas, the tale of sorority sisters in their row house, fielding phone calls from a serial killer as they mysteriously disappear one by one?

I had reasons for being curious. It's a remake of a 1974 film that prefigured the slasher genre inaugurated by John Carpenter's Halloween. I saw the original once and it's cloudy, but I remember there was nice characterization by Olivia Hussey (1968's Romeo and Juliet) as a holier-than-thou sister mortified that she's become pregnant, with uproarious scene-stealing by Margot Kidder (1978's Superman) as a chain-smoking, liquor-guzzling, foul-mouthed cynic with no pretensions; and there was comparatively restrained direction by Bob Clark (director of 1983's A Christmas Story). The director of the remake is Glen Morgan, a guiding hand of TV's The X-Files.

So, I had fair expectations for this remake, but I couldn't figure out which one of the sorority sisters I was supposed to identify with as the movie's Jamie Lee Curtis wanna-be ‹ Katie Cassidy (When a Stranger Calls), Michelle Trachtenberg (Ice Princess) or Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Bobby), among others. The girls have no personality, flagrantly violate the "Don't wander off alone when being pursued by a killer" test, and you could care less when they meet their unnecessarily gruesome fates.

In the '74 version, there was real suspense as you suspect the phone-calling killer might even be Olivia's boyfriend, who keeps popping up unexpectedly. In this version, the anonymous killer is replaced by an intrusive backstory lifted from Psycho and merged with Halloween, with a little Silence of the Lambs tossed in as seasoning. All of this is seen in flashbacks that leave no mystery and slap the brakes on the present-day story. If you'll pardon the expression, it's overkill.

The irony is that the flashbacks, while gruesome, do possess a kind of demented genius simply because they're so outrageous. If Morgan had tossed out the idea of remaking 1974's quirky little stocking stuffer and developed the backstory into its own stand-alone entity, he might have had his own merry minor classic instead of a joyless retread.