Pigs, That Was The Sin

This weekend I viewed two nearly entirely disparate films, by two directors who don't have much in common - Children of Men by Alfonso Cuaron & The Wild Blue Yonder by W to the muthafuckin' erner Herzog. The tie that binds? Both are set in the future.

Cuaron's gripping but flawed work is set in 2027. Women have been infertile since 2007, Britain is the last "civilized" country (I think?), & anybody with an accent is summarily rounded up & sent off to animalistic refugee camps. The youngest person alive is eighteen years & some odd months. To Cuaron's credit, what actually sounds like heaven to me (the part about no kids, not the rest of it) looked like hell. It was so gray, so drab, so depressing, that I actually wanted to see a baby. Clive Owen was great as the grudging knight Theo, & Julianne Moore was luminous as ever. (If she keeps it up, she's going to eventually age more Catherine Deneuve-ish than Faye Dunaway, thank heavens.) As for Michael Caine - I didn't even recognize him til halfway through the movie. Nuff said.

The environment is tense in Children of Men. In the opening scene, a bomb explodes in a cafe, which is pretty much the only sweet relief you get out of this movie; by which I mean, the remaining hour & 45 minutes are spent with the bomb ticking - awaiting catastrophe - something going wrong. Sometimes it does. Just as often it doesn't. Grrr. It's getting a bit annoying to try not to reveal plot details. Me & my principles. I will say that I adored the ending.

Generally speaking, Alfonso Cuaron has had my heart ever since A Little Princess was released in 1995. It's an exquisite film, one of my favorites. I've also heard good things about Y Tu Mama Tambien, though I've not yet seen it. Great Expectations kinda blew, but I'll blame that on studio malfeasance & the insufferability of its leads, Gwyneth Paltrow & Ethan Hawke (um, ew). I did enjoy his take on the third Harry Potter. Overall, I think he's an extraordinarily talented filmmaker who has in this case crafted a largely extraordinary film.


Herzog's vision of the future comes from an unknown point in time. He posits that microbial bacteria from the Roswell spacecraft created an illness which threatened to wipe out the human race, but was barely contained. A team of scientists were sent off in a spaceship to discover an alternate habitation; a replacement Earth, just in case. The story is narrated by an alien (Brad Dourif) from a dying planet called The Wild Blue Yonder, whose inhabitants made the long journey to Earth, only to build a failed shopping mall; they are not super-slick superior life forms, but pace per (me no speak good English) Herzog, they are aliens who "suck". Their home planet's atmosphere is helium & the sky is frozen. But words & plot are overall in short supply in Herzog's "science fiction fantasy". The poetry of the images is paramount; the words just tie everything together. Herzog uses both found & documentary footage, as well as Brad Dourif's excellent performance, to magnificent effect; the music is key as well. (But music always has been very important to Herzog's films.)

I LOVE Herzog. I adore him, I respect him, I admire him. He has a vision. It is a strong vision which runs throughout his oeuvre. "Man, Nature. Nature, Man." Aguirre vs. the Amazon. Fitzcarraldo's boat vs. the mountain. The innocent Stroszek's struggle with the fictional American Dream. Bruno S. again as Kaspar Hauser against the villagers (actually, although more widely known as the drably dubbed The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, this one was released in Germany with the (roughly translated) title Every Man For Himself & God Against All, which pretty much sums everything up right there). Oil fires in Kuwait during the first Gulf war. Shit, Herzog himself walking 500 miles from Munich to Paris with a film print under his arm to "save" the film critic Lotte Eisner, who was deathly ill (it worked!). And more recently of course he's undergone a bit of a renaissance with the justly celebrated Grizzly Man (to my unexpected yet endless delight - anything good for Herzog is good for humanity).

The Wild Blue Yonder also has a pretty great ending.

Although I would love to continue, I should probably be doing work at this point. Long story short - both excellent films, both very much worth the time investment.