{"id":698,"date":"2007-01-07T01:24:41-05:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-07T06:24:41+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2007\/01\/07\/children-of-men\/"},"modified":"2007-01-07T01:24:41-05:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-07T06:24:41+00:00","slug":"children-of-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2007\/01\/07\/children-of-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Children of&nbsp;Men"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='e-content'><p>This afternoon was mostly taken up with a viewing of <cite class=\"title\">Children of Men<\/cite>.  No spoilers here unless you&#8217;re <em>really<\/em> sensitive to things like knowing that it takes place in England.  Some random impressions:<\/p>\r\n\r\n<ul>\r\n<li>It&#8217;s one of the most realistic, and therefore effective, near-future representations I&#8217;ve seen; I read some of the headlines in the newspapers on the windows where Julian and Theo meet and I can absolutely envision them happening in the next twenty-odd years.<\/li>\r\n<li>Jasper has a line of dialogue about a future-past event that I&#8217;m certain was the seed that started the whole storyline.<\/li>\r\n<li>I was surprised twice at where Jasper&#8217;s story went, given one of the stories Julian told about Theo&#8217;s past and an event that was telegraphed as a red herring later on.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n\r\n<p>So was <cite class=\"title\">Children of Men<\/cite> any good?  Clive Owen (Theo) was, definitely; Peter Mullan (Syd) and Michael Caine (Jasper) were entertaining; and although I was initially annoyed by Pam Ferris (Miriam) and Claire-Hope Ashitey (Kee) they grew on me and had me caring about what happened to their characters.  And it&#8217;s a great concept; a somewhat familiar one, but turned on its head.  But the last act left me cold.  From the first scene, and for the rest of the first two-thirds of the movie, I was completely bought-in, yet somewhere around the bus ride I started to lose the vibe and by the end it seemed to just be going through the motions.  (The soundtrack under the abrupt closing title card was a nice touch, though.)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<p>A solid three stars out of four.  Readers of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerebert.com\/\">Mr. Ebert&#8217;s<\/a> will recognize the use of his scale, and should also remember his caveat about comparing artistic works using absolute numeric values.<\/p><\/div><div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This afternoon was mostly taken up with a viewing of Children of Men. No spoilers here unless you&#8217;re really sensitive to things like knowing that it takes place in England. Some random impressions: It&#8217;s one of the most realistic, and therefore effective, near-future representations I&#8217;ve seen; I read some of the headlines in the newspapers&hellip;","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"mf2_syndication":[],"venue_id":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}