Realism C

A while back I caught up with a critics' favorite, Children of Men, about which I can mostly only muster very bad things to say. (Disappointments like this are what, in part, prevent me from staying as comprehensive as I could be on the apparently important new releases each season or year.) Tripping over itself to make hackneyed decisions as quickly as possible - most of the time - Children even goes so far as to have a baby who conveniently never cries ... until of course, it is narratively convenient for the sound of a crying babe to touch the humanity deep within the military-industrial complex, and cause soldiers to lower their weapons. What point is a dirt-smudged face, or the glorious thrill of depicting a "radical underground," in the face of such illusionistic wish fulfillment?

Of course, to be too disappointed in Children of Men would probably be to give too much credit (or at least the wrong kinds of credit) to the system which had produced the film. A lot of my problems with Children stem not from the film being incompetent than from my utter distaste for its organizing principles, which precede and will outlive it. Only a poor, callow sort of masochist could truly (a) exhibit the rudiments of a taste much superior to the Hollywood companies, and also (b) continually let the jaw drop at failure to live up to these standards.

{ - Hollywood produces a steady trickle of decent middlebrow films, and puts out a fair number of good genre films. Of course, Hollywood also bleeds into non-Hollywood in these respects, e.g., the EuropaCorp family, which is working wonders in putting out vulgar/ian beauties. Who could deny that any one of the Transporter movies is far, far better than most films that get nominated for Best Picture these days? Even Taken - which is basically EuropaCorp consuming zombielike, shamelessly, a D.W. Griffith purity narrative - has its fine efficiency of storytelling, competent performances, and fewer impulses to make a solipsistic trendy mess of itself than a lot of big-budget films. The number of real Hollywood masterpieces the past decade is shockingly low, though, which is why the people who early on pointed to contemporary television as (at least) the US's closest industrial a/v equivalent to classical Hollywood were, we must admit, quite correct. - }

One of the problems with a film like Children of Men, then, is not so much that it fails on some level of realism, as that it feints toward certain kinds of realism (sociopolitical "hardhittingness," like a TV current affairs show in thick black eyeglasses) by means of the scaffolding of sheer fantasy ... the fantasies of grime, privation, and dystopia that are well-worn in Hollywood storytelling.

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Related points, on another movie (one I haven't seen yet):













"A look at the above production still shows that the people who make these films haven’t a clue what dirt, grime, poverty or desperation really look and feel like. The trailer showed more of the same – again the fraudulent clothes out of costumes, theatrically gritted up but nothing like what a pair of pants worn a week on a farm look like, much less the endless months McCarthy’s book depicts. And ditto for the burnt out cars, wrecked towns, and the glowingly lit skin of our protagonists." (Jon Jost)

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Recent promos for CNN International's "Beyond Borders" have irked me in their smarmy, privileged shallowness. Always, the modernist-enlightenment call to progress, innovation, going beyond borders, a new perspective. Delivered with sharp suit & glasses, a British - or, if American, moneyed - speech (a sign that you're not one of the Fox News faux downhome anchors), and an earnest gaze. And then, after the fearless call to go beyond, we get ... the soundbite.

Of course, as with Children of Men, to be too disappointed in this is to risk the foolishness of granting too much credit to begin with.