Children of Men: Movie Review

Children of Men (2006): **** and 1/2

Britishers, and more specifically, Londoners will be forgiven if after going to the movies they suddenly plan to pack their bags and just migrate forever. For if film-makers are to be believed this year, the English subcontinent is fast heading towards an intolerant totalitarian state with a government that, if failing in manipulating our fears through a conspired bio-weapon attack (V for Vendetta) will end up smoking cities galore in order to deport every one of the millions of illegal immigrants (Children of Men). To make matters worse in the latter’s case, pollution and/or radiation exposure will have rendered every woman in the whole world inconceivable. Every, but one. Her name’s Kee and Children of Men is essentially a story of her rescue to a sea sanctuary (namely the Human Project) first by an activist Julian (Jullianne Moore) and then her reluctant ex-lover, Theo (Clive Owen) amidst a raging war between the illegals and the state’s armed forces.

The real dilemma here is mine and that is, from where do I start complimenting this movie. Its heady mixture of tension, violence and poignance is so enrapturing, I was speechless when I came out of the cinema. After watching Alfonso Cuaron set new precedents in teenage drama (Y Tu Mama Tambein) and fantasy (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), I can easily say that Children of Men stamps its presence on the genre of sci-fi as loudly as only the likes of Spielberg or Wachowski brothers in the recent times could.

The use of hand-held camera, first of all, which immediately transports you into this grimy and murky London of 2027, just besides Theo. And the best part is, the scenes are filmed with whole sequences captured in a single shot. The camera would lazily follow Theo as he buys an early morning coffee (the news of the youngest boy in the world killed for refusing an autograph blaring on a sleek plasma screen on the wall behind), then as he steps out into the shabby Regent Street, the camera would casually capture the buses with animations for advertisements, motorised cycle rickshaws, rubberised cars–all caked to their windows in dust and moving amidst a heavy cloud of smog, and then the camera would come just behind Theo as he takes out his whisky bottle and starts to mix some liquor in his coffee, and just like that–you hear a loud BANG of a bomb exploding a few yards away from where Theo is busy having his early morning caffeinated booze. Yes, this is a single scene. (you can watch the snap-cut edited version of this in the trailer below)
Another masterful sequence is when the camera is placed inside the car which Julian and Theo, alongwith two other people are using to transport Kee. One moment the camera is busy capturing Julian (n the front passenger seat) and Theo (in the rear seat) playing, and then as the driver screams, the hastened camera captures the absolute sight of horror that sends shivers down one’s spine. A car in flames from the forest is being rammed right in the middle of the road in plain sight and before one can make sense of what’s happening, hundreds of raging illegals come out pelting stones at the car (the sound design is such that every hit almost hits the viewer’s head). Now the driver starts to reverse the car, and suddenly a motorcycle with two helmeted guys comes racing towards the reversing car, and a shot is heard. The front windscreen of the car cracks, yet the race between the reversing car and the bikers is on as the latter come hurtling towards the car’s side. Theo slams the door open which sends the guys and their bike toppling, first noisily on the car’s bonnet and then on the road. And just as the camera captures that and turns, you see a profusely bleeding Julian on the front seat shivering. And all that I just described in this whole para is one scene, captured in a single shot. The technique is just so perfect in extracting every bit of paranoia and the potency of violence in this, and all other action sequences, the images haunt you long after the credits have rolled. And kudos to the director and the actors who so expertly managed to convey the lightning quick transitions so naturally.

Coming back to imagery, the extrapolation of the current state of affairs to 20 years down the line is so well-conceived and well-realised by the production team and the cinematographer, that its realism is horribly credible. Given Britain’s inability to safeguard its borders nowadays, the constant infiltration of tens of thousands of refugees, an overworked Home Office, messed up deportation rules, growing burden of asylum seekers on country’s resources– the future that Children of Men paints isn’t improbable at all. In fact, in scenes like mass evacuation of towers of council flats, of refugees put in cages, of residential buildings used as militant abodes, streets littered with dead bodies with tanks firing into people’s houses and armed gunmen firing back from inside, activists and sloganeers on every road– the deliberate irony in the transformation of a city like London into what resembles a present day Basra or Beirut is both bold, totally believable and as a result, spine-chilling. But all this is the background of the movie, if the film-maker’s casual hand-held camera is to be believed. It might get clouded with dust or splattered with blood, but the camera just wouldn’t leave Theo’s shoulder.

Which is fine enough because the larger story that needs telling here is the impending end to humankind in absolute absence of procreation (the exact whys and hows are given a cold shoulder, a la the PD James book the film adapts itself from). Kee’s pregnancy clearly is a phenomenon and Julian’s terrorist comrades, who are fighting for equal rights for immigrants, understandably want to use the black girl’s baby for their own means. So now, its all upto the alcoholic average-Joe Theo to rise up to the occassion and deliver. Which might sound a little cliched a plotline, but pitch in the fact that our hero doesn’t even have proper running shoes, the baby can’t be made public and Julian’s aides are on Theo’s tail, and you have a menace filled thriller with odds greatly stacked against the good man. The main story’s template is simplistic with a defined start, middle and end but just like in the background, the foreground has some neat sequences— notably the one where Theo, Kee and Kee’s caretaker take refuge in a dilapidated school building and just as the caretaker mouths “the world is a strange place without children”, one just nods away in agreement. The progression of Kee’s pregnancy all through her rescue trip keeps one on tenterhooks. As if her contractions weren’t enough to raise questionable glances, she breaks water the minute an interrogating officer slaps and demands why she’s not answering him. The sequence of her childbirth and when Kee carries the child in the middle of what seems a raging battle are two exquisitely filmed sequences.

Surprisingly enough, Cuaron hasn’t left his wacky sense of humour behind (only he can have the main hero wear flip-flops for half the film’s running time) and the sharp, witty dialogues provide the much needed relief from the suicidally grim on-goings. There’s also Michael Caine, as Theo’s hippy dad who’s just such a likeable old fella, he’d have you in stitches and in tears within no time.

I can’t say this enough but if Children of Men and its principal players (the director, the actors, the technical crew) don’t get nominated in next years Oscars, the frigging Academy can as well close itself down and declare itself dead (though I have said this so many times by now, the sentence has lost all meaning, but it never harms as a reminder hehe). Stupendous is the word for the performances by Owen, Caine and the supporting ensemble, while the ultra-photogenic Jullianne Moore doing the terrorist leader act is classy. The production design is as elaborate and as painstakingly detailed as the likes of Minority Report, which is a godsend for a screenplay as ambitious as this.

Rather than taking the theatrical, symbolism and metaphor-filled path of V for Vendetta (not rubbishing that film either, just emphasising the difference), Children of Men is future created and realised at the grass-roots. Smell the stench and picture the murk. The film’s going to make you care for the principal characters, be a part of their struggle, and choke you up as you witness them succumb to the unrelentingly brutal backdrop. So go treat yourself by watching this cynical-to-the-max futuristic thriller NOW and be disgusted, moved and inspired all at once.

The trailer of this brilliant flick:

Deception Point by Dan Brown: Book Review

My rating: * and 1/2

This book’s a mess. And quite a big one at that. Just like his much-undeservingly-hyped Da Vinci Code, Deception Point takes a astrophysic-geographical premise and botches it up bigtime. Yes, like before, the author’s USP is his reliance on reader’s ignorance and appetite for thrills. He delivers amazingly on the latter account but the moment you question one “fact” and stop ingesting and believing every bit of tosh the author throws with a calculately asssured tone, everything falls apart–the facts about NASA, the facts about American elections, campaigning, country’s issues. Clearly, Brown’s promise at appearing to present us a well-researched book is, for yet another time, a big farce.

Yes, I do have to admit that the book’s extremely well-written for the first 200-250 pages (that is, when we haven’t had a full glimpse of his laughable premise). Sadly, once the cat’s out of the bag the graph follows that of any C-grade hollywood action flick and the kind of saved-by-whisker escapades we readers are made to gulp (not one, not two but hundreds–one after another) makes you first stop caring about the characters and ultimately, despise the book absolutely. In fact, the last 50 pages are so over-written and so unbelievable, that I had to glimpse at the first and the last line of every para to just finish this godawful book.

I just wish Mr.Brown stops being such a pseudo and uses his decidely well-honed thriller writing skills to better use. He has the potential to write truly fantastic thrillers if only he brings a little plausibility and stops being so over-sensationalist in every book of his. With his dimwit theories and imaginative conspiracies–he has done precious little above brainwashing ignorant readers.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

~~State of Fear by Michael Crichton~~

My rating: ***

It doesn’t take much effort on anyone’s part to do a bit of browsing and come up with solid proof from top scientific journals, coalitions and organisations that almost everything said about global warming is nothing other than hyped-up-for-monetary benefits speculation. Or, as Crichton puts it, its a politico-media-legal conspiracy to create an unceasing State of Fear in the general public.

Since I was completely sold out to the basic premise, this 700 page long romp turned out to be both entertaining, incisive and informative as the author rolled his concerns and facts in an extremely believable adventure-thriller format. Contrary to a very common criticism that’s slapped on every thriller’s face–to State of Fear even more relentlessly– is the “caricature-like”, “co-incidental”, “cardboard” characters but to me its outright hilarious to even imagine some detailed character study amidst the frenetic, tension-filled, fast paced, plot-driven narrative that SOF boasts of. Yes, they can be larger than life and vanish into thin air towards the end, but clearly if you want pages of dialogues of self-doubt or “inner” feelings, you clearly have picked a book from a wrong genre.

As the story of a philanthrophist who suddenly becomes suspicious whether his good intentioned and generous donations are being actually used for welfare or baselessly elaborate lawsuits, Crichton’s tried to experiment with the structure a lot in the first 200 pages, and the results, I daresay, aren’t always pleasant.

As stated out in the blurb, the first few chapters chronicling detached transactions of colossal machinery, cables and equipment are highly uninvolving and having a barrage of these freestanding sequences right at the start is indeed a big put-off. I am clueless as to why Crichton didn’t think of interspersing these static information-heavy chunks with the main storyline as that really would have gone a long way in making this otherwise fantastic book accessible to thousands of unforgiving readers who slam the book shut if they haven’t warmed up to the characters enough in the first 100 pages.

Even more frustrating is the constant putting-off of the actual conflict in the dialogue (e.g.”You’ll see”, “Just wait and watch”, “I’ll make you understand later… now just do as I say”)in these first 200 pages which make you wince and cringe, and which also means that the book takes longer-than-expected to take off. But once it does, it goes into such a freewheeling, wholesomely enjoyable mode that it leaves you wanting for more.

The graph reaches its crescendo not once or twice, but thrice as the protagonists (in particular, the philanthropist’s lawyer and secretary) and their side-kicks valiantly try to muffle three elaborate attempts by the eco-terrorists–melting icebergs, generating hurricanes and a tsunami. Each of these three missions are so crisply written and the sense of place, time, action, urgency and anxiety are evoked so accurately, I was gasping for breath on all three occasions.

But of course, to convey his concern and seriousness towards the whole issue of this “state of fear” we live in everyday, there are some very serious and plausible arguments between the characters, insightful footnotes, references, graphs appendices (especially Appendix 1–which takes a stab at the eugenics phenomenon in the last century, and a very effective one at that) — all conveying the utmost sobreity and genuine intentions of the author this time around.

The undercurrents of not following conventional wisom blindfolded, not believing everything that the tabloids and news channels throw at us everyday, the desperate need for an honest science and the dire consequences of amalgamating it with politics are all strong ones and if one can look beyond the narrative hiccups of the first few pages, adjust one’s biorhythms just a tad bit more and stick to it, I am sure this book will leave one feeling entertained and to some extent, educated.

So stop reading those unnecessary sensationalist Deception Points and godawful Atlantis Founds and rush to buy this mature and topical adventure thriller NOW.

Critical Judgement by Michael Palmer: Book Review

Critical Judgement (Michael Palmer): ***and 1/2

No need for pondering over sentences for days on stretch, no need to indulge into the magnificience of carefully etched out paragraphs, and absolutely no need of even imposing your version of the title or the left-ajar climax. Simply because thrillers have grave disregard for such linguistic frills, and why shouldn’t they? Detached from these arduous and cloggy formalities give them more than enough space to develop in all directions into an instantly stimulating and electrifying capsule that has you sweating, panting and breathless with each sentence. One of my all-time favourite medical thrillers, Critical Judgement, is all this and more.

Coming to the plot (ah! these obligatory fillings of a review), Critical Judgement tells the story of a surgeon (Abby) who leaves her job at a high-profile hospital in San Francisco only to move with her fiancee (Josh, who’s been sacked at his workplace) to a suburbian

Californian town with a wilfully deceiving name–Patience. While Abby finds herself suddenly stepping into the shoes of the Head of the ER team of the Patience Regional Hospital, Josh finds an equally well-paid job at the town’s sole employer–which doubles up as the country’s foremost battery manufacturer, Colstar.

Trouble starts trickling in as Abby, much stressed from the explosive workload and responsibility, starts encountering patients with seemingly simple, but undiagnosible symptoms. In jest, Abby calls them NIWWs (No idea what’s wrong) until a violent incident in which a Colstar employee, Willie Cardoza, in a manic fit, zooms his 4×4 into a tennis court almost killing three old ladies. And this obscure insanity also seems to have caught up with other Colstar’s employees–Angela, (who’s turned into a self-multilator), Josh (who’s suddenly become maniacally ill and has threatened Abby physically) and Ethan Black (the son of a supremely influential Ezra Black, the financier of Colstar, who jumps off a high-storey building when visiting his psychiatrist). The outlandish fury and rage in these Colstar employees kindles Abby into investigating the cause of the eruption of these sudden cases, but she doesn’t have to go far as one of her colleagues, Dr. Lew Alvarez seems to have all the answers to her NIWWs and violent cases–cadmium spill from Colstar.

Running an Alliance against the Colstar, Lew and his small team, has infact been accusing Colstar of neglecting the health of Patience’s population and even forging laboratory results keeping the cadmium spill well under covers for years, but have been muted by the influential Big Daddies. As Abby becomes the crusader, she finds both her life and job in serious jeopardy, as she’s been penalised at every stage for her probing. Has Abby got the strength to outperform her enemies? How successful does she become in unraveling the mystery? Is it really the cadmium spill causing the mysterious illnesses? Is Colstar really the culprit?

What instantly separates Palmer from other thriller-jotters is his care for his book’s characters which infact feel so alive and kicking, that the book has an ineluctable cinematic ambience to it. This, and his graphic style of writing uplifts even the most mundane of sequences enlivening the reading experience thoroughly. Some of the sequences like the introductory defibrillation (unpleasantly graphic), Abby treating an eccentric Old Man Ives outside her neck-breaking schedule (deeply empathetic), the pretentious celebrity psychiatrist (inescapably comic), Abby’s decision to treat a killer rather than the killed (thrilling and true-to-bone), a claustrophobic patient recollection of her experience at MRI (stomach-churning) and the orgasmic end keeps afloat the belief of Palmer being a storyteller to vouch for.

The protagonist’s character, an ER doc, is on the predictable side of the fence as from the very premise you expect her to be the crusader, the saviour, the find-all-reveal-all belle and Palmer’s heroine, Abby fits in all these gloves, yet comes across convincing thanks to bountiful nuggets of vulnerability and conflict that’s thrown into her sketch. The third-person narration, though glues to Abby’s every move, every thought, surprisingly keeps the sentimentality-quotient close to neutral with extremes of alkaline and acidic emotions kept much at bay. Their pictorial descriptions consistently withstanding, Palmer populates his book with believable and distinguishable characters with equal success, even though the genre means that almost all the characters have a meagre life outside the incidents involving them.

The pace of the thriller is rocksteady and absolutely unwavering for if Palmer doesn’t have Abby stepping into the shoes of the investigator, we see her participating in some genuinely chilling ER histrionics or we might even find ourselves reading first person gruesome accounts of Colstar’s suddenly-venegeance-seeking employees. The surprise factor is 10 on 10 as the book’s so overgrown with unpredictable twists and turns that you might not realise you have actually skipped a day’s meal. More than justifying its ’’thriller’’ tag, since the catastrophe’s of a aesculapian core, even the ’’medical’’ prefix is more than suitable for this thumping 400 page fiction.

Testing of chemical weapons on innocent population, has indeed made to the headlines time and again, and with an appreciable amount of sensitivity with which the issue is dealt with, the author keeps the scare and seriousness much intact. The climactic showdown, swaying between wrenching unpredictability and hard-to-gulp unbelievability (the latter, solely visible in the fierceness of Abby which takes quite a huge leap to gallant levels of heroism) doesn’t try too hard to bring every thread of the plot to close, but the bemusing and horrifying epilogue more than makes up for that.

The author, being an M.D. himself has also instilled a decent degree of rawness in the ER histrionics, but let the seemingly honest and amazingly vivid sequence of events not blind you into believing that diagnosis at ER is always so fulfiling, well-defined, objective, active, glamorous and brimming, as the routine, repetitive and tiresome aspects get negligible prominence here (understandably so), and the fiction carries forward the legacy of painting a reasonably blushful picture of medicine in ER which had emerged with telly-tube’s babies like ER, Casualty and the likes. Its not gruesomely externally valid, but internally, the procedures and the few diagnoses made are masterfully written.

The bipolar reactions of the workforce (be it a nurse reluctant to treat a patient just because he’s the presumed criminal or Abby being unreasonably censured by her seniors for attending to that very criminal), the contamination running in the upper levels of hierarchy and the innocent dependence of the public on their doctors sears through with astonishing effect. However, since the author’s quite unapologetic about the generous sprinkling of medical terminology, I won’t really recommend it to the medically uninitiated or ignorant. The unobtrusive, simple language is a major plus though.

In all, Critical Judgement is a fantastic thriller, with dominant threads of the population being betrayed for their unflinching trust in the medics and venegeance acquiring phantasmagoric potency, sewn with perfection by the wilful and ferocious (if larger-than-life) Abby. As intoxicating, as the industrial toxicology at its helm, this memorable medical thriller begs to be read, and writing even a sentence more on it would give the plot away. Go read it and experience it for yourself.