It’s okay sometimes if a movie doesn’t tell you everything. The imagination can fill in all the blanks. For instance, it’s okay that in The Polar Express they don’t tell you why “Christmas just doesn’t work out for” the poor kid, because if you’re like my brother and me, you can infer it to mean that the poor kid’s dad always got arrested before every Christmas, and all the presents had to be unwrapped and pawned to pay his bail. You can also infer that the poor kid’s unidentified — save for the poor kid shaking the box and saying “I know what this is! I’ve wanted one of these my whole life!” — Santa gift is a supply of bail bonds.
But if you’re going to make a movie about every woman on earth becoming unable to carry a baby full-term, and becoming totally infertile all together, you really need to explain how this happened other than saying the scientists shrugged and said, “Maybe this, maybe this, maybe this, we don’t know…” Because in the age of test tube babies and cloning, we know there’s ways to make babies, whether they’re born from people or not. Also, if you’re going to go to all this trouble to save the first baby born in 18 years, you need to let us know how this is going to change the world, all of which, except for Britain, has plunged into civil war.
Children of Men didn’t do it for me, if you’re wondering what movie I’m talking about. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t even dislike it. I just didn’t love it. Or particularly like it. One scene brought me to blinking back tears, but then I thought it should have ended differently… I don’t know, I see why they did what they did at the end, but it just… I don’t know. I guess I don’t know sums up how I felt about the movie.
On a slightly related note, why is It’s a Wonderful Life a Christmas movie, when only the last twenty minutes of the movie occur at Christmas, and even then don’t really have anything to do with Christmas? Greg and I theorized that it’s because George Bailey tries to kill himself, and Christmas has the greatest number of suicides of any day of the year, but somehow I doubt that’s what Frank Capra was going for.
02/01/2007 at 12:53 pm Permalink
It had to be at Christmas time so the Bailey’s would have a Christmas tree with a bell ornament on a branch so it could ring so Clarence could get his wings.
“Zu-zu’s petals! Zu-zu’s petals!”
“My lip’s bleeding, Bert! Merry Christmas!”
02/01/2007 at 12:55 pm Permalink
I wish they could re-make that movie without Clarence, Uncle Billy, or Zu-zu. “I want to give my flower a drink” and Paste it, Daddy!” have to be the two most annoying movie lines ever.
03/01/2007 at 9:56 am Permalink
About Children of Men: the book probably explains the entire crisis of infertility very clearly, but after the screenwriter and producer and director had their say, all those silly critical details had to be cut.
That’s why you need to keep screenwriting rights to your own books, my dear. Get your agent to put that in the contract.
I know Zu-zu’s annoying, but without her we’d never have these fantastically amusing and memorable lines:
“Zu-zu, my little ginger snap.”
“She doesn’t have a smidge of temperature, Daddy!”
03/01/2007 at 9:35 pm Permalink
Have you read the book, Annie? I wonder if the end of the book was the same as the movie one.
Definitely I want to keep my own screenplay rights. Do you know JK Rowling got totally ripped off with the film rights when she got the first HP book published? It shows, too, though I thought the most recent one was a pretty good adaptation. I hope they don’t butcher Order of the Phoenix.