Children of Men

Children of Men
The horror of a world with no children. Have you ever tried to picture it? No children means no diapers, crying, interruptions at the movies, and no one to blame for locking your keys in your car. No need for schools, daycares, midwives, teachers, pediatrics, birth control, abortion . . . or toys. Santa Claus would be out of business. But was this the main point the movie was trying to make? Maybe. I never know on these things.
Watching the movie, I was shocked at how I began to believe there were no more children (what a waste these three and a half years would have been—my degree would be useless if those events in the movie were real) and to hear, partway through the movie, the cry of a baby. It was touching enough to make a hippo cry, but was it enough to stop the uprising? The movie said “No”. Shocking? Maybe.
I did not understand most of the “messages” the movie was trying to get across…as you can tell from the previous paragraph. There were things that I did not connect because something in the background I was supposed to notice while other action was going on. I thought it was a great movie and it was very touching (at parts). It was extremely graphic and violent but I think that was to contrast with the peacefulness of the quiet parts. The movie was touching but not touching enough for me to want to watch it again.

First Movie Review!

The Wild

Back of the box thoughts:
Wild animals in NYC…nothing new, but from reading it I got the impression that the animals were stuck in NYC and were unable to get out of the city without helping each other.

The Movie:
The movie shows us exactly what its plot will be within the first four minutes. Son gets humiliated because he cannot do something that the father does well. Father then says son will learn from his heart, and the son does not believe him and thinks he has to be in the wild to learn to roar. After about the first seven minutes we figure out that the father has never been to the wild but has been lying to his son for years. The son declares that he knows how to get to the wild: the pigeons told him the green boxes go there.

The father asks the son to come to his game. Since the son is still mad at the father he goes with his buddies instead. Trying to stop them from starting a “stampede” he ends up starting it himself, and his father yells at him and he runs off to pout and go to the wild in a green crate.

The racial profiling was shocking in this movie. An English Koala was shocking, I always thought they were from Australia, silly me. Most of the other main characters seemed to be English too. Yet the father/son combo sounded like they were from completely different places. All of these Brits were thrown into NYC…making everything just a little bit weirder. All that seemed normal until we got to the pigeons. Arab pigeons?! They never stopped dancing and seemed to be completely unable to talk except in extremely broken English where they did not know what anything was called. “The big water” was the ocean, and no information could be gotten out of these birds without force. The Swedish dung beetles were offensive to me. Not only was the implication that Swedes like dung, but they are totally off the wall happy and too dumb to realize a squirrel is not dung.

The animals also realized they were animals and did not know anything, yet seemed to know some things that most kids are not sure of. The animals did not know what the Statue of Liberty was, yet they knew which hand her torch went in. The wild dogs could not communicate with the animals, but the crocs who had been flushed down the toilet as babies could. On that note, it is not possible for crocodiles to survive in the sewers to the best of my knowledge because they are cold-blooded animals that need sunlight in order to move. The lions being afraid to roar once out of the zoo seemed completely overdone.

The movie’s claim (or people’s claim for the movie) was that it was not trying to reach a large age group but stay with the very young. This is not true due to kissing and flirting jokes (which little kids would think were nasty—cooties). And the one about the spider that “dates” or “mates” with an animal 1/20th her size and then eats him, but at least he dies happy.

There seemed to be stuff borrowed from many other movies to the point where when describing this movie it seems easier to say how it differs from the other movies rather than describing it in itself. An example of this is the plot came almost directly from Finding Nemo where a single dad looking for his only kid. There was a lot of Madagascar in this movie like the animals end up on an African island, yet unlike in Madagascar, the animals in The Wild had a boat that never ran out of gas. Both Madagascar and The Wild were set in the NYC zoo with a lion and a giraffe in the main set of characters. Personally, I think Disney should have kept this movie a few years so it wasn’t such a used idea by the time it came out. The graphics in The Wild were more realistic than most other animated movies, and even though it was well done, I did not like it as much as the truly cartoonist looks of the other ones.

Humor that flopped:
The koala who falls on a fence and it catches him between the legs, and then gets beaten up by pink flamingos.
Turtle fart joke to win the game.
Obnoxious animal talking into a bamboo toilet, looking for a baby lion, and trying to annoy the father.
The giraffe telling the male koala that he needed a sports bra.
“Who knows how to steer? Oh right, none of us, we’re animals!”
Interspecies relationships—so eww.
Swedish beetles that thought the Squirrel smelled so bad he was dung.

Running jokes:
The koala stuff animal that said “I’m so cuddly, I like you” and haunted the koala who wanted to be tough every where he went.
Chameleons that could turn into anything, any color or design, instantly, and even make things invisible.

One original joke I liked:
Steak in the shape of a rabbit: "Ooo! Rabbit for dinner!"

I think this is a fun movie to watch if you are completely bored out of your mind or you are really looking for something to make fun of. I did not hate watching it, but it felt like a summary of most of the other animated films I have watched lately. I think if it had come out on its own, the humor would not have been like a small child repeating the same “knock-knock joke” ten times in a row. Knock-knock.