Children of Men & The Real Thing

Someone will have to make a comment and tell me how it came out in the end. I was so bored that I didn't want to have to sit through the last 50 minutes of this movie.
It could have been a worthwhile entertainment had the filmmakers thought of giving me something to care about. Maybe I'm too demanding or easily distracted by the guy behind me with the crinkly brown paper bag, but, silly me, I want a character or a concept or a story I can care about. In Children of Men I found none of these. It was some silly set-up about how there had not been any children born on earth for 19 years. I don't know why this was such a problem since there were all these illegal alien people running around this 2027 England attacking motor vehicles as they drove by. Actually that was the best part of the movie, when we got two or three rides in cars or busses and the people outside threw stuff at us. If only there where more of this.
There was some droopy guy, played by a sleepy Clive Owen. He was our hero I guess, but I didn't give a damn about him since I was told nothing about him really I guess I was supposed to care about him because he was a friend of some boring old hippy played by Michael Caine. Good old Caine was the only alive person in the picture at least as far as I got in it. Actually I left after he got shot and killed, but he was a stupid old hippy anyway and there was no reason I should care about him either. Besides he was a bloody pot dealer and who could care about a person like that? There is a pregnant woman and they are trying to get her to "The Human Project" so it was going to be another 40 minutes of fleeing from the bad guys through stressed sets and then there would be some sort of birth and mankind would be saved. Except I didn't give a damn if any of these people or the crappy world the lived in got saved actually I would have rather they rode around in the cars more in reel one and then all got shot up end of movie and I could go home. Oh yeah, Julianne Moore is in it too, sort of. She contracts a bloody neck and gets to go away to work on some better movie somewhere else. JM fans who go to the movie to see her will be disappointed that she got to go home early like Caine and me. She even left before me and Caine. I doubt if she put in a full week on the project unless she comes back at the end or something. She does do a dumb stunt with a ping pong ball. It would have been a good role for a redheaded trained seal.

But go see the movie. You will probably think it was really profound and the crappy sets really cool. I'm just an old crank and, well, a bit of a snob in that I sort of want entertainment to be, well entertaining, somehow interesting, rather than just boring.
I know I'm not a big movie fan. I don't live to see moving images on the screen. I don't get all excited if I see movie violence unless the people in the movie mean something to me. And I'm not one who demands that a movie be upbeat. I LOVE downer movies, but good one's like Hopper's old Out of the Blue. Besides I saw an uplifting end coming in this one and I just knew that would be too unbearable. Anyway, I wasted enough time typing about this piece of crap, this waste of someone's millions of dollars. Had the director hired someone to write a screenplay rather than trying to do it himself. . .

I could have been that I was spoiled earlier today when I heard a great BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. Indeed it was the real thing. It was an hour and a half of masterfully written and performed human drama. Here I didn't even need to care about the people in the play. The writing was so clever, so beautiful, so spot on that it provided me with completely fulfilling and thoughtful entertainment. I won't bother telling you to listen to it while it is still available on the BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play website until Jan 5, 2007. Because you don't listen to audio drama. You want pictures. You want everything handed to you in a really graphic way like in a movie or a TV show. You don't want to bother with old fashioned forms like reading, or radio plays. Fine! what do I care.

If some reader or radio fan wanders here and actually reads this, Well, of course I didn't mean you, comrade, I was just trying to antagonize the masses. I know I don't really have any readers anyway so it doesn't matter what I type and that's the way I like it. So bug off!