Chil­dren of Men runs the dystopi­an gamut, from V for Vendet­ta and 28 Days Lat­er to Fahren­heit 451, THX 1138 and 1984, while cap­tur­ing the dead seri­ous urgency of cur­rent pol­i­tics, thanks to heavy dos­es of xeno­pho­bia, insur­rec­tion­ist vio­lence, sur­veil­lance, impris­on­ment and tor­ture. Draw­ing rev­er­ent­ly from the sto­ry of Christ’s flight through Egypt, Alfon­so Cuarón has made the dystopi­an thriller of our time — one rife with the para­noia, cyn­i­cism and iner­tia that have come to define our polit­i­cal time.

If there’s some­thing miss­ing from the film, it would be insuf­fi­cient time to absorb the moral weight of the mate­r­i­al with­out the need­less intru­sion of a music cue. It goes with­out say­ing the the images and per­for­mances com­mu­ni­cate the film’s seri­ous­ness ade­quate­ly; by com­par­i­son the music feels cheap. In some cas­es, the music mis­leads the audi­ence. For instance, the strains of King Crim­son’s “In the Court of the Crim­son King” filled me with dread — I expect­ed betray­al, detain­ment, torture…a trau­mat­ic work­out where­in the film’s action forced the audi­ence to suf­fer the fate of the character[s] in ques­tion. When noth­ing of the sort hap­pens, the lin­ger­ing uncer­tain­ty is still unset­tling, but not as force­ful as the out­come the music portends.

The music notwith­stand­ing, Chil­dren of Men exceeds expec­ta­tions with quick-paced action, on point polemics and over­ar­ch­ing mes­sage of hope and opti­mism, mak­ing it an imme­di­ate clas­sic in the vein of the dystopi­an thrillers that pre­ced­ed it.

[See also: Chil­dren of Men earns Cin­e­marati’s top rank­ing]

• My lat­est review at Paper Thin Walls is up. If you did­n’t catch Kirb & Chris then, don’t miss ’em now. Set up an account and com­ment! What bet­ter way to take part in Web 2.0. Live up to the great expec­ta­tions Time Mag­a­zine set for “you.”
• Col­lect­ing my thoughts on Chil­dren of Men. In a word: wow.
• Just heard Marnie Stern’s In Advance of the Bro­ken Arm. More on that soon.
• After much encour­age­ment and a five year hia­tus from the game, Black­mail Is My Life eyes a return to the acad­e­my for Fall 2008. I promise not to make friends call me “Dr. J.” Pinky swear.
• Last­ly, Fri­day looks like as good a day as any to unload an avalanche of pro­mo discs on Prince­ton Record Exchange.

Mem­o­ries came out of hid­ing, but not emo­tions; not even the mem­o­ries of emotions.

- Julian Barnes — Flaubert’s Par­rot

Words like “haunt­ing” and “ellip­ti­cal” fail to express the beau­ty of Vic­tor Erice’s The Spir­it of the Bee­hive. Imbued with doubt, naivete and the over­ar­ch­ing para­noia of Fran­co’s Spain, Erice con­structs a nar­ra­tive of inno­cence and loss, one that spans the gulf between par­ent and child, cre­at­ing a sto­ry of tremen­dous pow­er, mut­ed by a pover­ty of expres­sion, painful remem­brances and an unwill­ing­ness to admit deep feel­ings. As Fran­co’s Spain becomes a metaphor­i­cal place­hold­er for today’s polit­i­cal tur­moil, Erice trans­ports us to that time and place: one frozen by an anony­mous, banal, and bureau­crat­ic evil that reduces us to zom­bies par­a­lyzed by fear, the fear that those feel­ings and mem­o­ries we’ve for­got­ten may some­day come flood­ing back to drown us with regret, a fear that strips us of human­i­ty alto­geth­er, leav­ing us naked before its unname­able dread.

Iñárritu should prob­a­bly find sub­tler ways to describe the exis­ten­tial links that bond soci­ety — Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft and all that — but Babel works in mys­te­ri­ous ways across bor­ders, lan­guage and time. In cer­tain respects, it’s a more dire expla­na­tion of David O. Rus­sel­l’s much maligned I Heart Huck­abees, which seemed prefer­able to me only because but­ter­fly effects are so roman­ti­cal­ly absurd. It’s in this way that Iñárritu’s lit­er­al attempts at con­nect­ed­ness would seem com­plete­ly art­less were it not for his cap­ti­vat­ing abil­i­ties as a film­mak­er and a breath­less storyteller.

Visu­al­ly, Babel accom­plish­es the work of sev­er­al film­mak­ers, past and present, draw­ing on the likes of Anto­nioni and Wong Kar-wai. Lin­ger­ing shots tell as much of the sto­ry as the actors do and the bleak vis­tas all mean the same thing whether you’re in the desert or the city.

This may be the most need­less­ly over­pro­duced pro­gram on the inter­net, but that does­n’t stop me from being com­plete­ly enam­ored of it.