Friday, 29 April 2011
Today I participated in a highway cleanup. My employer sponsors the event and, even though it didn’t come with a free meal like it did last time, I still like the opportunity to get outside and wear a fluorescent vest.
I participated in my company’s cleanup in 2004 and 2005, but, for various reasons, I haven’t done it since. In 2006, for example, I was vacationing in Florida. In 2008, I think I called in sick that day.
Here’s a fun fact: highway trash essentially = cigarette butts. The butts formed the majority of the items I picked up today (not in volume, but in quantity), and I didn’t even bother to pick up about half the butts I saw. There were the other predictable bits of trash: McDonald’s wrappers, plastic bags, beer cans, drinking straws, and car bits, but it seemed as if no piece of litter could be tossed onto the side of the road without at least adding two or three cigarette butts. This shatters no stereotypes I have about cigarette smokers.
Saturday, 30 April 2011
This evening, my wife and I watched the movie Children of Men. I had heard good things about this Oscar-nominated flick; alas, they were all untrue.
Children of Men was a confusing, disjointed story. It began well; I enjoyed seeing how the world would be different if there were no people under 18 years of age – such as (and my wife notice this before I did) the proliferation of pets in the absence of children. It soon devolved into a mess. Who is fighting who, and why? A couple of times, my wife paused the movie to ask if I knew what was happening; I would conjecture a guess, but then just declare that I didn’t even care anymore.
The pregnant woman needs to get to safety, that’s the basic gist so, in that time-honored movie cliche’, she has to travel through hazards that are way worse than where she came from (leading me to wonder why she didn’t stay put). I think she was worried that the Brits would treat her and her baby like freaks, or maybe force them to do things against their will, but early on the movie makes a point of showing that this is a danger the whole world is facing, so it’s not clear where she’s running off to.
Near the end of the movie, while she’s in the worst possible place, guess what? That’s right, she goes into labor. Her water breaks while she’s on a bus. This is another movie-birth cliche’: gravid women have absolutely no idea they’re nearing the end of their pregnancy until the water breaks, and the water always breaks before anything else happens (okay, maybe – MAYBE – the woman stands up and announces she’s feeling funny).
Squirreling away in a shit-hole of a hotel room in the middle of a war zone (a war zone that they traveled to!), the laboring woman and her male companion (not the father) begin preparations for the birth. The man looks for clean water, which makes sense, and the woman lies down, spread-eagled, on a dirty mattress. Yet another movie-birth cliche’: no matter when or where the woman is, when she feels the baby is coming, so immediately has to lie down on her back like a subservient woman. Man, the medical community has really indoctrinated women well. So well, in fact, that that this woman – who has never before been pregnant, nor has she seen any other pregnancy or births in her life – still feels the need to lie down. Stupid.
Once the baby is born (and the woman can’t do it without the man’s help), she says that they need to cut the cord. The man begins looking around the room (presumably for a shoe lace), but states that “there’s no rush,” which, to me, was a rare instance of the scriptwriters actually researching the rare, obscure topic of childbirth before putting pen to paper.
For the next twenty tedious minutes, as the trio navigate the middle of a battlefield, the woman somehow manages to not hemorrhage. The baby, meanwhile, spends most of this time crying, which is nearly as annoying as a constant dog bark or car alarm. The new mom isn’t sure how to quiet her crying baby, which is too bad, because the crying could lead to their being found out and killed.
Later, the trio are aboard a row boat and the baby is still crying. The man suggests the woman place the baby up on her shoulder and pat her back.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a lame-ass movie even without the trite, predictable birth scene. I just think it’s sad that only 18 years after the last baby is born women have forgotten what their breasts are for. Too bad. ‘Cause my guess is that that baby was crying because no one was feeding it anything.
[Also see the recent episode of Community for another example of the Hollywood-only-has-one-birth-story-to-tell policy.]
Sunday, 01 May 2011
Today, I listened to two audio files my friend Ryan sent to me.
Here’s the first one: Every #1 Song, part 1.
Here’s the second one: Every #1 Song, part 2.
Basically, the creator of these files took a snippet from every song that went to #1 “EVER” and spliced them together in chronological order. He did a pretty good job, too, there’s about 2 to 10 seconds of each song, and it melds (usually) smoothly into the next one. When possible, he took a section of the song where the title is spoken, for example, at one point we hear “No I gotta cut loose, footloose,” which is certainly a more appropriate sampling of “Footloose” than “Eighty hours, for what?”
Despite the claims on the page, it’s not EVERY song – for some reason, part two ends with Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” which was the final #1 song of 1992. Perhaps there will be a part 3 that consists of the last 20 years, which would be great, because I’m aching to hear a snippet of the Black Eyed Peas “Imma Be.”
Also, it’s funny to notice the different length of the songs. For “Hey Jude,” for example, there’s barely enough time to hear the title being sung – I’d say there’s about 3 seconds of the song. Later, for a certain Barbara Streisand song, the file lingers for 15 seconds (or maybe longer) as Babs spits out the two lines leading up the title. Also, some songs are instrumental, so I wasn’t always sure if a new song was playing or not.
While listening, I followed along in my copy of The Billboard Book of #1 Hits, just so that I could ‘check them off’ as I went along. Oddly, the file skips over a few songs. Not sure why. I couldn’t detect “Sixteen Tons,” for example, and it also missed playing Buddy Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day.” At several points, the clip reverses the order of two or more songs, too, and I’m not sure why that is.
Overall, it was a fun listen. It brought back many good memories, and a couple of times I found myself thinking, “Oh, so that’s how that song goes…I didn’t know that was a number one song.” If you have time (and it does take time), take a listen.
Yeah I saw Children of Men too, a long time ago, possibly in the theater. I immediately forgot it untill now. I wonder how long it will take me to forget it again!
When portraying a woman having a drug-free physiologically appropriate birth perhaps screen writers should educate themselves about what that looks like. It would be very rare for contractions to start at the same intensity and intervals as they end up at, for the water to break so soon, for the woman to lie down on her back right before birth (hands and knees would be much more normal), and the all time stupidest one is that the guy had to tell her repeatedly to “push”. Um, hello, she isn’t numb from the waste down so she can feel the baby descend and therefore she can feel the natural urge to push that all women have (if they are laboring without drugs). I wonder if this guy needs someone to come in to the bathroom every morning and yell at him to “push” when he is having a bowel movement? And she would have totally bled out moving through a war zone hours after giving birth. Also, breastfeeding should have been a top priority since there was no formula or other nursing mothers to rely on, so the fact that we never saw her nurse even though her baby was crying and crying was pretty unrealistic. I think we need more women writers in TV and movies. This premise had great potential, I wish it had been done better.
Yes, that’s a great way to sum it up: great potential, but too bad it wasn’t done better. Maybe Hollywood will do a remake in ten years.
Hollywood must have a shortage of women writers and (judging from their terrible depiction of winter) writers from the midwest.
I found an early script for Children of Men online and compared it to some of the points mentioned here. While I’d be more forgiving of an early script for not getting some of these details right, it seems (according to your critique) things maybe went the other way.
You mentioned that the woman didn’t know she was near the end of her pregnancy until her water broke. In this early script, she was having contractions prior to her water breaking.
You had an aside that said she couldn’t have done it without the man’s help. In the script, Miriam (not even in the scene in the movie) is the one helping and directing the birth while Theo “obeys, clumsy — he has no idea what to do.”
You had pointed out that women had, seemingly, forgotten what their breasts are for. The script: “Kee puts the baby to her breast. Instinctively, the child suckles, extracting the milk hungrily. Kee watches, amazed.”
Jennifer pointed out that the guy had to repeatedly tell her to “push.” In the script, the guy does say “push” (once), but only after Miriam says, “Trust your body. Your body knows what to do. Now push.” I take the contradiction between “your body knows what to do” and telling her to push to mean that her saying “push” was more out of encouragement than direction. It’s interspersed with other things like “keep breathing” and “All the women who have ever given birth are with you right now” (gag).
I didn’t look at the other concerns you mentioned and perhaps you still wouldn’t be satisfied if they had done things according to that early script, but I thought it was interesting. It makes me wonder what all happens between script and screen.
It also reminds me of the story (told on This American Life) of how Peter Sagal is credited with the script/story for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
That’s really interesting David. I guess I was too quick to criticize the script writers! It sounds like the script did a way better job of portraying natural childbirth than the actual movie did. I do wonder where it got changed into the hollywood cliche.
Fascinating, David. You’re right, though, even if the birth (and subsequent nursing) scenes had gone as scripted, I still would’ve found this to be a mediocre movie, though I might have written a blog post extolling a decent birth scene for once. The scene of Kee nursing – as originally outlined in the script – would have been a beautiful, emotional moment, and a much-needed point of pause during the frenetic final third of the film; too bad they left it on the cutting room floor (or maybe they never filmed it in the first place?).
Do you have the link to where the original script is located?
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/children_of_men-script.pdf
Here’s a link to the script I found. It’s not the original, though. According to Wikipedia.com, this was a rewrite of a rewrite of the original adaptation (each time by a different group). It was then rewritten once more by a fourth party before being pitched to the main actor, who has been called an unofficial co-writer by the director. (Too many cooks?)
One other thing I noticed in this script was that the cutting of the cord seemed to be the super-rushed version you typically see. I almost wonder if this lead to the “there’s no rush” line in the movie — like someone pointed out the absurdity of being THAT frantic about it.
On your comment that you “might have written a blog post extolling a decent birth scene for once,” — there’s already a lot of that out there for this movie.
Sorry for the double comment, but I just found the shooting script online. I don’t expect you’ll spend any more calories on the subject, but for completeness sake, here it is:
http://awards.universalpictures.com/ChildrenofMenFinalShootingScript.pdf
Yep, too many cooks.
Thanks for the links. I looked at the relevant scenes. As I’ve noted already, it’s too mediocre of a movie to care too much about it, but I’m tempted to read the novel to see if the whole story (not just the birth scene) is better. As Jennifer noted, the idea has great potential.