Weekend movies

Well, it's the weekend, and we like to see movies on the weekend. We got to see two today (there'll be another one tomorrow).

First, we saw Children of Men. It is an awesome, chilling, and haunting post-apocalyptic movie. I'd heard that this movie is a movie for guys that women will like (basically, an action movie crossed with The Handmaid's Tale), and it's true. The movie is set in 2027; in 2009 women stopped being able to conceive. No babies have been born since 2009, and with nothing left to lose and nothing to look forward to, the world has essentially destroyed itself. Clive Owen does a fine job as the protagonist. He's very believable.

The view of the future presented in the movie is realistic and scary. I wish you'd all seen it so that I could talk more about the things that touched me deeply. I will say this: the concentration camps (well, they're more like ghettoes, really) in the movie sent chills up my back. The camps are at once futuristic, echo the camps and ghettoes of Hitler's Germany, and show an eventual conclusion to the post-9/11 world (two words say it all: Homeland Security). The cinematography is fantastic - the camera is basically a handheld, and so the action feels very real. We both highly recommend this movie. It's very, very good. Go see it!

Later on, we watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. We liked this movie a lot, too, but for different reasons. It's quite funny :) This one made us laugh a lot - Will Ferrell is awesome, as always, and the story is actually quite entertaining. Yeah, the characters are slightly one-dimensional but I'd expect nothing else. There is both physical comedy (although I don't think that anyone got a blow to the crotch, so it may not be THAT funny :) ) and word-play comedy, so it's funny on multiple levels. The racing is pretty good, too. So if you like funny movies, you should see this one.