Rating: 9/10
Recently I was looking for a good movie to watch. I was about to order another Atom Egoyan movie on demand when I suddenly remembered that a commenter on this blog named “Mugabe” had repeatedly praised the movie Little Children as the best movie since it’s release in 2006, recently saying:
this movie is not entertainment.
it’s serious.
it’s adult…in the good sense.
too many with children are still children themselves however old they may be in years.
Since I like serious adult movies and was curious to see if someone who claims such a high IQ has good artistic taste, I searched the on demand movies to see if it was available and started watching.
The movie was about a group of suburban stay-at-home moms (and one stay-at-home dad) and the childish ways they behave. As Mugabe implied, you think the title of the films refers to the children they are raising, but it may refer to the parents themselves. But in the tradition of American Beauty, it’s also just about the deadness of suburbia.
It’s almost Darwinian in the sense that if life evolved to reproduce, then once we reproduce our lives become meaningless. They are no longer about ourselves, but about our children. Almost as if we start dying the moment our children are born. They replace us.
And so the film is full of parents trying to recapture their youth. There’s the stay-at-home dad (played by Patrick Wilson) who spends night after night watching teenagers skateboard hoping they will invite him to join, and even starts playing evening football with a bunch of cops because it reminds him of his glory days in high school. There’s the stay-at-home mom (played by Kate Winslet) who has an affair because it brings excitement back into her life. There’s the suburban book club, desperate to get younger women to join.
It’s an extremely powerful movie about how we give up our lives for our children. In one case, literally.
Stop your critic you re bad at it and its boring zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Good review.
I didn’t like the ending.
Thanks for the rating. I’ll take your movie reviews over any mainstream ones, pumpkin.
Thanks. And thanks for the good idea of giving each film a rating
saw the movie and then “the Captive” after that. egoyan seems to like to deal with taboos…
Saw the movie? Not sure if the movie you’re referring to is Calender directed by Atom Egoyan, or this movie Little Children directed by Todd Field. Either way, did you like it?
And then you saw The Captive? I’m so sorry. That’s the one Atom Egoyan movie I’ve been actively avoiding. That movie almost single-handedly destroyed his excellent reputation. He talks about the backlash here:
😀 I thought the movie Little Children is also from Egoyan. I see now, that is different… 🙂
I did not see Calender yet…
It has been a really long time I did not see a movie. After seeing both movies, I did not feel anything special, to be honest. In Little Children, the pedo guy was an interesting character, though. The Captive, seemed a regular movie. I only felt moved by the wife accusing husband leaving the kid alone in the car. And the fact that 8 years passed, without parents and kids seeing each other… that is extremely tough, to lose a child to a pedo organization.
It was inspired from a realy story. I just find the real story amazing, but the way it is turned into a movie is average…
Atom Egoyan’s best movie is widely considered The Sweet Hereafter; it often appears on lists of the 10 best Canadian movies of all time.
But Calender deals with Armenian culture