2016 Muriel Awards: 10th Anniversary Award

We've been doing the anniversary awards since our second year, but I was especially curious how it would turn out this time. After all, this year marked the tenth anniversary of the first Muriel winners, and now we would be re-evaluating our favorites of 2006. How have our tastes changed in the last decade? Read on and see.

Third place:

Pan's Labyrinth [92 points / 14 votes]

Second place:
 

INLAND EMPIRE [95 points / 15 votes]

And the Muriel goes to...

Children of Men [177 points / 27 votes]

"I can still remember the staggered feeling I had at the end of Children Of Men. I sat in the theater, overpowered by grappling emotions of awe at what Cuaron had accomplished and a genuine, unshakeable sense of fear. I'd just seen the future.

"If this was a clear enough sentiment to understand in the waning days of the second Bush administration, it has stayed almost comically fresh in our present time with its anti-immigration rhetoric, nationalistic zeal, environmental destabilization and suicidal embrace of authoritarianism. Children Of Men has become one of those rare science fiction movies whose future has not faded into irrelevance, supplanted by a new set of anxieties. Instead to our sorrow it feels as fresh, vital and sharp toothed as ever.

"As such Children Of Men is a difficult movie to discuss analytically. It has always been nothing less than a full frontal assault. This is interesting in and of itself when taken in the context of director Alfonso Cuaron's career, whose films have always been noted for a certain diffuse nature, the soft focus sheen of his Great Expectations and Little Princess adaptations, the sun baked dreaminess of Y Tu Mama Tambien, the touches of whimsy and delicate dark beauty he brought to Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban. Even the closest thing to Children Of Men in his oeuvre, the panic attack delivery machine Gravity, takes time for more touches of the poetic (see, Bullock's" in the womb" moment).

"This is of course not to say that Children Of Men lacks humanity (its cast is rich, from Michael Caine at his warmest, to Danny Huston's dissolute government minister lamenting the destruction of La Pieta [a work of art that later recreates itself], the battered cool of Clive Owen and his chemistry with Julianne Moore, the relentless of Chiwetel Ejiofor and the mix of innocence and wariness that characterizes Clare-Hope Ashitey in the key role of Kee) or is anything less than stunningly beautiful. But that humanity is a weapon, our collective doom hurts so much because Cuaron so clearly believes we are worth saving. That beauty delivered with the force of an iron gauntlet striking the face.

"Ten years later its long takes still reach the level of, 'Holy Shit Am I actually seeing this?' good. But it's the sheer density of the images that the film derives its power from, the coworker's desk with every surface covered with baby tchotchkes, or a foreground filled with the burning remains of slaughtered horses, an image as apocalyptic as it is inexplicable. It's a film whose visual intricacy is forever topping itself. Take the slow procession through the poverty choked streets and a desperate, mass religious demonstration that is immediately juxtaposed with a drive through a closed off section of London where camels and zebras are walked through manicured gardens led by the uniformed and costumed gentry, each scene as surreal as the other. Every image is so densely layered with lived in detail and meaning that the prospect of taking it all in causes the synapses to smolder. It's here that the famous long takes truly fulfill their purpose, turning Children Of Men not into a set of tableaux, but a series of horribly convincing living environments that can be moved through at will. This was the film that shot DP Emmanuel Lubezki into the ranks of the greatest of all time.

"Of course, trying to sum up the visual style of Children Of Men in a few hundred words is a fools game. Any one element of the film's visual style, from its layered usage of religious imagery, political imagery, third world art and iconography, graffiti art, to the surprising prevalent, yet somehow all too fitting visual influence of Prog Rock, is worth its own monograph. What's just as remarkable is that no one of these elements drowns out any other. Instead they fit together in a perfect horrific mosaic. One that reflects back at us with undimmed intensity a decade later and will continue to so for the grim, all too foreseeable, future." ~ Bryce Wilson

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