Bill O’Byrne’s Bargain Bin Blues: How I Live Now

HOW I LIVE NOW 

☆☆☆☆☆

Director: Kevin Macdonald.

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Tom Holland, George McKay, Harley Bird.

PHIL vs BILL
This post-apocalyptic thriller is a creative shambles. About an American teenager stranded in the English countryside after terrorists blitzkrieg London, it’s clearly aimed at The Hunger Games/Divergent crowd. But it’s too violent for most readers of young adult fiction and too juvenile for older viewers, who will be left wondering why a director as talented as Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland) would risk compromising himself with such pap. A handful of scenes resonate but most will make you cringe. — Phil Wakefield.

If you are on the electoral roll, sometimes the New Zealand government will pay you to watch porn.

Well, pay is probably a loose term. In my case I received a $50 Farmers voucher from the Office of Film and Literature Classification after being randomly selected to take part in a panel discussion to help gauge whether their ratings are compatible with contemporary community standards, or something like that.

It was an interesting evening and culminated with the sexes being segregated and shown a movie (It was something something Web, I recall, and was kind of science fiction-ish with pretty good production values, no pubic hair at all, extremely limber women and the men who were all hung like donkeys. The kind of donkeys other boy donkeys envy. If that is what donkeys do. I am just guessing.)

Anyway, if you’ve had the experience of watching a porn movie in a well lit Internal Affairs room with a bunch of men you’ve never met before, well, you’ve lived a more interesting life than I. Or you belong to a very special support group within Internal Affairs. And that’s cool too.

I don’t know what rating the Classification Office gave this movie, compared to what we all individually suggested. An aircraft pilot, an elderly gentleman, was obviously horrified that such material actually existed and was shocked by it. The plumber from Lower Hutt, and I am not throwing in stereotypes here, thought it a well made piece of porn with good production values (of which I have mentioned).

Now the point of this is that here were a bunch of Joe and Joelene Publics watching and discussing the merits and otherwise of a pretty solid, no holds-barred piece of graphic, full-on sexual shenanigans. Did it get an R18? I don’t know. Probably. It wasn’t a mean spirited movie, everybody seemed happy at the end, the women seem empowered, hell, some of the women even made each other very happy, which sends a pretty strong feminist message, which I for one applaud.

The Office staff listened to our comments, got us to write an essay, and asked questions about our opinions about what we thought was acceptable for people to watch -all good solid public service stuff I must say. (Plus the voucher, so a giant win for democracy all round.)

Which brings me to the point of the solid R16 rating for How I Live Now, this week’s budget review. Having watched it, almost twice, I am forced to wonder whether, in the intervening decade, the Classification Office has LOST ITS FREAKING MIND!!!

A kidult movie if ever there was one, HILN earned this rating for “violence, horror, sex scenes & offensive language.”

I won’t go through the whole reason why that is totally wrongheaded and completely asinine, except to quote from the IMDB parents guide which labels exactly what wussified, milquetoast, helicopter parents should know in order for them to remain cowering in fear in the face of the nameless multitudes of evils that beset their universe.

To whit, and with comments in brackets:

Frightening/intense scenes:

A person’s finger is cut and a another person sucks it (0:21:30, 1:38:33). The viewing of dead bodies and the potential rape scene may upset some viewers. [The finger cut is from a rose thorn, and the potential rape scene IS quite mean, but strongly implied, not shown. ]

Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking

Pills are take as medication.

Profanity

17 uses of f-word, 5 uses of s-word, 2 uses of a-word, 1 use of JC, c*ck.

[My guess is they mean fuck, shit, arse, Jesus Christ and cock. Though the latter might be ceck, which is an old Gaelic term for men who sniff chicken’s bottoms, but that seems somewhat unlikely.]

Sex & Nudity

Boys swim in what appear to be boxers.

First cousins develop a sexual relationship. They hold hands, kiss (0:35:39-36:02, 45:08-15, 1:19:34, 1:38:54), nestle sitting and lying down, and copulate (0:41:50-42:42, 56:18-25 intermittent, inexplicit nudity). [These guys really pay attention to teenagers in love.]

There is a brief dream sequence depicting the main female character running naked through a misty forest. Bared breasts are visible for a few moments.

There is a potential rape scene .

Violence and Gore

Bloody fingers are shown after being cut. There is a potential rape scene, a young boy is seen getting shot, a pile of bagged dead bodies is seen and one is unzipped and identified, there are continued references to a nuclear explosion, two men are shot, many gun shots are heard throughout the film.

These aren’t necessarily the criteria the Office of Classification used in giving it a ridiculous rating, but they are the sort of nervous nelly nonsense that was probably the reason for it.

In a comparison of other places, it got restrictions of MA15 in Oz, 14 in Canada, 16 in Germany and12 in Japan and the Netherlands. Singapore, being Singapore, gave it R18.

Luckily the movie was pretty dull anyway, which could account for its terrible box office, or it could have been crippled by these idiotic ratings cutting out the very demographic it was meant for.

In reality it should have been an M which means it might have scared little kids whose parents let them watch M movies but any kid who has grown up with Facebook and YouTube wouldn’t bat an eye. Or is already too damaged to care.

To the movie itself.

Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) and Piper (Harley Bird) on the run from pretty much everyone. The spend an inordinate amount of time in forests but surprisingly for a New York teen on anxiety medication, Daisy is adept with a map and a compass. Bird is the youngest BAFTA winner for her voice work as Peppa Pig.

As mentioned How I Live Now is a kidult movie. It posits the fantasy, beloved of pre-teens everywhere, of a situation where the kids are in charge and don’t get bossed around by The Man. Aka, grown ups.

Based on the book by Meg Rosoff it features unpleasant New York teenager Daisy (Saoirse Ronan) visiting her relatives in an idyllic rural spot out of London. She’s a city girl, on meds for anxieties which are forever judging and commenting on her, and the kids are a bit Famous Five-ish, except the oldest (George MacKay) who has a way with animals and New Yorkers called Daisy as it turns out.

Then just as young lust blossoms – and I think they are cousins, which is a bit ick – some neer do wells detonate a nuclear bomb in London and a civil war breaks out.

You’d probably have thunk it was an Islamist terror attack but it appears to be the work of other bad egg Englanders whose motivation is never spelt out.

They’re enough of a threat to make the government start stripping the countryside of people and putting kids to work on farms, and the kids are split up with Daisy having to look after the littlest ranga called Piper (Harley Bird) who is probably the best of the bunch of the kid actors.

Bad things will happen to some of them and the survivors will be forever scarred by what they have to do. It IS pretty tough at times, but nothing the usual young viewers won’t see on the TV news about Syria. Or Timaru.

Alas the movie takes so loooong to get going that it kills the pace. There’s setting the scene, and then setting the scene again and again just in case you didn’t get it the first time.

The potential was indeed there for a good yarn of a band of kids against a hostile, confusing world but it needed more time to work. When it gets to the good stuff – civil unrest, gunplay, mayhem – it speeds up but loses coherence.

The extras include a short making-of with the usual penetrating psychological insights granted by child actors talking about their characters’ motivations. For good measure two producers cram a fair bit of twattage into what they say which could indicate why it all became a muddle.

The deleted scenes are of interest to those interested in the rest of the story, which would have been much better as a TV miniseries.

Two stars our of five. Mainly because there were also a couple of fine dogs in it.