Monday, August 17, 2009

The District 9 Aliens Sound Like The Billings, MT Taco Bell Trash

It's true. When you put your taco wrapper in the garbage the little door there swings back and forth and makes this croaky noise that is a pretty good impression of the 'prawns' in District 9. A pretty inconsistent movie, but certainly not completely lacking things to recommend it. I enjoyed it more than my travel mates, I think. I though the first half was quite good, fairly brimming with original ideas. Second half got kinda boring, which is not necessarily what you would expect seeing it became an action movie. Just sort of got generic, villains and heroes, you know?

Two things bugged me in particular (besides it just getting kinda long). The mix of the documentary approach and a 'normal' style was kind of off-putting sometimes. Brought to mind those cheesy documentaries you'll see on A & E or some such channel where it'll be interviews with the real-life people interspersed with reenactments.

And maybe I'm being too PC here, but I just kind of found it weird, especially considering the filmmakers are being hailed for their clever (obvious) Apartheid metaphors, that most of the black people in the cast were in the Nigerian gangs. Though there were certainly plenty of other scoundrels, the gangs took the film's villainous cake. They would laugh heinously (and kind of inexplicably) right before doing something particularly cruel, often in the name of witchcraft. Actually most of the time it was right before 'attempting' to do something particularly cruel, because their most devious acts were often thwarted in the nick of time. The thwarting became a common occurrence amongst all races (human and otherwise) over the last reel, which was an unfortunately hackneyed development in a movie that started out as anything but.

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