Starring: Sharlto Copely, Jason Cope. Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp.
Produced by Key Creatives. 112 minutes. MPAA “R’ rating. Parent’s Advisory for profanity, violence and gore, and frightening/intense scenes.
The extraterrestrials in the sci-fi film District 9 are taken captive by the South African army without a fight and incarcerated in squalid refuge camps in Johannesburg. The locals call the extraterrestrials Prawns but, cinematically, they are more like gefilte fish. All Prawns are slender and tall with wide shoulders and fetching wasp waists like the robots in I Robot. They have veil-like tentacles over their mouth, same as the bad boy in Predator, and they speak a clickier, less guttural dialect of Klingon. Their skin is horny and plaited like the Ninja Turtles and they have hooves like the aliens in Contact.
The one really unique thing about Prawns is that they roll over so quickly. Their name caries more than whiff of terms like Kaffir and Sami, toxic slang full of the triumphalist racial fear and loathing that fueled apartheid, the slave trade, colonialism, genocide, holocausts of every size and shape. These visitors from another world are treated with the thwackingly punitive disdain that non-humans deserve in a zero sum game for dominance of planet Earth.
Humans neutralize the Prawns in District 9 because they are understandably afraid of a civilization that has mastered interplanetary travel. We know in our bones that human history is the story of stronger nations conquering weaker ones, and that conquest is usually driven by an advanced technology of some kind, iron over bronze, wheel over foot, guns over swords. Prawns are a trophy species, something in a cage to amuse and distract people from their troubles, another feather in the cap that humans believe is the crown of creation.
But Prawns still must earn their keep like everyone else on planet Earth, and their novel alien biology makes them cash cows, rare commodities which can be easily converted to a handsome profit. The aliens’ claw-like hands are hacked off, for example, and sold as a kind of power bar. There’s also a thriving trade among sexual adventurers drawn to the flame of alien bordellos. But this stuff is chump change compared to figuring out how to operate the cache of rifle-like Prawn weapons that have been captured, gizmos with the kick of the Ghostbusters’ nuclear-powered backpacks but painted like boogie boards.
Director Blomkamp’s film is high-spirited but gory like RoboCop but nicely balanced by dollops of crisp, CNN-style news reportage, also like RoboCop. The film really works as an R-rated, entertaining sci-fi/action/comedy/thriller/moral fable.
A field agent named Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is our hero, a bureaucrat quirky enough to be likable. He is the lead government employee tasked with moving 1.8 million Prawns to a new camp, District 10. The real motive in this operation is to disrupt any guerilla activities in the planning stages, and Wikus finds plenty of ingenious weapons systems made from spare parts including an elaborate computer network. The plot hinges on his accidentally ingesting the fruit of a jerry rigged chemistry lab, a very nasty black liquid, and then physically beginning to morph into a Prawn.
Life is never easy for cross-genome dressers. The humans in Wikus’ life, including his wife, toss him overboard pretty fast and the Prawns don’t trust him either. But Wikus can at least live as an outlaw among the Prawns and buy cat food (a Prawn delicacy) from the Nigerian warlords who are the aliens’ commercial brokers with the outside world. Pretty quickly, Wikus discovers that Prawns care about their friends and children and hate being bullied by police but go along with it to avoid further trouble.
In other words, accoutrement aside, the Prawns have a certain sensitivity that we recognize as being human and the humans who control the Prawns’ act with an insensitivity that can only be called alien.
Suffice it to say, like Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement, Wikus becomes more sympathetic to the Prawns as he experiences the cruelty inflicted on him as a non-human with alien parts. So does the viewer. The mind reels, the heart convulses, somehow history slogs on. When will we ever learn?
Back in the day, there were three reasons why extraterrestrials would pop by the Earth: to destroy humans (War of the Worlds, et.al), enslave us (The Matrix) or to help us grow up (The Day the Earth Stood Still, et.al). The aliens in District 9 aren’t monsters, missionaries or messiahs. The Prawns are strangers in a strange land but it’s the humans that are truly strange, and really scary. Scarier still, we are the only ones with the power to save us from ourselves.
30 August 2009
21 August 2009
Julie/Julia
Starring Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, StanleyTucci, Chris Messina.
Written and directed by Nora Ephron.
Produced by Columbia Pictures.
Meryl Streep is the Venus of Willendorf of actors. The Paleolithic Venus is all bloated boobs and belly, a faceless fertility goddess, Eve as her own eternal garden. With Streep’s Venus, it's her heart and head that are fecund, a primal soul imagining the possible human.
In early films like Sophie’s Choice and Bridges of Madison County, her characters conveyed a sweet, enduring sadness about their lives and the grinding down of all flesh to dust. In recent flicks like The Devil Wears Prada and Doubt, Streep plays embittered characters, sharp-edged, manipulative people, nasty. Her range as an actor is amazing, the more so because she seems to consume the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to as a kind of food savored in all its forms. Who could possibly replace her? wondered my film friend Suzy recently. Good question. Dunno. Keira Knightly, perhaps. Kate Winslet? Stay tuned ...
Streep plays Julia as the physically awkward, slightly masculine woman she was, Terry Jones of Monty Python in drag, Lucy’s loopiness without the art. But there’s another Julia under all fuss and flutter: well-mannered and endearing, as stolid and resolute as Winston Churchill. She’s a truly odd duck and Streep played the role for its inherent comedy while never losing touch with the essential Julia. Not MS's best performance, but it must have been fun for someone so disciplined to let herself go so over-the-top.
In one scene early in the film, we see Julia, running on empty as a diplomat’s wife in Paris, decide to give French cooking a try. Improbably, she ends up in all-male, professional level class at the Cordon Blue. And there she crudely hacks away at onions while male colleagues in chic white chef’s coats slice them in a blur of fearless artistry.
Soon thereafter we see Julia at her kitchen table slicing onions. The pile must have been three feet high. The redolence of the onion mountain is so powerful that when Julia’s husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) comes in the door his hands fly up to his eyes as if he’s been shot, and he flees with just the slightest nod of his head and wave of the white flag of his hand. Julia returns a spousal wave of her own and resumes her quest of proper cutting technique, overriding nature’s call to her tear ducts, the obligation of wifely companionship. Soon, in similar fashion, there will be scientific cooking experiments to conduct and a 700 page cook book to write and sell
The onion scene is played for its inherent comedy, both actors maintaining their formal reserve even when under attack by powerful imagined chemical irritants. It's funny because we've all been there but end up blind with tears; it's notable for the raw power of acting skill not brought into play here. But it also succeeds in letting the audience know that Julia has an inner strength we didn’t see before, true staying power in adversity. Her little wave also says bye-bye to the decision to play a minor role in her own life. Thus begins the story of Julia’s ascent.
But Julia Child isn’t the only main character of this film. There’s also Julie’s story, a second (also true) narrative cleverly entwined with the Julia's. It’s about a young, attractive. thoroughly modern woman, Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams), who fends off a feeling of hopelessness in the post-9.11 world by making a commitment to whip up each and every one of the 500+ recipes in Julia Child's cookbook in 365 days. With unflagging encouragement from her editor husband Eric (Chris Messina), she blogs daily about her project, often quite openly, and wins a bunch of fans. Ultimately, she almost loses her husband in the process of landing a big book contract but it all comes out OK.
Julie’s path to success neatly parallels Julia’s and script writer/director Nora Ephron has fun cutting back and forth between the two stories, showing us how much women have changed in the last half century, and how much they are still the same. Yadda, yadda. It’s done mainly with clothing and the Internet, but also plenty of cute depictions of emotional meltdowns. Quick, wry cuts keep the characters and the audience from slipping beneath the surface of occasionally troubled waters in both eras. I think women may find this stuff funnier than men. Personally, I was amused by seeing Paul and Eric settle warmly into the role of the guy in the ballet troupe who lifts the prima ballerina when needed and otherwise acts as her silent, supportive pivot.
Ephron cast the blog as Julie’s best friend and uses it to serve up still bubbling, often half-baked portions of the wannabe chef’s inner life. I think this narrative device, which Ephron has employed in slightly different forms in Sleepless in Seattle and You'’ve Got Mail, adds a quirky fizz to romantic comedy story lines that might otherwise be too silly or conventional to succeed. This viewer generally likes Ephron because she is a really funny, insightful observer of people, especially when they are in love with someone or something. She certainly knows how to entertain. But I can’t help but wonder what the writer of When Harry Met Sally would have come up with in Julie/Julia if she’d throttled back on the funny girl stuff a little more often.
11 August 2009
Bruno
BRUNO
Starring Sasha Baron Cohen. Directed by Larry Charles. Produced by Everyman Pictures. 81 minutes
Sasha Baron Cohen is the Ur-comic: equal parts tummler, provocateur and saboteur. Hard to say at this point whether he’s a satiric genius with Swiftian chops or just another wacked out love child of the Monty Python gang. His latest movie, Bruno, seems to fall into another category altogether. It’s more an experience in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word than entertainment. Yes, it’s really funny in places, but mostly not ha-ha funny, and nowhere near the runaway romp of his first flick, the groundbreaking Borat. Still, if you like your humor raw and outrageous, chock full of jokes about penises and the human body’s various fluids, gases and secretions, this movie is for you. Mix one part Austin Powers with two parts Marquis de Sade and a twist of bromance and you’re almost there.
Bruno is the story of a gay, German fashionista in resolute pursuit of celebrity. There’s something prissy even imperious about the eponymous Bruno, a comic exaggeration of the flamboyant narcissism of real fashionistas. It would have been an inspired choice except fashionistas don’t leave much for a comic to send up.
To complicate the comic equation further, Cohen has made Bruno a sadist, one of those archetypal Germanic practitioners of the new cruelty. He’s an S+M artist using other people’s pain as his palette, and he’s just not a likable fellow. Mike Meyers made this kind of character funny on Saturday Night Live but he was extremely careful to be charming and silly when he was being cruel, letting us in on the joke. Adam Sandler is also cruel and self-absorbed in Funny People but his occasional glint of self-awareness keeps us in the game. In Bruno, Cohen has eliminated the Keatonesque innocence he used so effectively in Borat, almost as if he is deliberately raising the comic bar for himself. The film veers pretty close to Andy Kaufman’s wrestling routine at times, that twilight zoned place where comedy becomes performance art and starts prying up the floor boards of our societal and sexual conventions even as we stand on them – and then keeps hitting us over the head with them.
Cohen used exactly the same Candid Camera-style strategy in both of his films. He embodies an extreme comic character and somehow makes him seem like a plausible denizen of a crazy world not quite our own. He then has this character do, say or want something slightly aberrant from real people and films their reactions. The results, as you’d expect, are sometimes embarrassing or ha-ha funny. But Sasha Cohen is not a benign, avuncular student of human nature like Allen Funt. He is a satirist who delights in rubbing our faces in the droppings of our sacred cows. Some of what he does is disturbing.
There’s one scene early in the film where Bruno repeatedly rams some Rube Goldberg contraption on a pulley into his dwarf partner’s butt hole. While certainly surreal enough to be comedy, the scene was more strange and cruel than funny. The really funny part (still not ha-ha) was how directly and frankly this kind of sexual act is presented in the film. It felt like Discovery Channel meets reality TV, nothing hidden or forbidden. Is this perhaps our culture’s final revenge on the Puritans, our inching ever closer to the tribal rites of A Clockwork Orange?
That said, I really liked the scene where Bruno’s penis (aided and abetted by special effects) is yoyo’d around his groin with the easy precision of a circus act and ends by speaking through its urethral opening. I’d never seen a penis do tricks before or heard one talk, although the male organ is well known for having its own mind. Maybe it was quoting Augie March, the Saul Bellow character who said, “I want, I want, I want.” (or was that from the Dangling Man?) The utterly unselfconscious freedom of this scene felt really liberating. I laughed out loud because there’s a tension between the tectonic plates of the body and the mind, and laughter is the earthquake that keeps them from breaking apart entirely.
I had another LOL experience when Bruno, attempting to become a celeb by embracing a high profile charity cause, flies to Israel to make peace in the Middle East. He actually succeeds in getting a Palestinian citizen and an Israeli citizen to hold hands and sing the moral equivalent of kumbayah. The really not funny ha-ha thing about this scene is that Bruno’s preposterous peace mission is about as successful as the efforts of myriad high-ranking officials over the last 60 years.
In the end, Bruno is not a good film, and Sasha Cohen is not trying to teach us to reclaim the power of singing and holding hands that has been lost since the Civil Rights movement went out of business. The man is a comic, not a sage, but he takes no prisoners, and that makes him an interesting guy to watch.
Starring Sasha Baron Cohen. Directed by Larry Charles. Produced by Everyman Pictures. 81 minutes
Sasha Baron Cohen is the Ur-comic: equal parts tummler, provocateur and saboteur. Hard to say at this point whether he’s a satiric genius with Swiftian chops or just another wacked out love child of the Monty Python gang. His latest movie, Bruno, seems to fall into another category altogether. It’s more an experience in the Jimi Hendrix sense of the word than entertainment. Yes, it’s really funny in places, but mostly not ha-ha funny, and nowhere near the runaway romp of his first flick, the groundbreaking Borat. Still, if you like your humor raw and outrageous, chock full of jokes about penises and the human body’s various fluids, gases and secretions, this movie is for you. Mix one part Austin Powers with two parts Marquis de Sade and a twist of bromance and you’re almost there.
Bruno is the story of a gay, German fashionista in resolute pursuit of celebrity. There’s something prissy even imperious about the eponymous Bruno, a comic exaggeration of the flamboyant narcissism of real fashionistas. It would have been an inspired choice except fashionistas don’t leave much for a comic to send up.
To complicate the comic equation further, Cohen has made Bruno a sadist, one of those archetypal Germanic practitioners of the new cruelty. He’s an S+M artist using other people’s pain as his palette, and he’s just not a likable fellow. Mike Meyers made this kind of character funny on Saturday Night Live but he was extremely careful to be charming and silly when he was being cruel, letting us in on the joke. Adam Sandler is also cruel and self-absorbed in Funny People but his occasional glint of self-awareness keeps us in the game. In Bruno, Cohen has eliminated the Keatonesque innocence he used so effectively in Borat, almost as if he is deliberately raising the comic bar for himself. The film veers pretty close to Andy Kaufman’s wrestling routine at times, that twilight zoned place where comedy becomes performance art and starts prying up the floor boards of our societal and sexual conventions even as we stand on them – and then keeps hitting us over the head with them.
Cohen used exactly the same Candid Camera-style strategy in both of his films. He embodies an extreme comic character and somehow makes him seem like a plausible denizen of a crazy world not quite our own. He then has this character do, say or want something slightly aberrant from real people and films their reactions. The results, as you’d expect, are sometimes embarrassing or ha-ha funny. But Sasha Cohen is not a benign, avuncular student of human nature like Allen Funt. He is a satirist who delights in rubbing our faces in the droppings of our sacred cows. Some of what he does is disturbing.
There’s one scene early in the film where Bruno repeatedly rams some Rube Goldberg contraption on a pulley into his dwarf partner’s butt hole. While certainly surreal enough to be comedy, the scene was more strange and cruel than funny. The really funny part (still not ha-ha) was how directly and frankly this kind of sexual act is presented in the film. It felt like Discovery Channel meets reality TV, nothing hidden or forbidden. Is this perhaps our culture’s final revenge on the Puritans, our inching ever closer to the tribal rites of A Clockwork Orange?
That said, I really liked the scene where Bruno’s penis (aided and abetted by special effects) is yoyo’d around his groin with the easy precision of a circus act and ends by speaking through its urethral opening. I’d never seen a penis do tricks before or heard one talk, although the male organ is well known for having its own mind. Maybe it was quoting Augie March, the Saul Bellow character who said, “I want, I want, I want.” (or was that from the Dangling Man?) The utterly unselfconscious freedom of this scene felt really liberating. I laughed out loud because there’s a tension between the tectonic plates of the body and the mind, and laughter is the earthquake that keeps them from breaking apart entirely.
I had another LOL experience when Bruno, attempting to become a celeb by embracing a high profile charity cause, flies to Israel to make peace in the Middle East. He actually succeeds in getting a Palestinian citizen and an Israeli citizen to hold hands and sing the moral equivalent of kumbayah. The really not funny ha-ha thing about this scene is that Bruno’s preposterous peace mission is about as successful as the efforts of myriad high-ranking officials over the last 60 years.
In the end, Bruno is not a good film, and Sasha Cohen is not trying to teach us to reclaim the power of singing and holding hands that has been lost since the Civil Rights movement went out of business. The man is a comic, not a sage, but he takes no prisoners, and that makes him an interesting guy to watch.
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