la pomme du ciel

On paper, I’m easily impressed by movies. If there’s checkmarks for aliens, explosions, and sinister corporations and/or  governments, I’m usually in. I was raised on sci-fi movies, I am an unapologetic Star Trek fan, I fret about the potentiality of SkyNet and I still watch TRON (and was all kinds of jolly to see the trailer for the sequel). I am the perverbial fish in the demographic barrel Hollywood suits love to shoot at a couple times a year.

True enough to Mr. Barnum’s dictum, there is a (sad fanboy) sucker born every minute. Unfortunately, when you actually pay money for shitheaps like Alien Versus Predator, you’re only encouraging George Lucas to milk Star Whores harder.  I saw the preview for District 9 right before Terminator: Salvation locked my childhood in the basement for several hours and proceeded to abuse it (as if T:3 wasn’t bad enough). The logic that followed after I had expunged my rage in the parking lot was that anything had to be better than that: “Wait, that one trailer…District something…It’s got aliens, explosions, shit, what the hell? I love that stuff! I’ll be back.”

Niell Blomkamp’s film opens up with mock interviews, post-shit hitting the fan, letting you know that protagonist Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) had gotten into some shit, has disappeared, and that the people of Johannesburg hate the aliens living in the refugee camp/shanty town of District 9.

Good. Great. Aliens look believable (though I wish our imagination could go beyond the whole bi-pedal thing), sound cool, and then here’s Wikus, being filmed for a documentary, fumbling with new-found authority as the head toadie for MNU’s (MultiNational United) forced eviction of the aliens into a concentration camp well outside of the city limits.

Then Wikus gets into some shit. In the span of a few hours, he goes from a naive, loyal MNU stooge to guinea pig to a fugitive. There are explosions, lots of explosions, and the weapons in the movie are a sendup of every shooter since Doom. I am beginning to think that the R rating is the only safe way to watch movies anymore.

A lot of the footage is from the documentary, security cameras and the like, mixed in with some very striking shots of the arid squalor of District 9. Then there’s the nigh-seamless special effects. It was a treat to not have my intelligence insulted by hyper-real effects and a hyperbolic sis-boom-pow.

Plot, you ask? In full force, made all the more believable since not only are the actors all unheard of South Africans, but they’re damn good. From Wikus to the chillingly callous MNU executives to the trigger-happy head of MNU security, it’s all awful close to the mark, especially if you’re at all familiar with humanity’s history of medical research on itself, for one. It’s not too hard to concieve how blind of an eye would be turned towards the plight of non-humans.

The film is based on a short called “Alive In Joburg“, a six-minute short by the same director, which was apparently good enough for a studio to throw him a paltry 30 million for the best science fiction movie I’ve seen in awhile. It even trumps J.J. Abram’s Star Trek re-boot, suck it.

While District 9 is  a far cry from the gentle whimsies of the sci-fi films from my youth, I’m a big boy now, and I’ll take my screaming moral implications with gratiutous gibbage and Nigerian warlords.

Grade: A

It’s been ages since I made it to the theater, but this last Saturday I managed to find a partner in crime. She had gotten us as far as “Movie”, so it was up to me to roll the dice and risk wasting 10 bucks.

This time I chose wisely; “Taken” might not have been worth ten bucks, but it was certainly worth my time. The money, you can always get that back. But your brain will never forgive you for introducing the latest Hollywood shitheap into your domepiece. I don’t regret seeing “Taken” for a second, though I’d love to see the international rated R version.

“Taken” started out with a really tired exposition.

Caution: I am about to spoil the first half-hour of the movie. Because it’s not that good.

Yes, you’ve seen this before. A film about a government agent, with a past (duh-duhn)! Man (Liam Neeson) sacrifices family for career, man sacrifices career to do good by his family. His ex-wife is sort of a bitch, imagine. It even had a very contrived guys’ night to grill with the old espionage buddies, you know, kicking back, talking about that one time in Beirut. They even try and convince their retired buddy to get back in the game, imagine. He does a freelance security gig with them the next day, protecting some diva, totally saves her life and beats someone’s ass.

Then the real movie starts. Against dad’s better judgement, his daughter goes on a trip to follow U2 (O ye Gods, how I loathe Bono!) around Europe. She and her friend are then kidnapped by a Serbian sex-slave ring.

Very well choreographed beatdowns ensure. Liam Neeson kills everyone. Everyone. His solo investigation goes through a number of dead-ends while he tries to find his daughter, and he calmly extracts information out of the last survivor of each particular massacre. There’s a great monologue in there about the benefits of good old fashioned American torture.

The main drawback is your own common sense. You know that Hollywood would never risk being so bold as to give audiences an unhappy ending, so you know that everything is going to be alright in the end, it’s just a matter of how many bodies a righteous-psychopath Neeson stacks up.

The move really was a showcase of how frightening Liam Neeson can be; they should re-shoot “The Phantom Menace” and let Neeson torture Darth Maul, or calmly slice off Watto’s wings and do away with the giant waste of time the podrace scene was.

I don’t have much to say about “Taken”, because there’s not much to it. It’s conservatively shot, the chase scenes are teriffic, there’s about 8,764 great fight scenes and I would like to see how it stacks up to “Braveheart” for sheer human damage. The other big plus is that it’s not a three-hour slog- it runs crisply and the exposition nothwithstanding, every scene keeps your eyelids peeled back.

While predictable action movies are rarely my thing, the good ones are a great guilty pleasure. Sure, I’ve seen it. Sure, I know he saves his daughter in the end (and if you call that a spoiler, you’re too dumb for this blog. GTFO), but I gotta see it at least once again for the body-count. It’s perfect fodder for a dudes’ night drinking game. Besides,  you’ll need someone around to high-five whenever Neeson kills yet another sleazy gangster, brah.

Grade: B