District 9

Next up for the review board, is District 9. Now initially, I wasn’t keen on seeing this as from everything I had heard about it, it was just a movie about racism set in South Africa involving aliens. But after realninetails went to see it, and then actually admitted to wanting to go see it again (huge praise there, trust me on this one) I figure I’d give it a shot.

So the basic story goes as follows: Big alien spaceship suddenly appears and floats over Johannesburg, South Africa in 1990 and does nothing. Eventually humans cut through the ship and discover a large number of aliens (referred to as prawns), and promptly rehouse them all into District 9. Twenty years later, District 9 has turned into a slum and the local population no longer want to put up with the prawns. So the MNU (Multi National United) headed up by Wikus, is tasked to evict the prawns to the imaginatively named District 10 (who didn’t see that coming?). During the eviction process, Wikus gets infected by an alien weapon and starts to mutate, gets captured by MNU and then escapes, and befriends one of the aliens.

The racism card does feature, but no where near as heavily as I thought it would, though the irony of seeing loads of black people protesting against the “prawns” and demanding they be moved was amusing to say the least. I suppose the old saying “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is quite well demonstrated as black and white work together to evict the mutually disliked aliens, presumably so they can go back to fighting each other for control of the land, who knows.

For some unexplained reason, the aliens love cat food, to the point where thrown cans of cat food can be used to break up a group of angry aliens, and the aliens even trade their technologically superior weapons for the stuff. Talking about the alien weaponry, which really come to shine in the second half of the movie, I admit to laughing somewhat manically upon seeing some of the weapons in use. They ranged from a gun that shoots a bolt of electricity that causes the target to instantly explode into numerous bloody chunks, to a gun that fires shock waves capable of knocking down walls and flinging humans great distances (which is demonstrated a number of time to hilarious effect), up to robotic suits that can be worn to cause even more carnage and destruction.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable movie that I would happily go and see again. The change in Wikus from proud white man who looks down on the aliens, to one that understands what it’s like to be different and out of place, is well done without being overly forced onto the viewer. The camera work and CGI is stunning, the aliens are very well done, and the alien weaponry is hugely entertaining to watch in action. Go see it!

Fame (2009)

So let’s get this film reviewing business underway. First up is the remake of Fame (updated for 2009 but based off the 1980s movie). Now I have seen the musical Fame before, but because it was a number of years ago and I don’t remember it very well, for the purposes of this review I’m not going to make any comparisions between the film version and the stage version.

The plot of the film boils down to a focus on a number of different students at the prestigious New York High school for the Performing Arts (referred to as PA throughout most of the film) from their auditions, where their numbers are reduced from over ten thousand applicants down to a select two hundred, up to their graduation at the end of senior year. The characters are your expected mix of privileged and under-privileged students from all sorts of backgrounds, with the usual emotional issues and teenage angst you would expect from high school students. To be honest, the characters are pretty sterotypical, and once introduced as the stuck up one, or the quiet/shy one etc, there’s little in the way of character development. Of course, there’s the obligatory life lessons along the way such as the aspiring film director who gets ripped off to the tune of $5000 by a dodgy film producer, or the ballet dancer who is told that he’ll never be good enough professionally and then goes on to try and kill himself, etc etc.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s obvious that some of the characters have talent, with some great examples of dancing and singing throughout the film. There were a couple of particularly noteworthy scenes that stayed with me, such as the “Carn Evil” (Get it? A play on Carnival? Yeah, side splitting humour I’m sure) halloween party, and also the impromptu jam session set in the cafeteria shortly after the freshman year has started. A student hooks up an electro drum pad to a dusty old amp, and gradually the other students join in and it ends up involving violins, electric guitars, a drum kit, dancing across the tables, some impressive vocals and a bit of a rap battle, culminating in almost the entire cafeteria being involved. It looked like it would have been great fun to film, and indeed, was really enjoyable to watch. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the rest of the film.

I didn’t go into this film with high expectations, so I wasn’t overly disappointed. It wasn’t a bad watch, and the two scenes I mentioned were really quite enjoyable, but overall, it’s a film I’ll only go and see the once. Though if some misguided friend or relative buys it for me on DVD, those couple of scenes will likely be the only use it would get.