Jack Kentala hails from the land where snow make football stadium collapse. Big snow send football to Detroit. Filmmaker shoot in snow. Filmmaker make film.

Mr. Kentala also writes film reviews for dinca.

Here is a teaser trailer for his latest film, Archetype (2011). This is Kentala’s second feature film. All independent filmmakers — all filmmakers — know that making a feature film on a shoestring budget is no easy task. You work with the elements, your limited supply of money, and work with those good vibrations. Limited funds present challenges; challenges allow the filmmaker to make a superior film.

Synopsis: In the near future, Ridley Kraid, an ex-soldier, and James Drake, a college dropout, illegally sell guns to an increasingly-fearful populace. While they begin as freelance arms dealers, they soon attract the attention of a growing anti-government organization, who want an exclusive partnership. Kraid and Drake try to balance on the razor’s edge and not fall in league with either the government or the radicals.

Here is a true-grit indie that is not to be missed. Kentala has been working on it since August 2009, and will be submitting to festivals once he wraps post-production in March 2011. Watch out.

Here is the teaser trailer for Archetype. More info on MPC Film Co.

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1. Trailer: Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America
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3. Trailer: Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers

by Jack Kentala

What’s unexpected from The Social Network: That, even in the midst of everything, and once the smoke clears, Zuckerberg comes out clean. He’s not some megalomaniac asshole – that role is convenientally filled by Justin Timberlake’s Sean “Napster” Parker – or straightjacketed in a ward for paranoid schizophrenics. He’s a brain in a vat that was put into a human body. He has no inner censor, and having that perceived total lack of empathy ends up ruining more than one relationship. Saying he’s not very social is the understatement of the day. It’s more like he’s this little bubble floating through society and very, very rarely interacting on any more than a superficial level.

And yes, it’s a movie about people, and it’s far more a movie about Facebook than all this nonsense, left-field Oscar buzz (who the fuck started that?) would have you believe. I don’t think anyone over forty would get this movie the same way us hip kids do. I still get chastised at work if my boss catches me on Facebook, even if I’m computing something work-related in the background.

Zuckerberg, clearly at the movie’s center, acutely speaks about this generation gap. During his multiple depositions, he’s adrift, aloof, but probably thinking about a way to improve Facebook. There are some choice lines during such scenes – such as whether or not a lawyer has Zuckberg’s full attention, of which he clearly does not – that were spoiled in the trailers. But during all this lawyering, all these depositions, all these cease-and-desists and workarounds about IP law is a bunch of garbage – implied by Zuckerberg – when really he just seized on an idea at the right time and bet on the right horse. (Well, he built the horse.) It’s like those people who correct you when you say Bell invented the phone and they say nuh-uh it was some Italian guy. In the movie, when defending his Facebook, Zuckerberg says, “If you build a chair you don’t go out and pay everyone who’s ever made a chair before.”

Everyone knows the story of Facebook and Harvard Connect / ConnectU. What’s unfortunate about that is the beefy brothers who tried to start the latter end up as total buffoons, and only when they wield the cudgel of the justice system do they actually have to get down in the dirt and figure out what was Zuckerberg, what was Harvard Connect, and what was just floating out in the ether, ready to be snatched.

That’s a lot of the first part of the film: like how Zuckerberg marries the idea of separate dorm house facebooks into one giant facebook; or how a friend asking if Zuckerberg knows whether or not a girl is dating somewhere jumpstarts the whole idea of adding relationship status onto profiles.

There are a lot of scenes of Zuckerberg running, usually to his room to hammer out some new code. It also serves as a pretty blatant visual metaphor: Zuckerberg always, always running past throngs of people and students, all socializing, showing that he’s the lone genius, the loneliest man atop the mountain. And that’s part of the allure of his character. That’s why we’re drawn to reclusive or troubled or eccentric or socially-stunted geniuses; why we’re fascinated with J.D. Salinger, Terrence Malick, Syd Barrett, Brian Wilson, and, in an extreme form of the latter, the real-life Rain Man.

Being a writer/director myself, I definitely know that feeling of catching lightning in a bottle, of having this absolutely genius idea and greedily knowing it’s all yours. It’s bliss. It’s intoxicating. But at some point you have to release it into the wild, and sometimes it’s not ready. And it’s usually terrifying when you uncork that bottle.

A bit about the direction. From Alien 3 through Zodiac, Fincher dealt only with action or thrillers. Then with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button it seems he made the career move to only make Prestige films. This ties in with my earlier assessment that The Social Network was, first, scoffed at; second, thought Too Soon in the vein of Stone’s W.; third, buzzed as Pretty Good; then magically, considered in a horse race for Best Picture. But anyhow, what I wanted to say is, with just two films, Fincher has become a chameleon; he could make any kind of film short of a costume drama or musical. Other than looking at his filmography, it’s totally unpredictable what he’ll do next. It’s his mid-stage renaissance of sorts, sort of like Darren Aronofsky coming back after three heady, heavy films and making The Wrestler.

As for the writing, it’s perfectly apt that the basis for The Social Network was a book titled The Accidental Billionaires. I’m not sure where the line is blurred between the two, but it’s pretty obvious that Aaron Sorkin penned the screenplay. He’s always been dialog-heavy in his vast swath of TV stuff like Sports Night and The West Wing. While there isn’t much walking-and-talking, there’s as much spoken dialog in the first ten minutes than in entire Kubrick films. It’s not wholly self-serving, though, given that Zuckerberg, to put it lightly, has a tendency to ramble. It’s unnerving to the point that I can’t watch the man speak. He’s either on or off: total motormouth, or a brick wall. (The latter of which is masterfully captured by Jesse Eisenberg’s absolutely intense scowl. And, oh yeah, he was really good in this. He’s no longer the poor man’s Michael Cera [see also: Zombieland, e.g. a role written for Cera but given to Eisenberg].)

A bone to pick with Cronenweth’s cinematography: It continues the tired tradition of The Ivy League Mystique. Nearly every goddamn shot of exteriors takes place at night, and all those columns and all that old-ness is played up like Zuckerberg lives in a haunted village. Again, it loosely ties into the idea of the generation gap, and also a school with a rich history that Zuckerberg doesn’t give a shit about…

…except when it comes to the potential of exclusive clubs, killer parties, and meeting girls. I read some study somewhere – you were expecting me to cite it? – and it explained, in pretty basic anthropology, that human males are hardwired to try to make a masterpiece or some great invention between the ages of 18 and 26 for the primary purpose to attract females. In our generation, it’s been the Computer Kids. In the 70s, it was the first generation of film school grads (Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Spielberg, Lucas). In the second half of the movie – dominated by Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker, inventor of Napster, who’s played as Timberlake playing an asshole version of Timberlake in an egregiously-miscast role – just being connected to Facebook has VIP status. “We have groupies” one of Zuckerberg’s friends announces after they score two girls based on Facebook-creation recognition.

It’s actually this aspect that makes the film come full circle. The first scene is Zuckerberg and his then-girlfriend having drinks, in which it’s pretty quickly revealed that Zuckerberg usually holds about four conversations at one, all with the same person; like language existing in four dimensions. She breaks up with him because of varying shades of his own self-obsession and complete lack of self-awareness to the point of being an asshole. And at the end of the movie, he hasn’t spoken to her in some while, and over some screen text about the various legal settlements, it shows Zuckerberg in a room, alone, friend-requesting his ex and hitting the refresh key every ten seconds.

So it’s a message as old as Citizen Kane: It’s lonely at the top. Though Charles Foster Kane wasn’t worth $7 billion.

Related posts:

1. Brief Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell
2. Thoughts on the Lost finale
3. Thoughts on The Informant!

by Jack Kentala

There’s an old sort of theory. Or just an image, really. It’s a man riding a horse, and rigged to a stick is a carrot dangling just in front of the horse. The horse wants to eat this carrot, so it moves forward, but, alas, so does the carrot. The horse, though, keeps going for that carrot, and the rider of said horse gets where he wants to go. It’s the same sort of logic of a “Free beer tomorrow” sign permanently outside a local dive; an enticing promise that turns out to be empty.

That’s what Lost has been for the duration of its six seasons. Carrot and stick. Since the show thrives on creating mysteries that the hapless viewer think will get resolved, a reasonable person could assume there’d be equal parts carrot and stick. This, unfortunately, has not been the case.

Seasons one through five have concocted riddle after riddle on the enigmatic Island, and many viewers, myself included, finally thought the showrunners would finally give us that fucking carrot at the end of it all. We’ve endured polar bears, dinosaurs, magic children, visions, ghosts, hatches buried in the ground, the Dharma Initiative, a smoke monster, and, shit, wave after wave of plane-crash survivors and island inhabitants materializing each subsequent season just to pad out the cast of castaways.

Consider it a bad case of American television gone amok. If there’s party to finger, I blame ABC, getting the show’s writers to keep the endless, unresolved mystery going season after season because, hell, ratings weren’t that bad. Only once the scribes knew there was one season left to go, they could finally start gift-wrapping all the little oddities of the show and put an end to the shenanigans.

Season six was supposed to be the Rosetta stone for everything that had happened prior. But it wasn’t. It invented more things. Introduced new characters. Had the gall to put a Mayan temple on an island in the South Pacific with, sin of all sins to anyone halfway knowledgeable of civilizations, Egyptian fucking hieroglyphics inside. And it prominently featured a sideways parallel universe of sorts, in which the famed Ocean flight 815 didn’t crash, and all the passengers went on with their magically-intersecting, marginally-happier lives.

For those hoping the grand finale wouldn’t be total bullshit, well, it was a reminder that Lost never really was that great of a show past its first season. Once it gained its cult status, it veered into a really smarmy, smug, pompous, self-important show that had every sort of limp religious allegory thrown at it, along with a long-running debate of free will versus destiny that held about as much water as the shoddy Star Wars prequels. Same with the latter, Lost has always been pulp; one of the most expensive soap operas ever produced, complete with paper-thin characters, black-and-white morality, and oddly-foreseeable twists. All the while being, naturally, a horrid frustration for anyone wanting a legitimate, scientific explanation of What The Fuck Is Going On besides some warble about the Island possessing an enormous volume of electromagnetic energy.

All the minor mysteries of the show will be debated long into the dull future for the show’s diehards, but I’ve always considered the biggest riddle to be, “What is the Island?” Only a bit after the finale I came to an obvious answer: the Island is a red herring; simply a place for people to come together and stage this mainstream-television fantasy, complete with the standard rainbow of ethnicities and tiresome character archetypes.

I can’t imagine anyone reading this either a) hasn’t watched the finale, or b) gives a shit what happened, so I’ll give my take on the series’ ending moments. It was like a perfectly white tablecloth: boring, pedestrian, and fairly predictable. In short, everyone had died and was living in the sideways universe just to reunite with each other, since their time on the Island was the most significant in their lives. It’s the sort of Everybody Eventually Dies message ripped exactly from the ending of the equally-wonky but overall-better HBO series Six Feet Under. Lost, though, had the dumb idea to assemble everyone in a church and then overwhelm them with – I kid you not – a giant White Light that comes off as a saccharine, autistic-child’s version of a Christian heaven.

(Never mind that in this sideways universe – that if it’s Heaven, should be perfect – Sayid had to murder like four people before being reunited with one of the blandest characters in the show’s history.)

So that’s it. Done. I’m forever relieved that I won’t have to spend my Tuesday nights in perpetual frustration of that carrot dangling in front of my face. Let’s pray to the god of your choice that the next serialized show to hold our entertainment culture hostage is worthy of the zeitgeist Lost so wrongfully seized.

Postscript: For anyone looking to watch a far-superior show with a central mystery, I highly recommend the UK version of The Prisoner. On Wikipedia you can find a good listing of the “essential” episodes to watch, given there’s some chaff amid the wheat. However, don’t expect anything near closure for The Prisoner’s extremely avant-garde, heavily-symbolic finale. The AMC-produced American miniseries adaptation also doesn’t give up any easy answers at its end.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Inglourious Basterds
2. Thoughts on Iron Man 2
3. Thoughts on Where The Wild Things Are

by Jack Kentala

It’s easy to bemoan sequels, especially for the so-called “superhero” franchise films. For comic fans, there are innumerable changes to the coveted Lore for the sake of making a compelling hour-and-a-half to two-hour movie, laden with ret-conning and character compositing and various rejiggerings that muddy the pure waters of the diehard. For the adult populace seeking to watch something slightly more entertaining than reality TV, there’s the barrier of the PG-13 rating, which requires all possible grittiness and swearing and sex to getting sanded down to something harmless enough for the 14-year-old boys in attendance, not to mention the latter usually resulting in a lowest-common-denominator, playing-to-the-moronic-masses dumbing-down of most everything. And for anyone just trying to enjoy a damn film, there’s the product placement, the unwieldy comic relief, and the nagging suspicion that they’re watching a two-hour commercial for action figures.

Rather miraculously, Iron Man has proved itself to be one of the more tolerable, watchable franchises, which I’ll just go ahead and say I believe is entirely the result of the inspired choice of casting Robert Downey Jr. and getting micro-indie (circa Swingers) turned big-budget writer-actor-director Jon Favreau to helm the show. Amazing how Favreau went from slumming it with the criminally-underseen, Swingers-spiritual-successor, small-budget mob movie Made to a gargantuan, multi-unit, multi-million moneybag like Iron Man in around fifteen years, which is about the equivalent of fifteen minutes in gated Hollywood.

Iron Man, however, is only two films in, which for most superhero franchises are baby steps. Film Number One is always easiest and, usually, most interesting, since the bulk of the runtime is devoted to the Origin Story. It’s why I think of the first Spider-Man as the best, and why 2 and 3 gradually worsened, and why I won’t even bother with 4 and/or the reboot now that all the players behind the trilogy have divorced themselves from any future movies. X-Men and its sequel were passable, but then the third was widely panned, as was the Wolverine spin-off. The Hulk has never really gotten a firm grip, given Ang Lee made what is arguably the first superhero art-film with his simply-named Hulk in 2004; reviled insofar as to make the recent The Incredible Hulk have no semblance to Lee’s version. And there’s the also-junior Batman reboot, with a decent first foray (again, most interesting as an origin story) and a bloated sequel that only gained a tinge of legitimacy because one of the leads decided to go and die.

Batman is a good case-study for comparison. While Batman is helmed by a veteran action/thriller director – Chris Nolan, who started with the cult-hit Memento and whose Batman off-years yield such ambitious works as The Prestige and the upcoming Inception – Favreau really came out of nowhere as a director, going straight from small-budget Made to the bizarro-Christmas pic Elf, after which he directed something rather forgettable before getting behind Iron Man. But Batman and Iron Man seem to share quite a few elements. Namely, the titular character possess no innate superpowers, but because of their genius (or use of geniuses) and huge masses of sitting-around money allowed them to make suits and gadgets that can tackle a city’s worth of crime.

The characterization of Batman, though, stalled in The Dark Knight, since the only aspect of Bruce Wayne’s mythos explored is the death of his parents, and Batman Begin’s follow-up starred a man in a black rubber suit who spoke in a well-practiced growl and who possessed the uncanny ability to disappear whenever someone is talking to him turns their back. (It doesn’t help that the Hero is massively upstaged by Heath Ledger’s depiction of The Joker, unanimously praised if only because of the different compared to Jack Nicholson, who was merely playing Jack Nicholson in a purple suit in Tim Burton’s Batman.) Iron Man, by contrast, delves more into genius billionaire Tony Stark’s self-loathing and depression; his drinking and womanizing; his narcissism and deep scars of a childhood living in the shadow of his father. Again, this is where the PG-13 rating pins it to the wall, and Iron Man 2 doesn’t get much deeper past Stark’s surface than the first.

So Iron Man 2 picks up with the finale of Iron Man 1, in which Stark publicly disclosed that, yes, he is The Iron Man, making himself even more of a self-absorbed egoist than before. The film’s start has Stark, as Iron Man, jetting into his keynote at the year-long Stark Expo and declaring that he’s basically responsible for world peace, despite other nations trying, and failing, to create their own Iron Men.

That’s really where the movie starts to coast on the formula largely carried over from the first. We introduce Mickey Rourke as some Russian physicist (also conveniently brilliant) who can make his own fancy arc reactor whatever and, eventually, his own Iron Man rip-off suit, but with whips. Iron Man doesn’t have whips! It’s the same sort of problem as the first, in which foe Iron Monger could only go toe-to-toe with Stark with a special suit. And, like last time, Stark’s buddy (this time Don Cheadle replacing Terrence Howard) suits up as Iron Man clone War Machine and joins in the foray. I’m no Iron Man scholar, but in a sort of universe where there aren’t superpowers per se, won’t every Iron Man film basically involve the titular character squaring off against a baddie decked out in similar armor?

You can pretty much guess most of the film from there. Or, if not, you probably don’t care about these sort of things when seeing this sort of movie.

There is, however, the Baggage of the superhero franchise film that, fortunately, doesn’t weigh the film down too much. There had to be a b-line setting up The Avenger, set to come out in 2012, mostly present in Samuel L. Jackson lingering here and there and bringing up SHIELD, with various degrees of wanting and then not wanting Stark’s Iron Man to join up. Added to the mix is Scarlett Johansson shedding even more of her indie cred by taking the role of superheroine Black Window (which is never mentioned by name in the movie – I had to Wikipedia it). Whereas a worse film like, say, Transformers, would cast a Maxim-approved sexpot like, say, Megan Fox, to play such a character, I suppose I can credit whoever’s decision it was to get Johansson on board, given she has a resume that shows off some acting chops. (Though IMDb’s trivia shows she was in the middle of a rather long list of actresses wanted for the part.) She doesn’t really interfere with the not-really-established love triangle of her, Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper Potts, and, again, it’s more self-serving to establish the upcoming Avengers movie than actually adding much to the plot. But, as the theme of this piece is, the watchability of Iron Man 2 is aided by getting to ogle Johansson in various tight outfits.

I just went over the last few things and it might sound like I’m railing on the film. I’m not. It’s just that it’s hard to sit through something that is tethered so tightly to a formula that all hard-plot elements come off rather stiff. Like the inevitable end showdown and the surprisingly-quick takedown of Rourke’s metal-suited combination of the Crimson Dynamo and Whiplash (again, quick Wikipedia check).

And where Iron Man 2 shines (oh god, that’s a pun, isn’t it?) is the same as the first. There’s an apocryphal story about the first in which the producers and VFX army spent most of their time figuring out the action sequences that Favreau and the cast had pretty much free reign to create their characters and dialog. It created, egad, some nuance in the performances (regardless of how much the nation collectively wants to punch Paltrow in the face, et cetera) largely absent from the genre, and, in the sequel, many Altmanesque sequences with overlapping dialog that I’m sure gave nightmares to the dialog editor. So while something like The Dark Knight suffered from one-note performances by Christian Bale and his wooden Batman, here things go a little more loose. Though one could probably argue that Downey Jr. is delivering rapid banter as Downey Jr. instead of Tony Stark.

It’s all part of what makes Iron Man the most adult of these comic book films (despite some guffaw-inducing product placement and the money-machine spitting out an Iron Man video game simultaneous with the movie) and – say it with me now – quite watchable. And, hell, I find Iron Man’s brand of racing-through-the-sky action a lot more interesting than a dimly-lit, cut-too-fast Batman fistfight.

Dovetailing on the above-mentioned fast cuts, which can cause even the most MTV-raised moviegoer a migraine, another thing I seem to notice in a lot of these movies is the attempt to one-up all the others with regards to computing interfaces. I think it’s a result of a post-Minority Report world, in which VFX guys decided that keyboards and mice were really boring, and in an iPhone and iPad age we’re all figuring that touchscreen interfaces are the future and shit. Iron Man 2 has a few scenes in which Stark is sitting in his quasi-lair, surrounded by holographic computer screens that seem to fill the whole room, in which he walks around and flails his arms and the magic screens pop up and fly around and disappear at a pretty annoying, ADD-addled rate.

Oh yeah, and there’s a really stupid scene/plot point in which Stark manages to invent a new element (you know, like hydrogen) by building what looks like a particle accelerator in his workspace and directing a laser at a magic triangle of… something. I’m sure comic fans would point out how it was better in ink, but in the movie it plays pretty ridiculous to anyone who stayed awake for at least fifteen minutes during high-school chemistry.

This is the part where this last paragraph, for those who skip the big chunk of text above, look to find some ultimate judgment, so I guess I’ll give it a shot. Iron Man 2 is a good movie. It’s a lot better than its contemporaries, and by the looks of the Rotten Tomatoes scores of other summer blockbusters, you could do a lot worse. It manages to navigate the tricky minefield of comic book superhero franchise movies by not treating the audience like idiots, though it’s also burdened by the obligation to set up not only a sequel but also an entirely new franchise (coming in 2012!). What sets Iron Man apart from the rest is that it dares to be adult (because, hell, the kids just want to see the action anyway), has some actual characters, and is directed by someone as concerned with said characters as with, to use the colloquialism, blowing shit up.

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Jack Kentala’s Three Most-Favorite Films of 2009

2009, like most other years, saw me going to the theater probably less than a dozen times. Chalk it up to insane ticket prices, or obnoxious other-viewers, or the slimming release window between the theater and DVD, or my daily binge of a movie per day via Netflix, or, hell, I can be my usual curmudgeony self and say that it’s rare when ten good films come out in any given year. This fine online establishment has hosted my lukewarm reviews of Avatar and Where The Wild Things Are, to the downright-mauling of Inglorious Basterds and, to a lesser extent, Drag Me To Hell.

That said, I expect I’ll catch up on 2009 films early next year ‘round the Academy Awards, when most of these hit DVD. If nothing else, I expect good things from Up In The Air, if only because of director Jason Reitman (though I honestly don’t like Thank You For Smoking) and George Clooney. Considering that I just watched the 2000 film Tigerland, which criminally played in a scant five theaters, and now have placed next to Traffic as my favorite of the year, I figure I’ll run into some 2009 films that slipped through the cracks for the rest of my film-watching years.

I did, however, see three films worth mentioning. And, as tradition dictates, the list will be like a countdown, though if you’re really impatient, #1 is The Hurt Locker.

3. The Road, directed by John Hillcoat

Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition), for better or worse, delivers a blow-by-blow recreation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. The novel itself seemed perfect for a big-screen treatment, if only for McCarthy’s rich prose that seemed better suited for cinema than literature. The film, however, already raised red flags when it was delayed an entire year, running the gamut of speculation that a second McCarthy adaptation right on the hells of No Country For Old Men was a bad idea, or that the film just wasn’t that good.

Outside of a handful of flashbacks featuring Charlize Theron as The Mother (scantly mentioned in the book), the adaptation, as mentioned, flows the same as the book and hits all the same memorable setpieces. Viggo Mortensen continues to mature as one of the better actors of his generation, if only for his offscreen dedication to researching roles and, here, his onscreen obsessive will to reach the coast, thinking it’ll bring himself and his son some salvation amid the ravaged landscape.

The problems with The Road, however, are the same as the book. Outside of some sour notes hit by child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (which is, to his and Hillcoat’s credit, one of the better child performances in recent memory) and an unnecessary, intermittent voiceover by Mortensen, the greatest flaw of The Road is that it has no strong beginning or end. It’s simply a lot of <i>middle</i>, just like the book. And yeah, it’s a good middle. But you can’t tell a story without a beginning and an end, and it seems that The Road skipped those, instead giving a paltry prologue and denouement.

Regardless, The Road contained some of the most memorable non-CGI images of the year, and its unflinching, unsentimental journey of a man and his son through the (thankfully, unexplained) post-apocalyptic nightmarescape of a burnt America was as haunting as the lauded novel.

Watch the trailer for The Road

2. The Girlfriend Experience, directed by Steven Soderbergh

It’s rare when a director can command the attention of both indie and mass audiences alike. Whereas most probably know Soderbergh as “the director of Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13” and this year’s The Informant (which was advertised as directed by the Oceans’ director), he always leaves time for these little cinematic “experiments.” This, of course, comes off his epic, breathtaking two-part Che; the man simply doesn’t take a break.

The Girlfriend Experience, however odd this connection may first seem, shares a lot with Paul Greengrass’s United 93. Both are, in essence, a snapshot of uncertain times, filmed from a point-of-view that doesn’t have the gift of foresight or even hindsight. Here, Soderbergh captures the height of the economic disaster through the device of a high-end call girl that provides, quite literally, the girlfriend experience. There are oft the post-coital fearful ramblings of Wall Street players who are losing their fortunes but paying extraordinary amounts of money for Sasha Grey’s company. Connect some dots if you will, and add some Soderbergh-operated cinematography that casts New York is a perpetual gunmetal blue.

Excuse any fray into territory that might seem hyperbolic, but when the dust has settled and our parents’ 401Ks can actually let them retire, we can look back on The Girlfriend Experience as a cultural, collective What The Fuck Were We Thinking? window into an economic meltdown that was a long time coming.

1. The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow

Yeah, I’ve got problems with The Hurt Locker. Explain to me how three guys from EOD seem to possess the skills to scout and snipe using a .50 cal rifle at distances damn near a kilometer? Without calling in any support or an airstrike? And that, when lead character Sgt. James has a hunch where some Bad Guys might be, charges off into a hostile slum by his lonesome?

But here’s what The Hurt Locker does that no one has come closer to: it takes place from the point of view as boots-on-the-ground in Iraq, without politicizing the action, without sentimentality, without any simple morality that can boil down this grey quagmire into black-and-white starkness. That, and it’s punctuated by some huge setpieces, like the aforementioned sniper shootout, the slum raid, and a lot of bomb defusing. Some make a big deal that a solid action movie was helmed by Kathryn Bigelow, a female director, but I can also point to the Generation Kill miniseries – another of the best works about the Iraq War – being mostly directed by Susanna White.

The Hurt Locker, I guess, catches the buzzwords I’ve tossed at my favorites of this particular year: unflinching, unsentimental, non-political, and restrained. We’re at such a strange crossroads in this country that it’s hard for American cinema to remain impartial. But The Hurt Locker manages it quite brilliantly.

So that was 2009. 2010 already has some fine prospects in the works – the delayed Shutter Island (directed by Martin Scorsese), The Tree of Life (directed by Terrence Malick), and The Green Zone (directed by Paul Greengrass). Let’s check in twelve months later and see if those three make my list. I do, however, hope to be surprised at some point in the year.

Watch the trailer for The Hurt Locker

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on The Informant!
2. 2009 Interview w/ Filmmaker Deborah Stratman
3. Introducing the Dinca Experimental Film Portal

written by Jack Kentala

I, like many others, already had an opinion about Avatar before I stepped into an IMAX theater and put on 3D glasses. I had an opinion about how I could spend $230 million. That, as a nonplussed, nonfan of Titantic, nor Aliens, nor the Terminator movies, I could make a hell of a better movie with $230 million than James Cameron. That as an independent filmmaker going broke making a film with an out-of-pocket budget of $15,000, I don’t have the risk of having so much money and marketing out of a product (as Avatar is certainly more product than film) and, thus, can actually tell a story where the morality isn’t black and white; where one set of people are eulogized while dying and the others are mercilessly slaughtered; where one feels a growing sense of fatigue at every shiny, pretty thing.

I already had an opinion about Avatar. I already had an idea of what the movie would be like. And I was exactly right. And so will you, too.

The story, minus $230 million, can be summarized as thus: the director of Titanic has bestowed upon us lowly mortals the story of an ex-Marine who can, through some magical, not-explained device, take control of an alien body. He gets into some trouble and, because some magic tree seeds cover him, an alien woman decides that, instead of killing him, will take him into her tribe. (It was somewhere around here that my mother said it seemed a lot like a CGI version of Dances With Wolves.) Then, of course, the ex-Marine realizes the current Marines are bad, and then there’s a big war that goes on too long to justify the 162-minute runtime.

And yes, every part of the plot is predictable. It basically is a rip-off of the story of colonists settling American (an industrialized, earth-killing society murdering the shit out of a non-industrialized, earth-worshipping one) and the Iraq War (going to war for a resource [in the case of the movie, the hilarious-named "unobtainium"] and having humanitarian efforts basically getting their budgets cut in favor of pure military muscle). The latter is actually used to an uncomfortably non-clever degree, when one character makes mention of a “pre-emptive strike,” and then another saying the military is massing for a “shock and awe.” Not that I’m going to knock on liberalism, but the message is pretty obvious, and pretty grade-school, and pretty fucking dumb.

So yes, you will see pretty things, and yes, you will see dragons rushing down cliffsides in glorious 3D, and yes, you will see a hell of a lot of transparent computer screens. But that’s all you’ll get.

It can come down to this: Avatar, as the most expensive movie ever made, is not the best movie ever made. And that gives so much hope to filmmakers without $230 million.

Theatrical Trailer:

Related posts:

1. Brief Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell
2. Thoughts on District 9
3. Thoughts on Where The Wild Things Are

written by Jack Kentala

Consider the polar ends of the spectrum: Where The Wild Things Are, mostly-beloved picture book by an ageset now in their 20s and 30s; a hipster-approved trailer accompanied by an unheard version of The Arcade Fire’s classic “Wake Up,” and an OST by hipster-approved Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs; a film heavily advertised on adult-oriented outlets like Pitchfork and The AV Club; coming from solid director Spike Jonze and cinematographer Lance Acord; promised as “dark” despite a PG rating (which I give benefit-doubt to, since 2001: A Space Odyssey is rated goddamn G); in stark contrast to, at the 12:30 p.m. showing on opening day, myself being the only adult viewer without (multiple/loud) children.

So it’s not a stretch to figure that the money behind Where The Wild Things Are, during its oft-delayed growing pains (originally slated for May 2008), had a hard time finding an audience. And, like many casualties of this dilemma, it doesn’t fully satisfy either camp.

The film has a strong start that caters to probably the largest amount of the audience. We follow Max terrorizing his dog and building an igloo across the street, followed not long thereafter by getting into a snowball fight with his older sister’s friends who, in the process, destroy said igloo. That sort of madcap, it’s-fun-until-someone-gets-hurt mentality has, for any bipedal human who lives in a snow-producing climate, has happened to anyone.

What follows are the inciting incidents from the trailer, which, unfortunately, don’t have much more bulk than the trailer. Max, again, dons his wolf suit and spies on his mom and her boyfriend before one night’s dinner. A brief standoff occurs, then Max books out of the house and to a conveniently/mysteriously-docked boat that leads off into the land of the Wild Things.

This is where things start to get really hazy. When Max comes upon the Wild Things for the first time, there’s really no awe or mystery; it’s as if the enormous Wild Things were just human-sized and, well, human (which is sort of the point, I concede), and then a lot of talking ensues before Max is rather suddenly anointed King.

What then happens is also distilled quite concisely in the trailers: a lot of running, a lot of random in-the-forest mayhem, and, above all, a suspicious lack of anyone needing food throughout the several “days” spent in the land of the Wild Things; a land that consists mostly of a Wooded Area, a Rocky Area, and a Desert Area.

There, the human-named characters fit nicely into pretty broad stereotypes. With all the mayhem aside, this is where the movie loses it way. It completes loses all forward thrust and, aside from Max’s plans to build a fort of some kind, there’s nothing that propels the narrative. It just idles along as the runtime lengthens. And at the end, it’s hard to tell if the story of the Wild Things – who are just a sad and lonely and, by extension, semi-pathetic race of creatures marooned on an island – is still rooted in sheer fantasy and imagination, or if it’s trying to bridge an allegory with Max’s home life.

It never becomes fully clear, and all of a sudden Max leaves without really giving anyone hope or joy or any sort of lesson. They mutually howl goodbye, and that’s it. Furthermore, Max spends a few days at sea going home, and some uptempo music is tossed in as though to trick us into thinking he actually accomplished something in the land of the Wild Things.

Max gets home, his mom makes him dinner, and that’s it. True to the extremely-short source book, sure, but as glad as I am that we’re spared the melodrama of a too-talky denouement, I wanted something in the ways of a denouement. That is, given that the film starts so strong in the Real World that I hoped it would end strong in said Real World.

Speculation abounds what Spike Jonze really wanted with this. IMDb trivia mentions that Jonze had a fully-finished version that the studio didn’t think was family-friendly enough, and if there’s any justice, that version will end up on DVD at some point. The studio seemed so repulsed that they actually considered reshooting the entire movie for $75 million. But that’s a different story; one we might never know unless we between-the-lines-read every Jonze publicity interview. And after an underwhelming 101 minute film, who has time for that?

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on District 9
2. Thoughts on Inglourious Basterds
3. Brief Thoughts on Drag Me To Hell

By Jack Kentala

Some would say I’m unqualified to “review” a Sam Raimi movie. I agree. After all, the only films of his I’ve seen are Spider-Man (decent), Spider-Man 2 (worse), and Spider-Man 3 (deliberately terrible). I have seen nothing of his horror films. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a contemporary non-M. Night Shyamalan supernatural/horror film.

Thus, I feel a bit out of my element here. I can’t even make a decent comment relating to the cinematography, since the shooter, Peter Deming, has been all over the place: Austin Powers, Scream 2, Mulholland Drive, and The Love Guru. Not exactly the most consistent career choices.

So I’ll avoid all attempts at making a coherent essay and wheel out the Hate-o-Matic, which will spit out all my random, semi-coloned thoughts about the film since, hell, I’ll spend most of tomorrow picking apart Where The Wild Things Are. And, honestly, Drag Me To Hell was slightly above average. Though quickly dragged (har har) back to average because it featured the obnoxious “I’m an Apple and am clearly hip and cool and PCs are for dads!” ad guy.

So—

Let’s take a deep breath and—

Begin:

• Another horror movie basically about a victimized young woman? PASS;
• …that thrives on a) gross-out, vomit-related gags, or b) flash-cuts of scary things set to a huge spike in the mixdown, or c) wind blowing stuff when, clearly, there should be wind;
• …which I’ve been told goes back to the director’s “roots,” which is a statement that always sounds like an admission that the director has started to suck (see also: Spider-Man 3, though conspiracy theorists suggest it was deliberately bad) and that they try to copy their old style, which is, usually, never a good idea unless you’re Martin Scorsese;
• …that contains a limp women-in-the-workplace subplot;
• …including a scene of vomiting blood that, for whatever reason, doesn’t really concern people other than possibly getting the blood in their mouth;
• …dates itself hopelessly with a saturation of Toyota Prius and glowing-Apple-on-the-back-of-a-Macbook shots;
• …devolves into quite a bit of Believe Everything Some Mystical Guy Says nonsense after a very brief science-vs.-non-science word exchange;
• …further devolves into some bad wirework in the faux-climax;
• …to further climax during a rainstorm which invariably becomes a wet t-shirt contest featuring the female lead and a dug-up grave that fills up with water really, really, really fast;
• …and leading to a fake-out ending that is pretty obvious but semi-satisfying, since the moral of the story is Don’t Fuck With Gypsies

And I’m spent.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on District 9
2. Thoughts on Inglourious Basterds
3. Thoughts on The Informant!

By Jack Kentala

Yet another disclaimer: This is not your typical film review. I spend half of it talking about cinematography and name-dropping the past ten years of Soderbergh films. I also may or may not reveal the ending. That said, you’re still allowed to read it. If you want.

There are several points in The Informant! when Matt Damon’s character, Mark Whiteacre, drowns out the dialog at the foreground of a scene in voice-over and indulges in a usually-funny aside about something completely random, like sentences that could trigger your death (“Our ties are identical, but the pattern on mine is reversed.”), how some butterflies just get by on their looks, or that some people are really good listeners and that he could imagine bass fishing with them. At first it seemed an afterthought: a solution in the editing room to spice things up.

But it became pretty clear: For the first half of The Informant!, Whiteacre gets deeper into his role as an FBI informer on his price-fixing company. During this, he gets wired, told how to record tapes, and all that spy stuff that’s been in a zillion movies. And during this spy stuff that’s been in a zillion movies, Whiteacre digresses. I came to think: what would I prefer? Asides and anecdotes, or literal instructions about how to, say, operate a Nagra?

I later came to think it wasn’t just a final voice-over to sate test audience responses. It digs into the core of the narrative: Whiteacre is a lonely man, and the movie is about loneliness, and he tries to thwart that loneliness by digging himself a gigantic hole he can’t possibly fill himself by the end, and that a prison jumpsuit ends up his attire for nine years.

It’s nearly impossible to predict what a Steven Soderbergh Film really is. This, in particular, is marketed as Matt-Damon-as-nerd spy-spoof movie, from the director of (the dubious) Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s 12, and Ocean’s 13; not from Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh; and definitely not the director of the scalogical-comedy-that’s-fucking-hilarious-but-only-seen-by-ten-people Schizopolis. It gives itself a lightness by mentioning the Ocean movies, but, like Ocean’s 12 and 13, that lightness doesn’t always execute as good as the original remake.

Case in point: the first half of the film is great. It’s a spoof on corporate culture, amateur spy games, paranoia, and the entire concept that Matt Damon, post-Bourne, is a badass who couldn’t possibly look like nerdo ultimo by gaining thirty pounds and donning a ridiculous mustache. The second half? It gets bogged down. The main thrust of the plot – the FBI investigating Whiteacre’s company and a conspiracy with other company to fix the price on lysine by controlling production levels – disappears, and it becomes a montage of Whiteacre going to attorney after attorney trying to explain it’s not his fault, all while making extravagant lies that end up implicating himself much more than his partners in white-collar crime.

I’ll mention again that you have to dig to find the undercurrent of loneliness. Whiteacre never seems to connect with his wife or kid, and his favored relationship is with his FBI handler, who he, as previously mentioned, envisioned as a bass-fishing, good-listening friend. It seems as a catalyst, possibly, for the bulk of the film’s actions; that Whiteacre just wants some attention.

This is the part where I talk about great it is that Steven Soderbergh keeps maturing as a cinematographer. Compared to the lush Che and the gunmetal-blue The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant! falls a bit flat. Granted, it was shot on the fantastic Red camera, which, even though printed on 35 mm stock for theatrical distribution, is still the best digital camera out there, and Soderbergh is its champion. Otherwise, Soderbergh, known for his careful use of color palette, goes a sort of Bubble route and seems to leave a lot of incandescent light uncorrected, lighting interiors all orange and blotchy, usually with blown-out windows giving characters an eerie halo.

I just glanced at his filmography, though, and it looks like he’s shot every one of his films (as “Peter Andrews”) since Traffic in 2000. Not a lot of high-profile filmmakers do (or did, in the case of Stanley Kubrick) that.

So The Informant! is uneven, funny, and not without deeper meaning. It’s not one of Soderbergh’s stronger films, though Damon turns in an amazing performance that effortlessly carries the film with a weird nerd-charm. And while the Ocean’s movies near-guaranteed success allowed Soderbergh to indulge in whatever sort of cinematography he felt like cinematographing, The Informant! is oddly, disappointingly tame. The same can be said of the plot and its execution.

More on The Informant!
Official site
The Informant! on IMDb
The Informant: A True Story on Amazon

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on District 9
2. Thoughts on Inglourious Basterds

By Jack Kentala

To disclaim: This isn’t a bog-standard review. There won’t be a plot summary. There won’t be any spoiler warnings; said spoilers will be applied liberally, probably within the first paragraph. And I won’t even attempt to provide a fair-and-balanced, point-counterpoint view.

Inglourious Basterds, according to the trailers: a guns-blazing action flick about a cutthroat band of U.S. soldiers who specialize in Nazi scalping. Later trailers added mention to a German movie premiere in which Hitler and all his higher-ups will attend, which, naturally, becomes a high priority for the eponymous Basterds.

Inglourious Basterds, in actuality: an overlong, disconnected, hole-filled collection of dialog scenes that involve very little action and very little interest.

Take the opening scene, for instance. At first it seemed a masterstroke, and I thought, “My god, Quentin Tarantino has finally grown up.” In it, the randomly-nicknamed “Jew Hunter” visits a French dairy farmer and politely asks if he, the farmer, knows the whereabouts of the last remaining Jewish family in the area. The farmer cites rumors that they fled to Spain. The Jew Hunter, for reasons unknown except for his name, surmises that the family is hidden under the floorboards. They are, and the Hunter’s SS quickly enter and shoot up the floor. One woman escapes. The Hunter, with the woman in the sights of his pistol, lets her flee.

That all happens in the formally-labeled “Chapter 1,” which doesn’t so much serve as a plot device but as a pretentious annoyance to, more or less, mark which characters we’ll be following in the upcoming chapter.

“Chapter 2” begins with the main focus of the trailers: the introduction of the Basterds, who are given no names, no backgrounds, no identity apart from the others except, hey, isn’t that B.J. Novak from The Office? Also, for those who haven’t seen the trailer, this is their first introduction to Brad Pitt’s egregious accent, which exists only for a limp joke about twenty minutes from the end of the film.

What then follows are about two more hours of disconnected vignettes. There are only two scenes in which the bulk of the Basterds are at work scalping Nazis. One takes place, bafflingly, at the aftermath of their battle, and another is a sort of flashback of a prison raid. Again, there’s no mention of how these Basterds managed to hone skills sharp enough to outwit and outshoot the SS, nor exactly why they are on their mission. It’s just assumed that it’s a bit of Allied propaganda that there’s a loose-cannon unit who likes to brutally murder the enemy, which I’m sure is some version of irony in the Tarantinoverse (that is, Jews becoming as brutal as Nazis).

The only other action scene happens for about five minutes at the film’s end. So, already, the Target Demographic has been suckered into buying a ticket to a film that shares about 2% of a similarity to the trailer.

The rest of the film consists of a variety of dialog sequences that, hell, even a little over thirteen hours after seeing the movie, I can’t, for the life of me, recall what they were about or, most important, why they went on for ungodly lengths of time.

Yesterday I watched Pulp Fiction in attempts to ready myself for Inglourious Basterds. I’ve only seen it twice: once in 1997 or so, and another when I bought the DVD in the early 2000s. It hasn’t changed. In fact, it hasn’t aged well at all. Once you get over the novelty of characters discussing that a Quarter Pounder with Cheese is called a Royale with Cheese in Europe (because of the metric system), there’s no humor. The same goes with all other exchanges that riff on pop culture and, fifteen years later, are hopelessly dated. And if you take off your rose-tinted glasses, note that the Butch-in-the-cab-with-Esmerelda scene is hopelessly bad in both writing and execution. And Tarantino’s cameo in “The Bonnie Situation” storyline is damn near unforgivable. It’s just an excuse to throw himself into his own movie, poorly recite lines, and say “nigger” an uncomfortable number of times.

So I had Pulp Fiction in my mind when going into Inglourious Basterds. Basterds doesn’t have any pop culture references other than a few mentions of German propaganda films, and I’m not sure if that was Tarantino’s attempt to insulate the film from aging poorly. I’m not sure if he had any conscious intent; it’s like inquiring what a toddler is drawing with crayon, or asking Lil Wayne if he actually has any idea where he is in the physical universe at any point in time. Basterds has been Tarantino’s dream project for so long that it suffers from Dream Project Syndrome. See also: Gangs of New York, Heaven’s Gate, A.I., etc. They’ve all been on a director’s platter so long that said director lost all perspective on why it became a dream project in the first place. As for Basterds, I think Tarantino simply forgot that the titular Basterds should’ve been the focus and could’ve propelled the film. Instead, it gets mired in a bog of lengthy dialog sequences that, well, don’t do anything except build a little tension for… nothing, usually.

As a whole, the film leaves the viewer with far too many questions: How did Lt. Raine assemble the Basterds? Why doesn’t the Jew Hunter recognize the theater owner a mere few years after he killed her family? Why would the entire hierarchy of the Reich assemble in a public place that is so obviously a security risk? What are the motivations for each individual Basterd? What are their personal stories? How are they so good at outfighting hardened SS troops? These sort of things ran on a loop in my mind about halfway through the film until its end.

Here’s the part where reviewers talk about the positives during an overwhelming-negative review. I’ll give tremendous credit to certifiably-insane cinematographer Robert Richardson for his work. Again, coming off Pulp Fiction, which was shot for $8 million, looks like it was shot cheap, and has a kind of thesis-filmy feel, Basterds is gorgeous. Though there have been zillions of World War II films before it, Richardson shows much restraint with his compositions and camera movement, and the overall palette sets scenes far better than Tarantino’s warbly dialog.

Richardson also lensed Kill Bill Vol. I and II, and there’s definitely more discipline at work here. Those films were arguably just a mishmash of Tarantino’s wet-dream fantasy genres, though, and the cinematography was all over the place. Case in point: Remember when The Bride gets buried alive in Vol. II and the aspect ratio suddenly switched to 4:3? What justified that, Robert Richardson, ASC?

All said, I’m sure the minority of readers who have both a) seen Basterds, and b) really liked it, will just think this is the knee-jerk backlash. Same as how I player-hated Slumdog Millionaire and, to a lesser extent, No Country For Old Men (if only because it was vastly inferior to There Will Be Blood). And it might be that. I could be a petty critic who pans films by an obnoxious director who starts foaming at the mouth and blathering about obscure cinema to anyone who makes partial eye contact with him. Or I could be telling the truth, having only seen the misleading trailers and having not read a single review of the film before sitting down in the theater, and, two and a half hours later, leaving with an extremely-confused irritation at what I just saw.

More on Inglourious Basterds
Official site
Basterds on IMDb
The development of Basterds on Wikipedia

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on District 9

By Jack Kentala

Before I begin: This is not a review. I won’t summarize the plot; that can be found elsewhere. I’ll talk about many plot points, including the end of the film, so for those who wish to avoid those sort of things, shield your eyes.

On paper, the materialization and success of District 9 seems quite miraculous: a science-fiction film helmed by a first-time narrative film director, whose background stems mainly from visual effects, music videos, and commercials; a film set in South Africa, featuring a cast of unknowns – including the lead – who all have thick South African accents, and with no Hollywood regulars in sight; and, most amazing of all, a Summer Movie not affixed with a subtitle or number, e.g. not a sequel, or a remake, a franchise, or the cornerstone for what the studio hopes is a franchise (see also: G.I. Joe: Pointless Subtitle, X-Men Origins: Insert X-[Wo]Man Character Name Here, and Harry Potter: They Still Are Making Harry Potter Movies? Jesus Christ There’s Already Like Twelve Of Them).

Then again, maybe it’s not so miraculous: director Neill Blomkamp’s name seems to be the fine print compared to the top-billed PETER JACKSON slathered over all advertisements; Pete Jackson having pretty much free reign to greenlight anything he sees fits, and, in this case, tossing Blomkamp $30 million for D9 after the proposed film adaptation of gaming megafranchise Halo fell through; millions upon millions of dollars earmarked by Sony for a viral marketing campaign that, if nothing else, took meticulous notes from last year’s Cloverfield; and the latter of which brought my attention to the film in the first place. Prior to Friday, I had never heard of District 9. I don’t follow the industry. I happened to see that Sony bought out the whole of IMDb to have every available ad space dedicated to the iconic image of the aliens’ mothership. Then, seeing a very positive critical consensus, I decided I could spare the $9.50 and watch something new and current instead of a dusty old Criterion whatnot.

Oh, right, the film:

My first difficulties with District 9 started immediately. The film set itself up with faux documentary footage, cramming in an enormous amount of exposition passed off as real-world footage. Considering that the film is also bookended by this technique, it’s a bit of a cheap trick, and Rule One of filmmaking was broken: Show, don’t tell; granted, there was a bit of showing, but it was accompanied with much telling. In hindsight, I suppose most of that footage could’ve been re-engineered to play linear (like the bulk of the film’s middle, which made the documentary-ness at the start and end seem sort of random and sloppy), but that would’ve added probably a solid thirty minutes to a film with a runtime probably already trimmed to the bone.

All the mixed media added to the general disorientation of the film. The film isn’t a statement about our Media Culture, so it seemed unnecessary at best, and confusing at worst. Cutting from surveillance cameras to a news helicopter to a cinematic camera and then to a cinematic camera strapped to a mercenary’s gun completely destroys any coherent geometry within any scene. As far as modern action movies go, this is rather tame. It’s expected that you can’t see anything other than bodies getting shot and that you can’t freeze-frame your mind and realize exactly what’s going on (a trend mastered sometime between the second and third Bourne movies).

Also, the paper-thin, flimsy allegory for alien-oppression-as-apartheid has been discussed to death, so it bears only a cursory mention. What’s unfortunate, though, is that instead of blacks, we get an alien race comprised entirely of computer-generated imagery. Yeah, it’s been ten years since Star Wars: Episode I, and the technology has made huge advances, but every time an all-CGI characters pops up (see also: Gollum in Bored Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King), there’s a definite case of what’s scientifically known as Jar Jar Binks Syndrome. Or rather, the Uncanny Valley. Never mind that it was intentional to make the alien “prawns” visually gross in an attempt to get them semi-humanized at the end. It’s still always a little too shiny, or a little too fluid, and every time a shot doesn’t get it quite right, my brain triggers a that-isn’t-right-flag that disrupts the whole flow of the narrative. As a somewhat-pertinent sidenote: director Blomkamp’s short “Alive In Joburg” (available to watch in full pretty much anywhere) had the prawns played by humans, albeit seen only as hooded entities with tentacle-mouths hanging down below said hoods. I’m not exactly sure what the middle ground is. Either way: all-CGI characters are hard to pull of in a balls-out action movie; District 9 does a better job than most (like the laughable human-dummies in The Matrix Reloaded and that third Matrix), but can’t we all agree that real people are, ultimately, much more interesting?

Credit is due for the film including, god forbid, a shred of character development. MNU’s Wikus gets points if only for his sweaty, fevered state during the initial stages of his transformation. From there, though, once he sort of realizes he’s turning full-on prawn, he just seems to play the one note of wanting to get his alien buddy to fix him. He doesn’t try to identify with the prawns or even imagine becoming one and living his life as one (though, bam, the movie ended on a riff of that half-baked concept); he just wants that fucking claw to turn back into a human hand so he can snuggle with his wife. (Also: Bonus points for keeping that to a minimum. Who wants action sci-fi bogged down with romance or, sin of all sins, a love triangle?)

Wikus, unfortunately, was the only character anywhere near fully realized. His wife and his father-in-law are static. Same goes for the buzz-cut mercenaries and their buzz-cut Leader Guy. He’s on a razor-straight mission, and only after Wikus pisses him off does he prefer to just rather shoot Wikus in the head than bring him in for nefarious tests and whatnot. That scene in particular – Leader Guy about to kill Wikus – confused the whole identity of the prawns. Yes, the rosy interpretation is that they identify Wikus as One Of Them and then proceed to, literally, rip the Leader Guy apart. But what does that make them? Any different than the violent, stand-offish refugees that seem to comprise 99% of the prawn population? Other than Christopher Johnson, they all seem content to garbage-sift, steal, and piss off the human populace in a variety of means. And yeah yeah yeah, there’s the argument about how We Made Them That Way by encasing them in razor-wired shanty towns, but the 112-minute runtime leaves that up to the imagination. And, let’s face it, as celebrated as this film is for injecting some sort of substance into a usually-braindead genre, no one’s going to sit around with their snifters of brandy and discuss the finer points of District 9 few subtleties.

As scattered in the text above, the setup of acts one and two leads to mindless running-and-gunning in the finale. That comes to its own predictable conclusion, and then the linear film gets fractured back into the documentary framing. There’s some slight hints at a possible sequel, but mostly speculation on what happened / what could’ve happened to Wikus. It’s not hard to guess when, the last we see him, one of his eyes has turned prawn, and it seems an entire half of his body has transformed. The little tacked-on denouement puts to rest any speculation: Wikus’s wife gets a flowers made a junk and, given Wikus’s penchant for making crafty stuff for her, it’s pretty obvious that the missing man-prawn somehow delivered it to her. Then the film cuts to a full-on prawn with a bandaged arm making a second flower. The film doesn’t make any grandstanding at that moment, to say something like, Gee, Maybe We’re Not So Different After All. You might have to think about it a bit to get that message. Or maybe you don’t think at all, and you leave the theater (probably) satisfied, since District 9, in the simplest terms, is an above-average sci-fi-infused action movie with cool guns and a high body count.

More on District 9
Official site
District 9 on IMDb
AV Club interview with Neill Blomkamp

No related posts.