cloudsoup

District 9, produced by Peter Jackson and directed by South African Neil Blomkamp, grew out of a short SciFi film from 2005, Alive in Joburg. The action takes place in the near future, several years after an enormous spacecraft has broken down above the city of Johannesburg, and its alien inhabitants, known disparagingly as ‘prawns’,  rescued and temporarily settled in the shanty town, Distict 9,  located underneath their stricken craft.

The film focuses on the misadventures of Wikus van de Merwe, an employee of a large and predictably evil multinational company called, in what must originally have been an unimaginative script placeholder, ‘Multinational United’, which has been unsuccessfully attempting to exploit the aliens’  organically-integrated weapons technology. When Wikus starts turning into an alien after an accident with a peculiar liquid being collected by one of the aliens from discarded scraps of old alien machinery, he becomes a valuable commodity to the company, which captures him, experiments on him, and, when he escapes, hunts him down.

Wikus hides from the corporation in District 9, finds common cause with one of the aliens, and fights to escape to the alien spacecraft. This noisy, explosive battle in the last part of the film, reminiscent of  Jackson’s unbearable fight scenes in The Lord of The Rings trilogy, which the audience endures for a tedious three-quarters of an hour, finally ends any hope that District 9 would begin to fulfil the promise of its peculiarly interesting precursor and the subsequent critical buzz. Instead, District 9 was a let-down: predictable, simplistic, with the aesthetics, storyline and dynamics of a X-Box game. Blomkamp had been slated to direct the movie version of Microsoft’s Halo video game series; when that fell through, Peter Jackson produced District 9 with Blomkamp as director and the result feels very much as though Blomkamp had already started shooting Halo: The Movie and was disinclined to waste the footage. 

At the outset, the character of Wikus is hammily played as a gurning, camera-mugging clown; not a put-upon minor functionary but a joke. When, later, terrible things begin to happen to him, the actor Sharlto Copley manages for a short while to add a little dimension and characterisation; but that effort is quickly snuffed out in the inevitable and almost interminable shoot-out.

The aliens themselves are surprisingly badly realised; aside from the slightly crustacean-like heads with politely unobstrusive antennae, they follow the trusted Star Trek formula: humanoid – two arms, two legs, two eyes, walking upright.  The child alien, introduced for no real plot purpose has the same unwelcome impact as Chachi in the 70s tv series Happy Days, or the junior Scrappy Doo and is an embarrassing mistake.

But the real gripe with this film lies with its pretensions. This is South Africa, these are aliens living in a slum township. The invitation to consider the film with some seriousness is unavoidable but when the metaphor is pursued it is a huge disappointment and a wasted opportunity; and worse, manages to retain after all these years some trace of the old South Africa.

The aliens, living in a township, are intended to be physically disgusting, although the costume department clarly wasn’t able to create creatures anything like as off-putting as the cast, speaking to camera in documentary style, assure us they are. If it was Blomkamp’s intention to engender unreasonable offence at appearance and lifestyle to insinuate empathy with the white South Africans then he failed; if it was to provoke sympathy for the plight of the aliens then he failed in that too. Short of an easy and slightly outdated dig at the likes of Blackwater to please a critical crowd that has been casting around for an enemy since the fall of the apartheid regime, the film doesn’t address the past or the difficulties of the present day in the slightest  – and it might be easy to take offence at some of the clichés, as some Nigerians already have.

This being Blomkamp’s first full-length feature film it’s difficult to guess what talent and promise he has free of the unfortunate influence of  Jackson.  I doubt I’ll be tempted to watch a film by either of them in the future.

Saw the Tomas Alfredson film Låt den rätte komma in (Let the right one in) last night, in a cinema audience of just six people.

Eli’s Theme, from Låt den rätte komma in

Oskar, bullied at school, meets a newcomer to his block of flats, a slight, dark-haired child named Eli. They grow close, despite Eli warning Oskar at the beginning that they can never become friends. When Eli’s mysterious guardian is caught while trying to kill a youth to drain his blood before making a final sacrifice for Eli, she admits to Oskar that she is a centuries-old vampire.

The hesitant and tender relationship that develops between the two children is delicately explored, and the sorrows, mistakes and pleasures of friendship are played with assurance by the two young stars, Kåre Hedebrant (Oskar) and Lina Leandersson (Eli).

The cinematography (Hoyte van Hoytema) is beautiful and the sparse soundtrack, full of pauses and near-silence, perfect for the pace of the film and the night and snow of Sweden.

I’ve read that the book on which the film is based is darker and more unsettling. Eli’s guardian is a paedophile and Eli, a castrated/emasculated boy, which explains one very brief but puzzling moment in the film and Eli’s repeated assertion that she’s not a girl, which i took to mean that she was saying she was a vampire.

One slightly farcical moment (the unconvincingly cgi cats) to take the edge off perfection but that aside it’s a quiet, thoughtful, disturbing film that’s left quite an impression. Recommended.

The best proposed solution to the problem of young,feral scrotes I’ve seen is this:

As twisted as it sounds, killing off 41 teens takes a great deal of creativity and an innate sense of pacing in order to avoid, well, cinematic boredom.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is on the TV here tonight. I’ve seen it just the once and I’ve been meaning to see it again. The proper temporal order is maddeningly difficult to work out in retrospect and I suppose there is no great benefit in trying, as if some revelation came with the completion of a crossword puzzle – but the film was impressive and Kaufman’s a fine artist (and, I’d say, the obvious auteur here).

I read the Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard after I’d seen the film. The first stanza fits nicely with the theme:

In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
Yet, yet I love!--From Abelard it came,
And Eloisa yet must kiss the name

and later,

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Saw Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man this evening. At several points Herzog directly voices his opinion that Nature is fundamentally chaotic and brutal, and contrasts this with Treadwell’s romantic, anthropomorphic and sentimental take on the huge Grizzly bears of Alaska.

You might initially think Herzog correct, given that Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear; but although Herzog’s a compelling presence on screen and behind the camera and I admire his seriousness I wondered why anyone should think there’s a fundamental nature to Nature. Germanic tendency to theorise, I guess.

Recommended.