jasonfranks

I've got far too much work to do right now, and if I'm gonna blog it should be about my trip, but... that's a bit of a big post to write as well. But I saw DISTRICT 9 last night and it surprised me enough that I'm going to blog it now. Yes, that's right, for once I'm not actually the last person to see a movie...

Because I live like a mushroom, I barely knew anything about DISTRICT 9 when I sat down in front of the screen. I knew it was produced by Peter Jackson and that it was originally going to be an adaptation of the HALO video game and that was it. I was hoping some shit would blow up prettily and that there would be a minimum of cheesy dialogue and bullshit plot.

The film opens with helicopter shot of a Johannesurg. That was a shock; I had no idea. Not only is the whole production South African, but it's actually set in South Africa and it uses genuine Seth Efrican actors, so every frame actually looks and sounds and SMELLS like SA .

Once the surprise wore off I suddenly understood the significance of the title, DISTRICT 6. The events in the film are a direct reference to the forced relocation of the African and mixed-race population from District 6 in Cape Town in the 1970s. I spent several hours at the District 6 museum last year, so I'm pretty familiar with the history. The film is also a direct commentary about life in the shanty towns--the film itself appears to have been shot in Soweto or Alexandra in present day Joburg. It's a genuine slum, not a sound stage. DISTRICT 9 shows the real Johannesburg; dry and threadbare and decaying; the shanties; city and the streets and the homes.


The film aspires to be more than a shoot-em-up SF action blockbuster, and quite successfully so. It has some action sequences, certainly, but really it's a character piece. Nobody looks glamorous at any point and there are no big speeches, there are no big Acting moments. The film strives for a documentary style (more on that later) and performances are very natural and heavily improvised.

As I mentioned, the film is shot documentary-style. It starts out as a TV interview with the dorky and quite bigoted hero, Wikus Van Der Merwe-- a bureaucrat who has been assigned to oversee the serving of eviction notices to the alien residents of the District 9 slum. We follow Wikus from the office and down into District 9 as he goes about this mission, accompanied his assistant and a battalion of corporate mercenaries. This is intercut with various experts being interviewed about the situation with the alien refugees. Of course this means that all the photography is handheld, but director Neil Blomkamp actually manages to keep it more-or-less coherent (unlike the majority of other recent films shot in this way). Once things go awry this style of shooting persists, even though there is no documentary crew any more. Occasionally we are shown the action from the vantage of a security camera or a news chopper, but for the most part I guess it's just to maintain the style.

The story itself is a little thin. We're not given quite enough information about what is actually going on, but the film relies on its characters and its allegory to give it weight, rather than CGI and plot. In a large part it succeeds, which make it the opposite of the film I was expecting: a complex, nonsensical story designed to impart maximum CGI carnage, cookie-cutter characters and lots of shiny toys. But there's nothing shiny in this movie; even the prized alien weaponry is dinged-up, scratched, and second hand.

I mentioned before that there's nobody glamorous in the film (with the exception of Wikus' unduly-gorgreous wife, but she is barely in the film), and that's something I liked about it. Nobody looks like they tripped over on the way out fo a Beverly Hills beauty salon and landed ass-first in Africa. The actors are unmade-up and ugly. The costuming has been carefully designed to make everything looks a bit 1970s without seeming retro or 'Ron Burgundy', nobody looks cool or fashionable.

There's no context for the film given. No mention of District 6, or even the Apartheid years; it's taken as given that the audience knows about it. There are also a lot of smaller things in the film that I don't think that non-South Africans will get: bits of slang ('donner', 'futsak', 'doos'), not to mention the a couple of un-subtitled lines in Afrikaans that I didn't catch, either. The wimpy protagonist's competence with military ordnance is I'm sure puzzling to anybody who doesn't know about the exhaustive conscription program that South Africa maintained until almost the end of Apartheid. The protagonist's name is a joke, a well: Van Der Merwe was the name given to a generic Afrikaaner redneck who is the butt of a series of jokes in the same way that the Irishman is the fool in the "an Englishman, Irishman and a Scotsman..." jokes.

DISTRICT 9 is a terrific film; it's about politics and character where I expected explosions and gunfights. It also shows a genuine bit of South Africa without sugarcoating it. The cast look and behave like real people, not models and stunt personnel. It's not a perfect film by any means... the metaphor breaks down under scrutiny and there are a few too many plot devices for my taste... but it's a genuine, ambitious and very skilled attempt to make something smart and meaningful.

Go see it, it's worth your dollars, euros, pounds, kronor or yen.

Well, boys and girls, I'm now officially on vacation, and have been for a few days. Currently in the Natal province in South Africa. I'm going to blog it out over several posts, as I get time, before I syndicate them to www.jasonfranks.com. There will be photos in coming installments, and I will have to eventually go back and log up my visit to Stockholm... but for now, Africa.