A reminder that the alien apartheid dealt with in “District 9” isn’t exactly new. Here is a scene from John Sayles’ nifty bit of Reagan-era social commentary, 1984’s “The Brother from Another Planet.” Joe Morton is the baffled alien, who as luck would have it happens to resemble a fairly typical African-American, encountering a young and then entirely unknown Fisher Stevens, apparently practicing his close-up magic act.
Category: Movies (Page 308 of 498)
With “District 9” likely to be one of the most important films released this year, as well as a healthy moneymaker, I thought I’d do a few movie moments reminding us that Neill Blomkamp’s film is hardly the first politically charged movie about resident aliens. Actually, they all are, it’s just that some are more upfront than others.
I’ll start with the trailer for probably my favorite science fiction film, ever. It’s also the first movie I know of about an alien that openly addressed politics.
For more, check out my review of the DVD of 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still” which was put out last year to coincide with the release of the 2008 remake.
* You’ve probably heard it elsewhere by now, but Bryan Singer has been signed to do a “Battlestar Galactica” movie, though of course it’s still very preliminary. I hope it stays that way.
The show will apparently not be related to the recently wrapped, broadly acclaimed TV series, but will be a complete redo of some sort or another and original producer Glen Larson is involved. That Universal would want to do another reboot on such a recently and brilliantly rebooted property makes absolutely no sense to me at all and shows a real failure of imagination. Moreover, if the idea is to return to something more like the original, I have only one question: Why? One of the things that makes the new series so remarkable is how worthless its original was.
A few years back, I took a fresh look at the first few episodes after dismissing it in my younger geek years and, sorry, the show was three times as bad as I remembered. It was nothing more than a listless knock-off of “Star Wars” with an addition of some surprisingly blatant rightwing agitprop and all the poor characterization and infantile plotting that made seventies television that vast wasteland that it really was back then, with a few exceptions. There is nothing to be nostalgic for here and most modern viewers only know the new show in any case. Bryan Singer’s a smart guy and I just don’t get this.
* Speaking of Singer, his sometime writing partner Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects”) has been signed to do the next Wolverine flick.
* In other superhero related news, we are back at the start of it all with some new litigation which returns some of the control of Superman to the estates of his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. It may dramatically speed up, or slow down, production of upcoming Superman projects since the ruling goes into effect in 2013 and Warners might want to keep more money for itself by starting sooner rather than later. Regardless, as someone who remembers the “creators’ rights” movement in the comic book world of the late eighties and nineties, I have to think the good guys won here.
This is one interesting movie August we’re in. In fact, if you go to a mutliplex this weekend and can’t find anything that interests you, then you probably don’t belong anywhere near a contemporary movie theater. At this point in film history, things just don’t get that much more diverse, and more interesting, than the new films on offer this weekend.
* Anyone with a geek bone in their body has heard and/or seen a fair amount about the movie box office prognosticators expect to end the reign of “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.” By most accounts a thoughtful yet violent/bloody R-rated science fiction actioner from first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp, “District 9” benefits from a lot of really good buzz, truly outstanding reviews, and a very high-profile variant of a viral campaign; the “humans only” signs have been up at bus-stops in Los Angeles for what seems like years and the film’s association with executive producer Peter Jackson won’t hurt. (Just like the filmgoers who probably still believe that Quentin Tarantino directed “Hostel” and have no clue who Eli Roth is, many casual movie fans will give Jackson the credit/blame on this.)
On the possible downside: there are no stars or recognizable faces and the film’s setting of South Africa might put off some people. We Americans, I fear, can be an obnoxiously xenophobic bunch at times. However, this is a new age we’re in (I think) and certainly this film, about space aliens being oppressed by us literally xenophobic humans, has a much easier to grasp premise than “Serenity,” the last star-free but excitement-heavy, well-reviewed science fiction film to rely on viral marketing, and the virus is far more virulent this time. So, the projections of a take of somewhere in the $20 millions or more for Sony offered both by Variety‘s Pamela McClintock and The Hollywood Reporter‘s ever-jolly Carl DiOrio, who guesses it at at least $25 million, make some sense.
* Unless they’re seeing someone very special and very insistent, the young males who will be flocking to “District 9” likely won’t be seeing this week’s promising box office hopeful, even though it’s also science fiction, though obviously of a very different sort. Warner’s “The Time Traveler’s Wife” is unusual for the movies I write about here in that I’ve actually seen this one before its release date, and you can read all about my opinion of the film over at the link. Suffice it to say that fantastical romantic melodrama is not generating a whole bunch of critical excitement, though that underwhelming 37% RT rating is not so much a collective groan as a chorus of “meh.”
Yeah, I know, he doesn’t look angry — but trust me, there’s righteous movie-loving rage behind those smiling eyes.
Here in Southern California, we might have a health crisis like the rest of the nation, but amongst the burgeoning Cinephile-American community, the hot topic is the scheduled end of weekend film programming at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) later this summer. There’s been a lot of apt criticism — and in retrospect I feel I was bit too blithe/fatalistic about it in my first post about it.
A museum should not have to be slave to film fashion anymore than it should take down it’s Chagalls every time there’s an upsurge of interest in Picasso, or vice versa. If the world’s premiere film city can’t have a place — at a museum, for pity’s sake — that shows important films from the past, including ones with limited audiences, then maybe all of film is in danger of losing its sense of history and with it, most of its soul. It’s ironic that a still lingering sense of snobbish diminishment of film as a somewhat lesser art form might play into it. I thought we were well past that.
As Don Scorsese, il capo di tutti capi of film geeks put it:
I support the petition that is still circulating, with well over a thousand names at this point, many of them prominent…People from all over the world are speaking out, because they see this action – correctly, I think – as a serious rebuke to film within the context of the art world. The film department is often held at arms’ length at LACMA and other institutions, separate from the fine arts, and this simply should not be. Film departments should be accorded the same respect, and the same amount of financial leeway, as any other department of fine arts.
That petition is growing, by the way. Particularly if you live in Southern California, but if you care about movies and live anywhere, it’s time to step up and sign on the dotted line. Think of it as your proper obeisance to Don Marty.
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