I finally got a chance to watch District 9 at the early show yesterday morning. Would have posted something about it then but I had to go straight to work and spent that whole shift attempting to talk everyone into watching it.

1- The documentary style is fantastic.

It effectively creates a very lived in and real world that easily draws the viewer in to this brutal and unforgiving, forgotten corner of the world.

2- The film is a slow burn, almost unheard of in action films, let alone Blockbusters.

While the opening half of the film does have moments of tension, the first action sequence doesn’t occur until almost an hour into the movie. But when they come, look out.

3- The special effects are utterly spectacular.

District 9 is the first film that I have seen in ages that I knew something was CGI, but still thought it looked entirely realistic. From the prawns to the weapon effects to Wikus himself, everything is working on an unprecedented level of perfection.

4- The weapons.

Wow. Seriously, wow. Everything from a lightning gun to a sonic blaster to a freaking pig canon. And every single one seemed cooler then the last. Bravo to the effects artists who both conceived and executed these. You deserve an Oscar my friends.

5- Wikus is one of cinema’s great anti-heroes.

Its not often that you see a blockbuster action film have a complete douchebag as its hero. Oh sure you can say John McClain, but he pales in comparison to Wikus Van De Marwe, who is an outright racist and corporate stooge. Yet by the end of the film, I’d dare someone to not sympathize with the guy, nor marvel at his stunning emotional transformation. Shartlo Copley (Who the hell is this guy and where has he been all my life?) deserves all the praise in the world for this outstanding performance that is the anchor of this entire film.

6- The camera work is truly stunning.

While the documentary first-person style is what is drawing the most attention the camera work in the entire film is really quite stunning and executed with great precision. Despite the huge landscape and the slums where everything can seem very similar, District 9 has a great spatial feel throughout the film. You intuitively know where everything is and the distances involved, without having it constantly told to you through clumsy exposition. The camera work is rarely showy, though the utterly fantastic camera shots at the soldiers carrying guns are certainly so, but it is incredibly effective.

7- The final 45 minutes is one of the greatest action sequences ever conceived and executed on film.

Like I said earlier, District 9 is a slow burn of an action film, taking its sweet time getting to the set pieces, but when things really hit the fan it is almost non-stop for the final two reels. Even more impressive, the extended action sequence never feels tired or overwrought, but rather the breakneck pacing in the final act elevates the film to an entirely new level, and truly earns the moniker of a summer thrill ride.

8- District 9 is a gateway film.

As much as people harp on blockbusters for playing to the lowest common denominator, they put asses in seats. District 9 has capitalized on that by including very real and powerful messages in this film, transforming the standard dumbed down action flick into an art film. Even better? The thing is so damn kick ass that people don’t know they are being preached to, but rather discover that art can be just as entertaining as mass produced schlock. Maybe not everyone will start delving into more artistic fare after watching District 9, but most certainly some will, and that is great news for film as a whole.

9- Neill Blomkamp is who I want to be when I grow up.

Despite all the misinformation about Blomkamp being the reason why Halo was shut down (he wasn’t, the film was shuttered because Microsoft was demanding too much money from the studios) he has come out and created a film that is entertaining, educational, morally challenging and fucking fun. I love Halo, but that film simply doesn’t have the framework to achieve those distinctions and especially not to the degree that District 9 has. In a somewhat shocking reversal, Blomkamp has proven he’s too good of a director for Halo, and kudos to him for pulling that off. Now if you excuse me, I need to go write I <3 Blomkamp all over my notebook and cover it with toddler prawn stickers.

10- If Michael Bay isn’t crapping his pants, he should be.

‘Nuff said.

Tags: Action, action films, CGI, cinema, cool, district 9, documentary, film, films, john mcclain, Michael Bay, Microsoft, movie, neill blomkamp, prawns, trailer

There are films that we are drawn back to, again and again, because of the place to which they take us. It isn’t the depth of the characterization or complexity of the plot that fosters an enduring love for certain films; instead, it’s the way that they preserve a time and place like life in a jar of formaldehyde. For me that time is the seventies, and that film is Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.

Sure, I didn’t see this film until I rented it on VHS in the late eighties. I am certain that I rented it on one of those terribly long and boring summer days you encounter during your teens when you’re on summer vacation. Likely I was wearing my beloved red-striped shirt and a pair of cut-off jeans. I walked all the way to what was then called Loehmann’s Plaza on 98th Street and Normandale Boulevard, a depressing little strip mall about a mile and a half away from my house — a long way for a fat kid to walk, for sure. Loehmann’s Plaza always had a scant few shops during those years: a family restaurant called ‘The Cottage,’ a Pizza Hut, a bank, and The Dress Barn. Nowadays it’s come back to life a bit. It’s got Subway, Famous Dave’s, a Lund’s, and a Haskell’s.

The only real place of interest back then was 98th Street video — an independently owned video rental place that, along with renting videotapes and games for the Sega, sold used movie posters. I would save up my allowance and the money I made from doing odd jobs and spend it on buying posters that had advertised upcoming video releases, a practice my father found almost pathologically objectionable. My favorite was a poster for the James Bond film A View to a Kill. Roger Moore and Grace Jones appeared on that poster, back-to-back, both holding pistols if I remember correctly. Grace Jones, with her butch demeanor, good looks, and muscular thighs was a prototype for the domineering woman I would grow to find so interesting in later years. Watching Grace Jones beat Christopher Walken in a karate fight, then throw Roger Moore around in bed was likely fodder for my burgeoning adolescent sexuality.

What drew me immediately to Let’s Scare Jessica to Death was that it looked to be a genuinely frightening movie. I don’t recall how it was that I was allowed to rent it, surely I didn’t have the legal rights for renting quasi-vampire films back then; it must have been un-rated having emerged from a time before the MPAA decided to ruin the childhood of every horror film fan below the age of seventeen. Anyhow, I was able to rent it, and I returned home with it to the air-conditioned comfort of my parents’ neo colonial-style suburban home. While most kids were out playing basketball or running relay races, I was inside, with the curtains drawn, watching horror and science fiction films on VHS… a practice that was the right of every latch-key child in suburban America during the eighties.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, or Jessica as I will begin calling it now, tells the story of a group of friends who decide to leave the urban blight of 1970’s-era New York City behind in exchange for an old house in God’ country (which is somewhere near Connecticut) when one of them, Jessica, suffers a nervous breakdown. The group of friends begins working on keeping up an apple orchard on the land and selling off the odd junk that was left in the house by the former owners, an old couple who’ve not lived on the premises in many years. On the first night in their new house, the group stumbles upon a young woman who’s been squatting in the abandoned home. Of course, she plays the acoustic guitar and wears tightly-fitting corduroy jeans. What’s surprising is that she may or may not be the former tenant’s vampiric daughter. As Jessica is the only one of the group that suspects there is something amiss in the old house, the others begin to question her mental stability. What began simply enough as Jessica’s voice-over narration becomes the increasingly bizarre inner monologue of a woman doubting her own sanity when she is confronted with the possibility that she and her friends have happened upon the supernatural.

The film absolutely reeks of the seventies. A decade I know, from photographic evidence that exists like android memory implants in boxes around my parents’ house, that I existed in but scarcely can grasp memory of. Watching Jessica is like visiting some kind of a living history museum, where historical re-enactors eat fondue, walk around in burnt orange turtlenecks and say things like “groovy.” This is a world primarily preserved by the kinds of films I saw in high school health class, movies with sickly sweet soundtracks featuring acne-ridden teenagers sitting in bean bags, eating cotton candy, and discussing issues of personal hygiene. While watching it again recently I was struck with an odd sense of disbelief as I watched the early-thirtysomething cast of Jessica sit around their kitchen table having an impromptu sing-along with the homeless woman they’ve found living in their house. When were white people ever this comfortable with themselves?

It’s interesting the way history binds an individual to their times… one doesn’t think of George Washington doing anything other than crossing the Potomac or chopping down cherry trees; in this same way it is difficult to rescue the characters in Jessica from their times… I can only see them becoming the type of people who at some point put aside their LSD and their vegetarian cookbooks in exchange for selling insurance policies, giving birth to oddly-named children, and eating organic produce. Nonetheless, in the odd way in which I have pieced together my unremembered seventies existence from borrowed memories used to tear away the remembered years of my life like layers of old wallpaper, so Jessica lives on as a testament to a time when there was no kitsch value in macrame wall-hangings and men were allowed to emerge from the waters of a lake after skinny-dipping, naked and uncircumcised like something savage and prehistoric.

The makers of Jessica use lots of horror film axioms to their advantage — the old dark house, isolation, and the questionable sanity of the main character — in crafting a uniquely frightening vampire film that is rivaled only by Let the Right One In and Martin for originality in the vampire genre. Jessica’s re-issue on DVD is well-deserved. Its erie atmosphere and unsettling story of a town possibly in the clutches of an ages old vampire clan are enough to make it worth adding to your queue.