District 9, and a few more movies

THE NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#184  [archive]

District 9 (2009)

Writer-director Neill Blomkamp has faded from view, but this was his first and best movie, packed a wallop, and it still holds up as a thoughtful thrill ride.

The setup is that a ginormous alien space ship is hovering over Johannesburg, but that's all it does — hovers. The spacemen make no attempt to communicate with us Earthers, so the authorizes eventually send helicopters up, with men to blowtorch their way inside the ship.

There they find a million aliens who have nowhere else to go. With the whole world watching, the aliens are 'welcomed' to South Africa, housed in camps, and treated with disdain.

The movie opens 28 years after the aliens' arrival, when everyone's grown accustomed to having a spaceship hovering in the sky, and teeming crowds of hated aliens living in shacks, being treated as third class not-quite citizens. 

Almost too obviously, this is apartheid — or ICE, or Palestine, Mexicans swimming the Rio Grande, or anywhere one group has all the advantages, and the other gets none of the chances. It's as American as apple strudel.

A glib human cop named Sharlto Copley is put in charge of what's basically the Bureau of Alien Affairs, mandated to evict the aliens from their slum, because the humans have decided it's too close to the human city. They'll be relocated to internment camps, of course, and Copley goes about the evictions with less humanity than even the aliens. 

In the process of illegally searching aliens' homes and looking for anything illegal in their possessions, Copley accidentally squirts himself in the face with some unknown black liquid, and soon he begins changing into sort of a half-breed, a hybrid human-alien. 

The effects are terrific but never overwhelm the story. The lead actor is endearing, playing a character who's certainly flawed and not too bright. The script is intelligent and tight, and the film is a little too loud, but it all works as action, as spectacle, as science fiction, and as a political statement.

Produced by Peter Jackson, the Lord of the Rings guy.

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Toni Erdmann (2009)

Winfried is a daft but delightful old man, fond of telling dad jokes and bad jokes, who sometimes pretends to be someone else, just for the fun of it.

Ines is his daughter, a big shot career lady negotiating a deal with some oil conglomerate while also sidestepping her mostly-male colleagues who repeatedly underestimate her.

The conflict here is that Winfried thinks Ines is too serious about everything, and she's grown weary of Dad's whoopee cushions and has taken to avoiding him — so of course, Winfried decides to wear a slightly ridiculous wig and fake teeth to become his favorite made-up character, life-coach "Toni Erdmann," and follows Ines unbeknownst to Bucharest, where he'll insert himself as "Toni" into everything.

So he's my mother, minus God, plus a sense of humor.

The story sounds silly, but it feels genuine. For such a kooky concept, it's actually underplayed, not zany for zany's sake; everything fits the characters (well, perhaps everything but the wig, and one particular scene).

And wherever you think the story is going, it's not going there, and whatever happy ending you're expecting will not be delivered. 

There's sadness here, too, between the laughs. Neither Dad nor Daughter seem genuinely happy.

The actors are superb, leaving no doubt that these characters love each other, but the gulf between them is oceanic, and the film never imagines a midway point between his frivolity and anarchy and her dedication to being successful at the job. 

In addition to being written, directed, and performed so well, another factor in the film's success is that it's long. Most movies these days are around an hour and a half, but Toni Erdmann runs two hours and 42 minutes — time enough for these characters to bloom and breathe, and time for scenes that might've been extras on some lesser movie's DVD, but here make the original cut, adding perhaps nothing much to the plot but so much to the spirit. 

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Within Our Gates (1920)

This was pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux's retort to D W Griffith's Birth of a [racist] Nation, and it would've shocked white America if anyone white was watching.

Blacks are presented as genuine people, intelligent and articulate, and if there's any doubt about it Micheaux literally spells it out in the first intertitle: "Sylvia Landry — a schoolteacher from the South visiting her northern cousin — is typical of the intelligent Negro of our times."

Sylvia (Evelyn Preer) is awaiting the return of her true love, Conrad, but her cousin Alma has her eye on the same fellah, and sets Sylvia up to be caught in the act with some other guy, after which neither Sylvia nor the movie sees Conrad again.

She returns to the South, and soon she's raising funds for a black school, because the whites won't spend two nickels on black kids' education. She's romantically pursued by a local doctor, who's white, which leads to what must've been the first interracial wedding shown in a movie.

The film never flinches. It shows lynchings, bigotry, white-on-black rapes, all with a much more even-handed view of humanity than D W Fuckin' Griffith, that's for sure: It shows bad and good whites, bad and good blacks, and Micheaux offers ample condemnation of blacks who were happy to be subservient and popular with whites. 

Could Within Our Gates even have been screened in the South, in 1920? I can't imagine it playing at the Bijou in Baton Rouge. If it made it past the Mason-Dixon line, it must've played only in church basements and without any advertising.

The intertitles perplexed the heck out of me, especially at the start of the film, so I'll spare you that frustration. The convention of listing the cast at the show's start or finish perhaps hadn't become commonplace yet, so each new character in the film is introduced with an intertitle like, "Philip Gentry, a detective. —William Smith," and William Smith is the actor.

The film is a jawdropping historical piece, and ought to be seen for that reason, and dropping jaws was Micheaux's intent. It's more symbolism than story, and a century later it's not grand entertainment.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

• Coming attractions •

Asteroid City (2023)

Battleship Potemkin (1925)

China 9, Liberty 37 (1978) 

The Cook (1918)

The Dark Crystal (1982)

Doctor Who (second season, 2006)

Dr Cook's Garden (1971) 

The Eiger Sanction (1975)

From Beyond (1986)

Good Night, Nurse (1918)

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) 

Manchester by the Sea (2018) 

The Scarecrow (1920)

Stalker (1979)  

Street Trash (1987)

Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) 

The YouTube Effect (2022)  

    ... plus occasional schlock and surprises

    • And then •

A Night in Casablanca (1946) 

Atomic Cafe (1982) 

The Bat People (1974) 

Brainwaves (1983) 

Cell 2455: Death Row (1955) 

Downsizing (2017) 

Hobo (1992) 

John Wick (2014) 

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy (1996) 

Love Happy (1950) 

Motel (1989) 

Nothing But a Man (1964) 

Romper Stomper (1992) 

Scarecrow (1973) 

Scared to Death (1947) 

Secret Weapons (1985) 

Squirm (1976) 

Taoism Drunkard (1981) 

Who Farted? (2019) 

You Can't Take It With You (1938)

9/21/2023   

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter • Cineverse • Criterion • CultCinema Classics • DocsVille • Dust • Fandor • Films for Action • Hoopla • IHaveNoTV • IndieFlix • Internet Archive • Kanopy • KinoCult • Kino Lorber • Korean Classic Film • Christopher R Mihm • Mosfilm • Mubi • National Film Board of Canada • New Yorker Screening Room • Damon Packard • Mark Pirro • PizzaFlix • PopcornFlix • Public Domain Movies • RareFilmm • Scarecrow Video • Shudder • ThoughtMaybe • Timeless Classic Movies • VoleFlix • WatchDocumentaries • or your local library. 

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

 Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

 

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