District 9

Aliens arive in Johannesburg! District 9 (2009) was not bad. Not bad at all. Right from the start, the viewer is introduced to grimy, bleak pictures of a Johannesburg from hell. The raw feel of the pictures contributes greatly to the freshness of the film. Being a big-distribution movie, it feels different. To some extent it was political satire ("we don't want them here" /media/racism/commercialism & medicial experiments / "terrorists"/commercially hired units to perform "the dirty work"). That part was present without becoming overly didactic. District 9 was also surprisingly good entertainment - a good-humoured action/sci-fi movie well aware of all those cheesy moments in B-movies. Somehow, it uses many clichés for its own purposes, the result being at times effective images. With explosions and stuff. Plus some deleuzian images of body transformation, plugging in and plugging out. Things that usually make me squirm (fucked up gender ideas, glossy images, famous actors who act as themselves in every movie) was blissfully absent here. And I was surprised to see how sensitive the depiction of "the aliens" (derisively called prawns) turned out to be; as one reviewer pointed out, there was little antropomorphism but for all that the director managed to change the viewer's perception in quite subtle ways, not overly sentimental (or sentimental in a funny way). Interesting & intelligent entertainment.