District 9 (NZ/US/South Africa 2009)

Wickus Van der Merwe from MNU attempts to persuade an alien to sign his eviction notice from District 9

Outline (no spoilers)

When an alien spacecraft arrives over Joannesburg, the locals resist the urge to attempt to blow it out of the sky and eventually they discover thousands of malnourished creatures seemingly trapped in the craft. The aliens are brought down and housed in a temporary camp in ‘District 9′ of the city. Several years later the authorities, increasingly alarmed by the growth of the alien population and the potential for civil unrest that contact between aliens and humans is creating, they decide to move the aliens to a new ’settlement’ outside the city. The job of organising the move is awarded to a faceless private corporation, MNU.

Commentary

This is a fascinating film if you are interested in science fiction and horror as genres. Everyone is playing spot the references and I’d go back as far as the ‘creature features’ of the mid 1950s (Them, Creature from the Back Lagoon, The Fly and The Incredible Shrinking Man – Philip French identifies Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the first Quatermass movie and the latter is a good call, I think), then on to the revival of some of those films (e.g. The Fly) in the ‘body horror’ period of the 1980s. More recently, the film echoes action films like Iron Man. Then there are the elements from the alien invasion movies with spaceships hovering above the Earth. There is also a link to the satirical use of aliens as giant ‘bugs’ in Starship Troopers, but this time via the kind of documentary approach utilised in Cloverfield. A film I was reminded of a lot is the wonderful Korean monster picture, The Host (2007) which shares several themes with District 9 and even some actual scenarios (e.g. in the operating theatre). There is a direct connection as well as both films feature creatures created by the Weta Workshop in New Zealand.

Science fiction and horror are often close to each other when dealing with narratives like this. District 9 was sometimes more like body horror for me, but that’s possibly because as a squeamish viewer, I am easily disgusted/revulsed by alien representations. Having said that, the aliens in District 9, the ‘prawns’, eventually become quite sympathetic creatures and I was rooting for them by the end. Before that though, their behaviour is pretty anti-social from a human point of view. This is quite clever in a scripting sense since it suggests that a) these are carnivorous aliens with different attitudes towards flesh-eating and b) that any sentient creatures forced to live in squalor will  begin to behave in ‘uncivilised’ ways. In other words, we as an audience are required to think about our relationship to creatures that are both different and also similar to ourselves.

Perhaps the most important difference between this narrative and the ‘action spectaculars’ such as Iron Man, is that District 9 is mostly played ’straight’ – although I did find the opening irritating with its sense of ‘reality TV’ and a hero who at first seems like a cross between a South African Alan Partridge and David Brent. He gets a lot better as the film moves on and the actor (Sharlto Copley) has been highly praised by critics and popular audiences alike. Too many action pictures are tongue-in-cheek. The best genre pictures are played ‘for real’ and I think that is the case here. The sense of authenticity is also helped by not having the leads played by recognisable Hollywood faces – a real problem for so many South African movies destined for international markets.

Of course, the big question about the film concerns what is achieved by mixing all these familiar elements in a narrative set in Johannesburg, the home city of writer/director Neill Blomkamp? Most reviewers seem to think that the opportunity isn’t really taken up as much as it might be. Pushing the responsibility for removing the aliens onto a private company might be quite realistic, but it doesn’t offer us the interesting dilemma of an ANC leader explaining the policy to the world’s media. The authenticity of the setting does work however and it seemed to me that the film was ‘South African’ in its feel for the environment in the same way that Gavin Hood successfully represents the townships in Tsotsi. Younger viewers may not be aware that the scenes of eviction of the aliens are shot to mirror exactly the ‘clearance’ of illegal settlements under the apartheid regime.

You could perhaps argue that Blomkamp is even-handed in making the ‘bad guys’ brutish Afrikaners and Nigerians, but there have already been complaints from some quarters about the depictions of the Nigerians. I’m not sure about this representation at all. Here’s a useful blog entry followed by a range of comments. I’m interested in the comment on the blog which mentions the Nigerian movies made in South Africa and therefore the suggestion that there is competition between South African and Nigerian filmmakers. I also note comments that see the Nigerians as standing in for the range of refugees from countries like Zimbabwe who have suffered from aggression after their arrival in South Africa. All the same, it is a brave (white) director who offers us images of superstitious/cannibalistic Nigerians as gangsters. Certainly there are Nigerian gangsters at large in many parts of the world, but I suggest that the filmmaker needs to be more clear about how he expects audiences to read his satire/allegory.

So, the film risks being seen as racist at the same time as it satirises the post-apartheid treatment of refugees in the RSA. Another problem is associated with one of several plot holes/confusions. What do we actually learn about the social structure of the aliens? How does gender work in their social system and what kind of class system do they have? We do discover something about the ‘hatching’ of eggs, but did I miss something about ‘queens’ or other females? Are most of the aliens drones – with only a couple of high order males who can fly the spacecraft?

Overall, this is an interesting film that probably tries to do too much and possibly gets tangled up in political and social issues it isn’t quite sure how to handle. Nevertheless it is worth watching and studying. Although it is distributed by Sony, it’s clearly a global film with a South African director trained in Canada and a film shot in South Africa with effects and post-production work in New Zealand. (It’s produced by Peter Jackson, but I’m not sure how important his contribution was.)

There is plenty of material developing the stories around this film and the Guardian’s film page makes a good starting place.

Here’s the short film that Neil Blomkamp made in 2005 and which he then expanded to make as District 9:

Bonnie and Clyde 2: Genre and New Wave

Ever since Nick posted a short piece on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and its links to the French New Wave, we’ve been inundated with visitors searching for ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ – and some days 20-25% of hits on the blog have been associated with the title.

Was this a 'wired photo'? (from Wikipedia, public domain).

Recently I heard a short item on the radio about a new book on the couple: Go down together: the true, untold story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn. The book further debunks the myth of what were essentially a pair of inept criminals who would not have received any attention without the power of narrative in news reporting. In other words, there was little in what they did, but a great deal in how it was reported. Two of Guinn’s points seem remarkably topical. One was that this was the period (early 1930s) when the wired news photo was becoming the first medium to allow visual communication quickly over national and international networks. In some ways, the parallel today has been the the rapid take-up of mobile phone images as part of ‘citizen journalism’ around the time of 9/11. Guinn uses the example of Bonnie Parker photographed smoking a cigar as an iconic image.

Guinn’s other point in the radio interview was the antipathy of most ordinary people towards a banking system in 1930s America which was collapsing and abandoning savers – sounds familiar? In this context, the two criminals took on the role of folk heroes.

All of this makes me think about the ingredients of the Bonnie and Clyde story and the power of a generic narrative. I was about to suggest that the French New Wave connection is possibly overemphasised in the explanation for the success of the 1967 film. But when I think about it, Jean-Luc Godard was spot on with his line that all you need to make a movie is “a girl and a gun”, something that he proved several times over in films ostensibly about a young couple on the run (but often, of course, about a lot more).

As far as Hollywood is concerned the generic line of boy/girl on the run includes:

They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)

Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950)

Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973)

A French DVD cover for one of the most underrated films of the late, great Robert Altman (with terrific use of 1930s radio broadcasts)

Thieves Like Us (Robert Altman, 1974 – from the same novel as They Live by Night)

Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994)

and no doubt several more titles, some of which will overlap with other repertoires (e.g. True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) and The Getaway, Sam Peckinpah, 1972) and some, like Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), that transform it completely.

Anyone want to suggest other titles and indicate how they utilise the various genre repertoires?

A critic with attitude?

Coraline – a rare female action hero?

There aren’t too many UK-based film critics (as distinct from scholars who write) who I look forward to reading. Philip French in the Observer is usually reliable and Jonathan Romney in the Independent on Sunday is always worth reading. But that’s about it. I was intrigued therefore to clock the occasional appearance of Anne Billson in the Guardian. Billson has been around on various papers for quite a while and her other work includes horror novels and two BFI film guides. She belongs to the ‘anti-realist/pro-fantasy’ wing of the UK critics’ community. This gives her the motivation to weigh into quite a few sacred cows. Her Guardian columns last year went onto the film blog where they generated a healthy response from readers, many of whom showed put the paper’s film writers to shame. Strangely, Billson’s recent posts have lost their comment facility – perhaps she is too effective in getting up noses? I particularly enjoyed her New Year rant in which she declared that she wasn’t interested in all the Oscar hype and would far rather look forward to The Good, The Bad and The Weird.

A few weeks ago, Billson loosed a salvo at the British film industry in general and one of its leading practitioners in particular. I was all set to join in her attack on Richard Curtis and The Boat That Rocked, except that I couldn’t face going to see the film. In the event, everyone else seems to have agreed on how bad the film was, so we can just glow in quiet satisfaction. Today Billson has returned to the fray with an attack on the dearth of proper female action heroes in Hollywood animation films. She asks why it was felt necessary to add a male sidekick to the female action hero at the centre of the new film Coraline – and goes on to point out that in French and Japanese Cinema girls get a much better deal. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why, but the Guardian’s arts coverage has a very good team of women commenting on music, but Anne Billson’s is the only female voice on cinema. Why not give her some of Peter Bradshaw’s column inches on a weekly basis?

Bonnie and Clyde (US, 1967)

The start of nouvelle Hollywood?

Bonnie and Clyde broke the mould of Hollywood product and was probably the film that lay the seeds for the New Hollywood cinema of the early ’70s as it’s doubtful that Columbia would have made Easy Rider (1969) if this film hadn’t been a success. The script (by David Newman and Robert Benton) was a conscious attempt to mimic the French nouvelle vague and was offered to both Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. They declined, and it was not until Warren Beatty got attached to the script that Warner Bros. decided to finance the film. Indeed Beatty did not simply star in the movie, he also produced it, and was instrumental in getting the film re-released after its disastrous first run.

Bonnie and Clyde was unconventional in a number of ways. It was not simply because the central characters were anti-heroes or outlaws, as Warner Bros.’s gangster movies had celebrated villains in the 1930s; Clyde’s bisexuality (played by pin-up Beatty) was groundbreaking, and the film’s narrative focuses as much on the domestic squabbles of the Barrow gang as it does on the robberies and shootouts familiar in the genre. In addition, the ‘heroes’ meet their demise in an incredibly violent hail of bullets at once intensified, and aestheticised, by the use of slow motion; a precursor to The Wild Bunch’s finale (1969).

The film was also heavily influenced formally by the nouvelle vague, including the liberal use of jump cuts. The critics’ reception of the film was as varied and violent as the stresses tearing at  American society, which was embroiled in the Vietnam War as well as the civil and women’s rights movements. Bonnie and Clyde was a belated box office hit appealing to the burgeoning counter culture. In the same year The Graduate, featuring Dustin Hoffman as a youth rebelling against middle-class materialism, grossed over $100 million in North America to make it one of the top five films of the decade.

Adapted from Introduction to Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (US 1931)

I was pleased to get the rare chance to see a 1931 classic in a new print on a BFI re-release. I don’t remember seeing the film before, although the image of Fredric March as Mr Hyde is very well-known. The whole experience was a real treat and I wasn’t prepared for either the brilliance of Mamoulian’s approach via camerawork, editing and production design or the sheer eroticism of the film pre Hays Code. The film begins with an audacious subjective camera shot, seemingly hand-held, but presumably on some primitive form of dolly.(This follows a sequence of passionate organ-playing that must have been an inspiration for Monty Python.)

There is already quite a lot of material out there on the film and there is no need for me to repeat it. Here are two blogs that offer (1) a short interview with Mamoulian and (2) a formal analysis with loads of screen grabs showing the compositions and glorious wipes:

http://blog.allanellenberger.com/book-flm-news/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde/

http://www.aycyas.com/jekyllandhyde1931.htm

I suspect that the fans of the film who have only seen it on TV or DVD have missed some of the erotic charge of the film, partly because US TV versions were cut for a long time (as was the initial UK release), but also because the big screen has the kind of mesmeric effect in Mamoulian’s hands that you just can’t get on a small screen. In the final sequence there is a shot in which Mr Hyde approaches Jekyll’s fiancée from behind (as depicted in the poster above) and the subjective shot makes the woman’s dress seem almost touchable – and what dresses they are in the film, close fitting and low-cut. In his ‘Cinema One’ book on Mamoulian (1969) Tom Milne sets up a spirited defence of Mamoulian in the face of later critical apathy. 

Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) was a Georgian from Tbilisi who trained as a theatre director in Moscow and then travelled to first London and then New York, directing both straight theatre and opera. In cinema by the late 1920s he was seen as a real innovator in the use of sound, the roving subjective camera of Jekyll and Hyde and later the first Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp in 1936. He was seduced away from Paramount by the moneybags at MGM (where Garbo’s Queen Christina was a highlight) but after Becky Sharp, his career faltered and he became known for films which he left for various reasons, the last of which was the ill-fated Cleopatra in (1963). The last film he completed was Silk Stockings in 1957, the Cold War musical version of Ninotchka, with the sublime Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire. Milne argues that Mamoulian’s sense of rhythm and timing in shooting and cutting was such that all his films could be seen as musicals.

I can see that my viewing is Mamoulian-light. I have Golden Boy (1939) to watch but now I must also seek out Applause (1929), City Streets (1931) and Love Me Tonight (1932).

Here is the famous scene between March and Miriam Hopkins, demonstrating what Hollywood lost when the Production Code came in:

Defiance (US 2008)

 

Daniel Craig and Liv Schreiber as Tuvia and Zus Belieski

I want to see Andrjez Wajda’s Katyn about the massacre of Polish Army officers by the Russians in 1940. Wajda is a great filmmaker and this is a personal project. But the film still hasn’t got UK distribution. I can watch a similarly personal project about the Jewish partisans who successfully fought the Germans during the occupation of Byelorussia (now Belarus) between 1941 and 1944. The difference is that this is a $50 million film available on wide release in UK multiplexes. It is, however, technically an American independent film, shot in Lithuania with cast and crew largely from Europe. So I guess it’s a global film.

I have mixed feelings about director/co-writer Edward Zwick. I first came across him as the director of Glory (1989), in many ways a ground-breaking film that introduced Denzel Washington as a star and outlined the history of African-Americans in the Union Army during the Civil War. Later, I was repelled by what I read about the representation of Arab terrorists in The Siege (1998) and I didn’t see the film. I did watch The Last Samurai (2003) and although it was overlong and a bit silly in the last third (and starred Tom Cruise), there were impressive scenes and a sense of a genuine love for Japanese history and cinema. Zwick is clearly someone who specialises in stories about individuals caught up in conflicts, often in different cultural contexts. The difference in Defiance is that the film is relevant to Zwick’s own past in that his family left Poland after the First World War and the story of the three Bielski brothers is based on real events.

The three brothers are played by Daniel Craig, Liv Schreiber and Jamie Bell. They couldn’t look less like brothers, but they can all give a good performance, helped, I think, by the decision to all speak in some kind of East European accent. They are at least consistent (even if there are criticisms that a Brit speaking Russian is not very convincing). Although most of the dialogue is in English, there are significant exchanges in Russian and Belarusian (?). Before the screening there was a trailer for Valkyrie, in some ways a similar production – a Hollywood film with British actors and crew members on location in Eastern Europe. But in this case, the actors appeared to keep their own accents. Tom Cruise and Bill Nighy together as German staff officers was hilarious.

The Bielski brothers survived the first wave of German massacres of Belarusian Jews, but lost their parents and wives/girlfriends. They fled to the forests where they built refuges and took in other Jews escaping from the ghettoes, developing a relationship with Russian partisans who were officially part of the Red Army. Eventually, they ended up in a fortified village with over a thousand inhabitants despite attempts by the German forces to flush them out.

The film is well acted, beautifully photographed by the Portuguese master Eduardo Serra and crisply directed by Zwick. The action scenes work well and there is a convincing drama of relationships between the brothers and within the group generally. Part war combat movie and part ‘home front’/resistance film, it offers an interesting generic mix. On the downside it is too long and there was a moment when I thought the narrative lost direction and I began to wonder what might happen (which is rare for me, I’m usually caught up in the narrative). There was also one rather deadly speech delivered by Daniel Craig. I’m loath to criticise speeches where characters lay out a moral/political position since I’ve spent a long time defending the same thing in Ken Loach films. This time, however, the speech just doesn’t fit into the overall approach adopted elsewhere and the narrative just seemed to stop and wait for the moment to go away. Of course, this is a Hollywood film and it is all slightly ridiculous. The young women in the forest are all beautiful, the men are great fighters and the actual group we see never gets more than 40 or 50 strong. A different film might have focused on the logistics of the operation and the realism of survival as well as explaining a bit more about where the story is set and who was fighting whom. This one doesn’t, but as a popular film it introduced audiences to an historical event that is worth remembering. The one terrible thought I had during the screening was that the film could become a propaganda weapon for the Israelis since its main thematic is that these are Jews who fought back and survived an experience that mainstream history has tended to represent in terms of passivity and meek acceptance of a terrible fate. I have no argument with the theme as such and the film was meant to have been released several months ago when it would have been less explosive. It’s a shame that it appears when the attacks on Gaza are at their height. At the end of the film we learn about what happened to the real Bielski brothers. I was wondering if they went to Palestine, but the two survivors (who were represented as pragmatic men) went to New York.

Rendition (US, 2007)

The young Arab couple who provide one of the elements in the potential human drama of Rendition

I missed this when it was in cinemas and just caught up with it on DVD. I’d wanted to see it mainly because it was Gavin Hood’s follow-up to the impressive Tsotsi and it was again set in Africa, albeit with some action in the US. My first thoughts are that the film is beautifully shot by the South African DoP Dion Beebe in CinemaScope with terrific lighting and convincing rendering of scenes shot in Morocco. According to the reviews, the US scenes are unconvincing because the Chicago scenes were shot in LA. I wouldn’t know about that, but in representing Africa, sound and image were very effectively handled (I liked the score and sound design).

The narrative involves an Egyptian-American chemical engineer stopped by the CIA on his return to the US and then shipped out to an unnamed North African country (‘extraordinary rendition’) where he can be tortured in order to get information about a terrorist group with which he has supposedly had contact. His heavily pregnant wife in the US then tries to find out what has happened whilst her husband is tortured by a local police chief, ‘observed’ by a stand-in CIA officer. The CIA agent in the country was killed in a suicide-bombing incident by the terrorist group in question and this is linked to a parallel story about the torturer and his daughter.

As a thriller, the film works pretty well, helped by the staging and assured editing (with an interesting twist in the presentation of narrative events). As a political statement, the film is impeccably ‘liberal’, but is loaded with possibly too much on the side of the victim to be convincing to an audience with any political nous. Still, it may shock less informed audiences who perhaps haven’t explored the issues – if they are prepared to think about what it all means.

My problems with the film stem from frustrations about the representations of the Arab ‘others’ in the film. On the whole, they receive screen time and good visual presence, but I found it annoying that only part of the Arabic dialogue is translated in subtitles (i.e. not the script in a scrapbook or chants at demonstrations). This has the effect of making them simply ‘terrorists’ without any real sense of why they are acting in this way (precisely the kind of nonsense that we got from Bush and Blair). I assume that we are meant to see this as an ‘unnamed country’ because it reflects badly on the rendition procedures, but I’d mistakenly taken the location to be Egypt and thought they were meant to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. If this isn’t the case, who are they? It’s a shame that they aren’t given real motivation (beyond vengeance directed at the police chief) because the actors were good, especially Yigal Naor (who appears to be Israeli and recently played Sadam Hussein on UK TV).

I have two suggestions as to how the film could have been more effective, although perhaps not multiplex fodder. One suggestion might be to beef up the CIA field analyst part played by Jake Gyllenhaal (i.e. the man who takes over and observes the torture) and to reduce the US stuff to the minimum necessary to make the point. I thought several times about The Quiet American and how a drama about this man and the family of the torturer might have been developed. My other suggestion is to stick to the script, but lose all the US stars who simply get in the way in this kind of film. Meryl Streep carries too much starpower and baggage from other films, Reese Witherspoon is wasted. With unknowns or lesser-knowns in these roles, the human story might have started to come through more strongly and we could concentrate on the roles rather than the star performances (I’m not against stars, but they aren’t needed in this kind of film). I think I probably need to see the film again as the narrative is quite complicated. I’m satisfied, however, that the plot does make sense despite what some reviewers have argued.

Overall, a watchable and interesting film with a script from a first time writer that has real potential, but in the end a disappointment that Gavin Hood, as an outsider in Hollywood, couldn’t match his technical skill with a better drama – and one that does justice to the African characters. Tsotsi proved he could do it, but now he seems to be lost to blockbusters with the next X-Men film on his work schedule. Another one bites the dust!

Hollywood and Bollywood

A couple of interesting news items this week about the increased interest in Bollywood by Hollywood and vice versa.

First, Delhi High Court ruled that the Indian film Hari Puttar from Mirchi Movies was not a threat to Warner Bros. control over the Harry Potter franchise. In reality it seems that Hari Puttar is actually more like an unofficial remake of Home Alone.

Elsewhere, it looks as if Steven Spielberg and co. have somehow managed to escape from the clutches of Paramount which took over DreamWorks in 2006. The white knight turns out to be Indian media conglomerate Reliance Adlabs which will back the new DreamWorks to make six pictures per year. These will probably be distributed by another Hollywood major – Screen International is backing Universal.

Finally, in an Asian Film Market Special, Screen International reports the Indian box office has risen to $1.6 billion. There is also the suggestion that the growth of the middle class market in India (as in China) may keep ahead of the economic downturn in the West.

It seems likely that more Hollywood-Bollywood deals will be announced over the next couple of years.