Movie: Shutter Island (2010)

I love how this movie starts. A ship appears out of the mist at sea. It blows its deep horn, and the horn gets taken up by the music score, creating a theme of danger. The captain says there is a storm coming. By now every viewer knows that this is not going to be a comedy. The ship takes two FBI agents to a mental hospital on an island, and those who are familiar with thrillers know that mental hospitals are no places where people get happy, or keep their sanity.

The halls and rooms and people are just dripping with foreboding and danger. The staff of the hospital does not cooperate with them. Agent Daniels gets nightmares and the patients give signs that strange things take place on this island. From then on this movie develops into an extremely tense and unnerving experience, so much so that we, the viewers, lose the sense of what is truth, and what is fiction.

If you don’t like being messed around with, the movie might well rub you the wrong way, but at least you get to know the feeling of paranoia and isolation that the main character is going through. Shutter Island is the work of a master filmmaker who does not rely on cheap thrills or tricks, but takes lessons from old suspense-masters like Alfred Hitchcock, but then again I expect nothing less from Scorsese, who is perhaps the finest director working today. Everything about this movie is top quality, from the locations to the acting.

It wasn’t so succesful at the box office, but it is a must-see. If you feel like seeing a movie about fear, don’t see a typical slasher movie, see this one.

IMDB: Shutter Island

The New Post-Apocalypse: The Book of Eli (2010) and The Road (2009)

Eli (Denzel Washington), from The Book of Eli, acts like an action hero. The post-apocalyptic world seems to be created by the director and screenwriters just to show the audience what a hero this Eli is. He is silent and distant and has a big knife, and is the protector of the last Bible in the world. God told him to go west and so he slashes his way forward through the ranks of evil Gary Oldman, who wants to have this book so he can control the masses around him.

The movie is a bit of a moral jumble, where the Bible is simultaneously good and bad and it is somehow acceptable that this violent and distant Eli is there to protect it. Now and then it rubbed me the wrong way. The story is replete with cliches and the ending is overwrought. Still this movie has a lot going for it. It has style and a bit of dark humor and it is always a pleasure to see Oldman playing a maniac.

The Road is the bleakest and most depressing post-apocalyptic movie I have seen so far. The movie has so little colors that it is almost black and white. The story isn’t about some post-apocalyptic hero who is untouchable in this new world, like Eli from The Book of Eli, or Mad Max or some Kevin Costner hero. It is about a regular man and his son, who he tries to protect. The boy grew up in this ravaged world and has no memories of the world before, when everything was good. His father reads him stories of how it was before the bombs fell.

Their daily lives revolve around food. Food and cold and a grey world of snow, ash and dead trees. In tense moments when they are in danger from gangs of armed men, the thought of suicide is never far away. If The Book of Eli is an action/dark comedy version of the post-apocalyptic story, then The Road is the harsh, real and philosophical variant. Flashbacks to the past, to the time when his wife was still there, have a warmer tone.

It is a kind of desperation the viewer can wallow in. Both movies give us pictures of a destroyed landscape that are perfectly horrifying and fantastically miserable. It is the destruction of the world as a form of art. The Road succeeds in this even more than The Book of Eli does. Like its characters and story, The Book of Eli overdoes the bleakness by pumping up the contrast, making shadows darker and the land a dry surface with bright orange colors. The Road is grey and cold, with more impressive views of dead forests and empty roads.

Overall, The Road is the better movie. It has little plot, but at the heart lies the relationship between the father and his son and therefore it is intense and personal, but also a bit slow. If you go for action and less depressing eye-candy, The Book of Eli is very satisfying.

IMDB: The Book of Eli, The Road

Movie: Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Not too bad, not too bad. I happen to have read Lewis Carrol’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland two years ago and I remember that it is a book without much plot. Of all the books in the world, this is probably the book that is most like a dream, and dreams are not very coherent most of the time. The charm of the Alice story lies in subtle word jokes (that often require an explanation nowadays, 145 years later) and fancies in imagination. But modern Hollywood requires movies with a plot, a clear storyline.

I can imagine Tim Burton’s headaches as he tries to force the well-known Alice elements into a coherent story. I guess he took another look at the Disney adaptation and then made up a lot of new characters and places to glue the Alice elements together. This will make Alice purists groan, but I can forgive Burton for using his artistic licence. At least he tried to stay true to the dreamlike spirit, although the battle at the end is really stretching it. Burton also tries to get away with it by making his movie a sort of sequel to the first, and Alice is a young adult instead of a little girl (like Steven Spielberg’s Hook was a sequel to Peter Pan). The intro with adult Alice is nice, but the ending in the real world is rushed and awkward (curiously Hook’s ending was too stretched out and overly sentimental).

Burton has also sweetened the story a bit. If we compare this Alice in Wonderland with the book and the Disney version, then the latter two are much more darker and brooding and somehow better suited for adults than children. By removing the darkness, Burton’s Alice in Wonderland has become childish and falls a bit flat. In the end, if you like Burton and if you like odd characters jumping through inventive CG landscapes, you can enjoy it at face value. I love the cat.

IMDB: Alice in Wonderland

Movie: (500) Days of Summer (2009)

Why am I posting a romantic comedy on this blog? That isn’t my style! It isn’t really a romantic comedy though; even the voice-over says it is not a boy-meets-girl movie, its more of a dark humor drama and a refreshing look on relationsh... blablabla. Hell, who am I kidding. It is a comedy, and it is about relationships. It is about a guy that has listened to too many British popsongs and therefore thinks “the One” is waiting out there, and about a girl who doesn’t believe in love. Then we flip through 500 days of their relationship, not in chronological sequence however.

I didn’t lie; it is a very refreshing movie with great witty editing, funny dialogue and believable characters that could live next door and even a gripping story. Expecially if you’re repulsed by regular Sandra Bullock romcoms, you should check this out. It reminds me of the more truthful episodes of the How I Met Your Mother series, but in a darker, black comedy vein.

So the voice-over says it is not a love story, but there are only a few movies about love that capture it so touchingly and charmingly as this one. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes to mind; it also feels similar with the nonchronological setup of the story. It is a beautiful and funny movie and feels like summer, the time of warmth and energy. It’s the kind of movie that stays in the back of your mind for the rest of the day.


IMDB: (500) Days of Summer

Movie: Thank You For Smoking (2005)

Nick Naylor is a fast-talking advocate of the devil. He is the guy that endorses cigarette smoking on behalf of the tabacco industry. He knows perfectly well what he is doing and lives his life by constructing arguments and almost believes them. He goes out on a night with the advocates of alcohol and guns. He also has a son.

So the big question: how to be a good and honest dad while every day he walks a very very fine line between morals? He always twists the truth just the way he likes to, except with his son. Only in their interaction we see a glimpse of Naylor’s true self. But Naylor is transforming his son, to make him understand his dad’s world. His son is his only friend. But can Naylor continue down that path? This is no drama though, it is a comedy, filled with wacky characters.

Director Reitman’s filming is as flashing and fast-paced as Naylor’s talking, and he assembled a great cast of actors that give stellar performances! In short, this is a smart and funny movie.

IMDB: Thank You For Smoking

Movie: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

To explain a film like The Imaginarium, a reviewer invariably turns to describing the unusual style of the director. Terry Gilliam is the director, and anyone familiar with his movies (try Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or the more disturbing Tideland) knows that he is unconventional, but always tries to present something wonderful.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is Gilliam as we know it: a patchy film, quick and chaotic, a bit troublesome to follow or to get the hang on, and filled to the brim with imagination. Occasionally it looks like Gilliam tries to tell more stories than the two hours permit, throwing in whatever came to his mind at the time. My guess is that this movie is Gilliam’s ode to storytelling, much like Big Fish was Tim Burton’s, but Gilliam’s is a far more trippy experience. To explain the story would take another page, and, on screen as well, remains a bit hard to digest.

In the end, this film will probably go down in history as “Heath Ledger’s last film”. He died before completing his scenes, and halfway in the movie his role is filled by no less than Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. This is done quite seamlessly as we jump from imaginary world to imaginary world. They all give great performances, as do all the members of Parnassus’s team. You will probably not be transported into a world of wonders, but if you like your films to be unpredictable, vivid and visionary as a feverish dream, the Imaginarium is waiting for you.

IMDB: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Movie: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

A jolly adventure based on the famous book by Roald Dahl, complete with talking foxes, beavers and badgers in an English countryside of the Wallace & Gromit variety. It is not all fun though, there is drama too and familiar family problems. Before you watch it: you should know that this is a movie by director Wes Anderson, and Wes Anderson has a very unique style.

The ingredients of an Anderson movie are a bit as follows. His characters are witty, quirky, and often recognizable as stereotypes. His movies are very quotable. Then there is the settings and atmosphere. Every cameramove, every little piece of background has been taken care of and is often colorful and elaborate. Sometimes he contructs enormous sets to make his camera float over it, such as a house where the wall is cut away. Finally, to top it all off, Anderson has a strange sense of humor. His movies balance in a confusing way between comedy and drama. All of this goes for Fantastic Mr Fox as well. Once you get used to his style, it can be quite entertaining, so try it out.

Some like that stuff, some don’t. But perhaps all his movies so far have had more in common in style with animation than live action, and now is the first time that Anderson really turns to animation. And what kind of animation does he chooses? Stop-motion. Thats the way clay dinosaurs were made from the 1930s King Kong movie. But he succeeds bravely with an enormous production of top quality. Anderson is still growing as an artist and Fantastic Mr. Fox is one of the best animations of the year.

IMDB: Fantastic Mr. Fox

Movie: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino is the kind of filmmaker that reveals the hidden complexities of cinema to the viewer. Technicalities such as pacing, use of color and screen composition, normally only meaningful to specialists and not visible for the untrained eye of the average moviegoer, have become Tarantino’s trademark. He shows the audience how movies can have style, and besides all that, gives us again a heck of an entertaining story.

Clearly, Tarantino enjoys to play with his audience. He is in complete control of the tension of every shot. Scenes are often drawn out by means of dialogue, while Tarantino lets the tensions between the actors rise and fall, rise and fall again, and then in a single moment everything comes to a climax in an unexpected way (and often involves a lot of bullets). It is the technique of suspense-master Alfred Hitchcock, but where Hitchcock’s thrillers were purely focused on terror, Tarantino gives it all a twist of dark humor. Prime examples are the opening scène with the sadistic officer Landa and the scène in the basement with the drinking games.

Inglourious Basterds is much more besides. It is a jumping board for unknown, promising actors. It is a darkly comic rewrite of history with a daring and original plot. It is delightfully over the top without being cartoony, and it is an ode to the war movies of old, most notably The Dirty Dozen. All in all, it is better than 90% of all that is out there and among Tarantino’s best work.

IMDB: Inglourious Basterds

Movie: Blade Runner (1982)

Those who do not know what to expect may leave Blade Runner in a bewildered state. It is science fiction, and Harrison Ford, but Blade Runner is definately no Star Wars-like action adventure. Instead, this movie is slow, deliberate and philosophical, with emphasis on heavy themes like consciousness, life and death. The story is an adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick, a writer notorious for his drugs-awakened paranoia and mindbending themes.

On the face Blade Runner is a detective story, where Ford hunts for escaped robots (Replicants) that are nearly similar to humans. As a detective story it is pretty straighforward and Ford himself doesn’t seem so eager to have some action and fun. In fact, the robots, when discovered, seem more alive than the humans. This is a very deliberate choice by director Ridley Scott (who, after Alien, apparently felt the need to handle something heavier).


The movies of the 80s are always extremely visual. It was the time that special effects were on the rise and directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were influential. So too Blade Runner. It is set in a gritty, chaotic film-noir environment in a future Los Angeles, where the skies are brown and the streets between enormous black buildings are sprawling bazars. It is a place of rampart biotechnology, where customized eyes are grown in backalleys and artists fill their houses with talking living puppets.

The film occasionally drops hits that the boundary between man and android have faded completely and that Ford’s job is useless (and that Ford himself, even, is possibly a Replicant). The ending is justly famous, and one of the most memorable endings of all times, when actor Rutger Hauer, playing a killer android, improvised sorrow for its own demise. See it, but be cautious with your expectations.

IMDB: Blade Runner

Movie: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

The only thing I ever saw about Sherlock Holmes was the Disney adaptation The Great Mouse Detective. I have never read the original novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and I guess not many people have. Director Guy Ritchie has, and, him being such a fan of crime and comedy (and reaching his peak with Snatch), was the man for the job for a modern retelling.

Ritchie takes us back to the end of the 19th century, when science and superstition reigned together and the British Parliament was the center of the world. Sherlock Holmes is Doyle’s champion of science and deduction and, naturally, is pitted against an adversary with powers of black magic. What ensues is a great tale of action and adventure, a bit of love and a lot of humour in a gritty London (though not as over the top as, say, Tim Burton’s London from Sweeney Todd).

The success of Sherlock Holmes lies largely with the actors. The quirky Holmes (Downey Jr.), sober Dr. Watson and delightful femme fatale Adler (McAdams) remind me of another swashbuckling trio from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Sherlock Holmes almost turns into the Robert Downey Jr Show, as the Pirates movies almost turned into the Johnny Depp Show. Downey Jr shines in this role. Needless to say, I expect lots of Sherlock Holmes sequels and I would be more than happy to see them. Great Stuff!

IMDB: Sherlock Holmes

Movie: Collapse (2009)

Journalist Michael Ruppert is the guy that yells “don’t!” as the Trojans bring in the Wooden Horse. And no-one listens. At least, that is how he presents himself in the documentary Collapse. The film is not much more than an interview with Ruppert on oil, energy, money and food, shot over a period of five days and interspersed with archive footage of everything he talks about.

Here is the deal: Ruppert predicts the imminent collapse of the modern global industrial society. And he makes a pretty good statement. The whole world is based on oil, or, more precisely, finite resources. Not only electricity and fuel comes from oil, but products like cars itself come from oil. Oil is needed for all the plastic we use, from toothpaste to car tires. At the same time, our economy and our political ideologies are based on the false assumption of infinite growth. When infinite growth and finite resources meet eachother, collapse of society follows.


He might be a madman, he might also be a prophet. Collapse feels as a populist documentary but it presents a very clear story with no statistics, only the mention of trends that we are all already aware of. Ruppert is no scientist, and gets his opinions of what he finds out as a journalist, but his conclusions do not deviate much from the similar titled book Collapse by scientist Jared Diamond. Ruppert paints an even bleaker future than Diamond, but he might just be right. I haven’t decided yet.

At one point in the movie, after listing example after example of what is happening to our civilization, Ruppert collapses himself and starts to cry. Before the subtitles start, we are told that Ruppert has stopped writing and lecturing. He has given up, retired to his home, getting joy out of little things and holds on tight for the plunge.

Collapse is the ultimate feed-bad movie, but it is worth seeing.

IMDB: Collapse

80s SF/Horror special part 2: The Thing (1982)

Three years after Alien (1979) hit the movie world, horror director John Carpenter produced his own version of the SF/Horror formula. The Thing (1982) is based on a short science fiction story by John W. Campbell, Jr. about a shapeshifting alien and Carpenter incorporated lots of elements out of Alien to create a most horrific movie. Of all the movies that the SF and Horror marriage produced, this is perhaps my favourite.

There are many similarities between The Thing and Alien. I almost consider them brothers. Instead of a bushy Sigourney Weaver we have Carpenter’s favourite hero, a bushy Kurt Russell. The Alien tagline runs: In space no-one can hear you scream. Well, the same goes for Antarctica. Cut the communications and you are as lost in an empty and hostile place as you are in space. The movie opens with a powerful scene of a helicopter over the endless white plains of Antarctica.

As with the alien in Alien, the thing in The Thing is created with award winning artwork and special effects. After thirty years, the disgusting creature looks more real than todays computer generated monsters, although the models move a bit awkward. An important part of the movie is the strong mood of paranoia and the desolate, bleak landscape of snow. It has a good pace and is very entertaining. The Thing is timeless.

IMDB: The Thing

80s SF/Horror special part 1: Alien (1979)

When audiences sat down to watch Alien in 1979, they expected another space adventure of the likes of Star Wars (1977, only two years earlier). Alien took the dirty-looking spaceship idea of Star Wars and put it in an unexpected horror environment that scared the crap out of the viewers. A new thing was born: the next generation of the potent SF/horror mix. Today, thirty years later, Alien has become a hollywood classic. Too well known to be a cult movie, yet not exactly a part of the canon of respected good movies. How did it hold up in those thirty years?

There is the usual excuse for old movies (and Alien is an old movie by now) that they “were new at the time” and thus excused for shortcomings. Well, one obvious shortcoming is that Alien is a terribly slow movie. Even for the audience of 1979 it must have been slow. It takes half an hour for the movie to get started, and the final part is not much more than people searching dark rooms and faintly lit corridors step by cautious step. Yet the middle part is pure greatness! It is the foundation on which all the future sequels and spin-offs are based on.

Director Ridley Scott increases the tension step by step by step in a series of brilliant scenes:
1. The dark windy planet & the alien spacecraft
2. The eggs
3. The facehugger (great scary idea)
4. The acid blood
5. The birth of the baby alien (chestburster classic)
6. The full grown alien (a great and unique design by Swiss artist H. R. Giger)
7. The robot (very organic robot. A cool new idea)

It might be a step by step movie, but every step is made with deliberation, amazing artwork and set pieces and great shots. With so many iconic scenes and a great atmosphere, the whole movie is a milestone in cinema and I can indeed excuse its slowness.

IMDB: Alien

Movie: Avatar (2009)

Avatar is a wonderful ride. Much has been said about this movie already. According to many, Avatar is a breakthrough accomplishment in special effects and 3D cinema and I immediately take their word for it. This is one of those movies during which I thought: “this is visually the most beautiful movie I have ever seen” and that happens only every few years. I am sure that a few years from now, there will be movies bigger and better than Avatar in their effects and 3D (even though Avatar has been ridiculously expensive). Avatar is the movie that people will emulate and, before you know it, do better. But! Avatar will be remembered for a long, long time to come, not because of the techniques that have been used, but because just of what has been created with these techniques.

Avatar’s story is solid, but not very remarkable. At times downright predicable. But so were Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. It’s your standard Dances With Wolves or The Last Samurai story, in which a soldier changes sides when he notices that his own people are the baddies, only you don’t see these stories in a science fiction environment often. It is well written and I really started to care about the characters, as it should be done. James Cameron’s greatest achievement is the world he has created. This is escapism at its peak and it makes the 3D version truly stand out. Avatar feels real, as if Cameron truly flew to another world and took his camera with him, until you notice that everything looks bigger and better than on Earth and you remember that you are watching a movie.

The planet Pandora is an exceptionally beautiful creation. It feels like the moist jungle is dripping around you and the big, cute, blue, alien indians (yea that’s right) may look a bit odd but they grow on you and are rightfully the focus of the story. Avatar is not the typical mediocre movie that tries to hide its lack of story behind awesome special effects; it is a great movie that does everything right, aims high and wins. I love it when that happens.

IMDB: Avatar

Movie: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

Before this movie got claimed by certain teenage subcultures and main character Jack Skellington became a T-shirt icon, The Nightmare Before Christmas entered the lists of greatest animated movies ever made. Tim Burton’s magical marriage between Halloween and Christmas was put off as weird at first, but claimed a cult following and slowly gathered the praise it deserved.

I guess most people would label this movie as “weird”, but not many would fail to see that a lot of meticulously crafted artwork has gone into it. Burton created a weird kind of beautiful that managed to twist puppets (which are often unintentionally nightmarish, like clowns) into charming dark fun. It is a little blessing to approach darkness with such good cheer.

This is the heart and power of the movie and would have been enough to make it a cult classic, but The Nightmare Before Christmas is an allround spellbinding production with excellent voice acting, an original storyline and great music. Years later, Burton would try to make the same movie twice with Corpse Bride, but The Nightmare Before Christmas is unique and already complete in its vision, as if it sprung as a whole from Burton’s forehead. He may have named his movie a nightmare, but I wish I could have a dream like this.

IMDB: The Nightmare Before Christmas

Movie: Big Fish (2003)

The universe is made of stories, not atoms. Tim Burton surely looks at the universe this way, and Big Fish is his testament to storytelling. I guess we all look at our own lives as stories. We look for connections and threads and construct our own personal story out of it. It partly defines who we are. Now, does this story have to be true? A story does not have to be true to be beautiful. And the legacy of one’s life deserves to be rich and beautiful.

Big Fish is a feast for the eyes and the imagination as Burton uses his magical touch on a series of near-possible storylines. The movie is a tapestry of mythical-themed fables that stay enjoyable and fresh throughout the movie and here and there intertwine. Burton keeps the viewer guessing. Is it all real or pure nonsense? We don’t believe in giants and werewolves, but could they just be exaggerations? Ewan McGregor delivers it all with a fresh smile on his face and a big Alabama accent that is simply made for storytelling.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if the stories are true or not. It only matters that the tales have beauty. The conclusion of this movie could have been stronger, more emotional, but perhaps it is a testament to the idea of this movie that the other, “made-up” ending told by one of the main characters is more beautiful than the real one. It is all great fun, and quietly touching too.

IMDB: Big Fish

Movie: Up (2009)

At the same time grown up and young. That is the strength of Up. Animation is hardly ever so bittersweet as this movie. Amination is mostly upbeat, fast and shows the sunny side of life only, but Up starts at a downcast note in its masterly montage of poor Mr Fredricksen’s life. It is one of the highlights of the movie and is very mature and serious, but that doesn’t make this movie less suited for children, it makes it memorable. In this, Up is a movie very much in the style of Miyazaki’s Ghibli studio.

Up is a different film compared to other Pixar stories as Finding Nemo. It feels simpler and more straightforward. It is more focused on telling one story, whereas Finding Nemo, Wall-E (and also the Miyazaki stories) are more like strings of connected adventures. Up has less sidescenes and inventive stuff going on in the background, but it is by no means shallow. Up rests on a few very strong ideas and images, like the floating house and the waterfall, which become icons for the movie and so it doesn’t need to rely on other inventions to keep things interesting.

And all the while, Pixar’s mastery in animation shines through. You can watch it in 2D and 3D but I would prefer 2D to really appreciate the art that has gone into this movie. Up has a subtle range of colours, expecially for the interiors of Mr. Fredricksen’s house and the zeppelin later in the movie. Pixar dares to push the conventional boundaries of animated storytelling and I hope they will continue to make movies like this for a long time.

IMDB: Up

Movie: Moon (2009)

There is something spooky about silent, empty space and the sterile corridors of space stations. It is a place where people or, occasionally, robots, loose their mind. Stanley Kubrick knew this, so did Stanislaw Lem, the author of Solaris. Moon is the latest movie that stands besides 2001: A Space Odyssee and Solaris as a quiet, chilly space tale that for all its sterileness is more human than action-packed, explosion-filled science fiction.

Sam Rockwell, better known perhaps from his other science fiction role as the loon Zaphod Beeblebrox, carries this film alone. He is an expressive actor and has no trouble to keep the film going as the plot moves from creepy to weird. Along the way we see echoes of older movies as Sam talks to his robot caretaker Gertie and sees occasional hallucinations. Things begin to go wrong, but when you are up there among computers in a bunker on the Moon you are not going anywhere.

There is a very telling image in the movie of Sam, sitting in his moonmobile in a grey expanse of rocky moondesert, sobbing that he just wants to go home, and the Earth hangs in beautiful blue and green in the black sky. Moon might not be as original and groundbreaking as its predecessors, but is it still a beautiful and thoughtful movie and definately one to remember.

IMDB: Moon

Movie: Burn After Reading (2008)

The Coen Brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowsky, No Country For Old Men) are on a killing spree these last years. Burn After Reading is the Coen Brother’s take on special agent CIA Bourne Identity like thriller movies, but then, you know, the Coen way. The lazy way to summarize this movie is to say it is a story of morons with weird hairdos who do moronic stuff and the CIA is trying to figure out just what the hell is going on.

This movie takes some very charismatic actors, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and makes them look like suburban dorks. There is no a political dimension to this movie and there isn’t really a hero to this story. There is a sort of tragic character, played by John Malkovich who is so terrific at getting totally mad. He starts as a member of the CIA with a nice suit, the enlightened bunch that tries to make sense of everything, but falls from grace and becomes one of the morons, even as he doesn’t see it that way (but look how his clothing changes towards the end).

What is quite unique about this movie is that all the main characters are unimportant, middle-aged people. They are all suffering from a personal crisis, whether it is unhappiness about their marriage or their aging bodies. All these crises describe their actions, which sort of collide at odd moments with disastrous results. The anguish and problems of the characters are very familiar and human and so there is a tragic undertone to the story, but at the same time it is a “light” tale and very humoristic.

IMDB: Burn After Reading

Movie: District 9 (2009)

Science fiction has always been a problem child, both in movies and books. The special effects always seem to take the upper hand in science fiction movies as an irresistable force that in the end deprives the vitality of the story, much like candy in real life. Science fiction books are systematically ignored by critics who still carry an image in their mind of the pulp space opera of the 30s. But science fiction can be good (in books more often than in cinema) and on these occasions it can function as a mirror in which our image and our values of the world get transformed in the stirring threads of the possible future.

District 9 is such a film. Its power comes from the original ideas it presents and the gritty, down-to-earth (inside joke), realism of the way it is executed. So here we have a UFO that got stranded not above New York but above Johannesburg, South Africa. The humans break into the UFO and find lots of malnourished prawn-like aliens. This all happened 20 years ago. The aliens were unable to adapt to a human city and people just want to see them leave. They are living in a slum (district 9) at the edge of the city. The star of the movie is Wikus van de Merwe, who is in charge of relocating the aliens, but he finds out there are lots of secrets kept in District 9.

The movie starts out as a documentary. We see people commenting on the events that we are about to see unfolding. It slowly gathers momentum and in the final half an hour District 9 transforms itself into an exciting action movie in which special effects are used sparingly but very effectively. The special effects are generally used in a masterful way. The aliens are very realistic (think Gollum-like realism) and the UFO hangs ominously as a sword of Damocles above the scenes. It is the big unknown.

District 9 is a masterclass in storytelling and I can see this develop as a franchise and a future classic.

IMDB: District 9