Worth Seeing: District 9 / PS: NO, Joe!

District 9 is produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp. It's a movie about an alien (the extraterrestrial kind) refugee camp in Johannesburg, South Africa. District 9 if the kind of movie that's more fun the less you know about it.


So I'll just say this: I think it's worth seeing. It won't spoil anything to tell you that the production design and effects are great, and that this movie can be enjoyed on any level from shallow (explosions!) to deep (Apartheid metaphor, barely veiled).


If you are simply in too much of a hurry to see the movie (or you hate aliens, or Peter Jackson, or ... um, Africa?), you can ruin it by watching the short movie that this big movie is based on: Alive in Joburg.


In other news, it seems that against everyone's wishes and plain common sense, GI Joe 2 is already in the works. While contemplating this tragedy, I figured out another reason I hated that movie: The fights remind me of Star Wars Episode I's battles (snap!!). A lot. Check it out:


The ninja's (analogous to Jedi) are really cool, and they flip around and sword fight like crazy. But you just don't care about these strutting personality-vaccuums, so when they're not fighting (90% of their screen time) you're bored with them.


Everyone who's NOT a ninja is fighting a big, cheesy CG battle that just feels... without consequence. When the Joes were battling, I think for a second I imagined Gungans (lots of Jar-Jar's) fighting battle droids, and it just made me want to... to... to pay my bills, or wash my wife's car, or watch SportsCenter, or balance my checkbook or something. The whole thing JUST DOESN'T MATTER.


I will leave you with this riddle: Which is less important, the subjugation of Jar-Jar's people, or the survival of a big CG Eiffel tower?


Just in case you were worried, even the little CG people visibly evacuated the tower first. There is nothing to worry about. Or care about. Or be excited about. Or prevent you from yawning.




Okay, I can't help it--I have to answer my own riddle. They are both infinitely unimportant. This is not a good thing to be thinking when you just paid $9 to be entertained.

Yo Joe!

I had to see it because I grew up in the 80's--so back off, okay?!

Here are the things you need to know about GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

It's cardinal sin (here's looking at you, Star Wars prequels) is that it just plain isn't fun. There was no point during this movie when the characters, the action, or anything else made me happy. It was just a chore, through and through. In a day and age when you can find eight billion fun or funny things on Youtube within seconds, a movie can't afford to be funless from start to final frame.

The actors are wooden. Channing Tatum seems born to play high school football players--there just isn't a lot going on in this guy's noggin. He falls blandly in a dull netherworld between the original Rocky (who you pity because he's dumb as a brick) and some sort of trendy 'Fast 'n' Furious' type rogue (the kind of character that is lost on me). But I liked what one reviewer said about Dennis Quaid's 'General Hawk': He barks out orders "like your drunken uncle at Thanksgiving dinner."

America is mostly safe. The Joes operate out of Egypt (maybe because real estate is cheaper there?). We spend most of the movie watching French Moroccan and British 'Joes' rescuing Paris and Moscow. Maybe it's the poor direction and pace of the movie, or maybe it's our current geopolitical state, but I looked around the theater during the "save the Eiffel tower" scene and nobody seemed all that concerned.

WOULDA COULDA: I would have set this movie in another timeframe. Maybe during, or just post-WWII, or maybe the Sixties (interesting setting for a patriotic fighting force) or even the Eighties. And we should have had older heroes. How could Channing Tatum have earned the 3,437 tour of duty ribbons he's wearing when he looks like he's 23 years old?

Bring on Michael Biehn! Protagonist of Terminator, and supercool military squad leader in Aliens, The Rock, Navy SEALS (movie: bad; Biehn: good) and The Abyss. Come to think of it, how was Biehn NOT in a movie about a supercool American military team? If there is one guy who can walk around with a gun in a movie that springs from 1980's nostalgia and make it work instantly (with the exception of maybe der Gubernator), it's Michael Biehn.

DEATH BLOW: I'm not trying to be mean when I say this--really. But you know your military movie is bad when the audience is wishing it was more like a Michael Bay movie. I was missing the guns (with bullets, not lasers) and standoffs between Michael Biehn and Ed Harris I remember from The 90's blue-camo-cheesy Rock.

Seriously, Stephen Sommers? You forced me write that you something to learn from Michael Bay? Yowtch.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL: The movie ends with all villains surviving and vowing to get revenge in GI Joe 2: An Insult to Your Brain. This goes to show the one character attribute these filmmakers possess that I sorely lack: Unabashed, I-don't-care-what-people-or-numbers-say, hopeful-to-the-point-of-idiocy optimism.