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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Information Exchange  |  Movie Reviews  |  District 9 review by Armond White « previous next »
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Author Topic: District 9 review by Armond White  (Read 41912 times)
Saucerman
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« Reply #15 on: August 31, 2009, 10:48:27 AM »

The only film critic whose reviews I pay any attention to is Jay Sherman on PNN. 
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« Reply #16 on: August 31, 2009, 11:26:09 AM »

I wanted to post this from the Ebert blog article:



(They left off MAX PAYNE on White's list of "good "movies.)  I had noticed that White likes what everyone else despises and hates what everyone else praises.  It seems blatantly calculated. 

Seeing this list caused Ebert to say, "I realized I had to withdraw my overall defense of White. I was not familiar enough with his work. It is baffling to me that a critic could praise 'Transformers 2' but not 'Synecdoche, NY.' Or "Death Race" but not "There Will be Blood." I am forced to conclude that White is, as charged, a troll. A smart and knowing one, but a troll. My defense of his specific review of 'District 9' still stands."

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« Reply #17 on: August 31, 2009, 11:41:23 AM »

I think it involved the careful and repeated use use of a large hammer, several nails, and a screwdriver.  The details are pretty sketchy though.   TongueOut

 BounceGiggle TeddyR

That Roger Ebert review makes me a little concerned about going to see the film next week ~ if the film is in fact an indictment of SA by a South African, I will walk out of it. I love sci-fi, but bleeding heart / anti-SA sci-fi isn't my scene.  Buggedout

My very quick non-spoiler review
It's very much a movie in two parts... that's all I say about that other then most people I was with hated the first and loved the second.... I was more the opposite, though didn't hate the second.
Though I will admit it's good, and amazing that it was only made on 20 Million, it's one of those films that doesn't appeal to everyone, and I wasn't blown away by it.
I would suggest seeing it in the theater, despite I think I will like it better when it comes out on DVD, if that makes any sense.
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« Reply #18 on: September 07, 2009, 12:42:58 AM »

I happen to think he was quite right in his review.
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« Reply #19 on: September 07, 2009, 07:39:22 PM »

Quote
From Mothership to Bullship
District 9 trucks in trash and South Africa’s apartheid history
By Armond White
. . . . . . .

District 9
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
Runtime: 112 min.

HOVERING OVER JOHANNESBURG like a CGI outtake from Close Encounters or Independence Day, the Mothership of District 9 looks like a far-off hallucination, something unreal shrouded in atmospheric mist. It is both ominous and ridiculous, yet the movie gets no more creative than that secondhand “gotcha” spectacle—which is also central to its promotional campaign. Newsflash: Just because a film is advertised one way doesn’t mean that’s what the film is really about.Visiting extraterrestrials stuck on earth are forced to live as second-class citizens enduring humans’ degradation; and from there on, preposterousness rules in District 9.

That cartoonish Mothership image suggests the high-concept inanity featured in Children of Men and Cloverfield: It’s apocalyptic silliness. Not ominously beautiful like the civilization-in-peril tableau that caps Roy Andersson’s You, the Living (critic John Demetry described that climax as a “revelation out of [Morrissey’s] ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday’”). Rather, the immanence in District 9 suggests a meager, insensitive imagination. It’s a nonsensical political metaphor.

Consider this: District 9’s South Africa–set story makes trash of that country’s Apartheid history by constructing a ludicrous allegory for segregation that involves human beings (South Africa’s white government, scientific and media authorities plus still-disadvantaged blacks) openly ostracizing extraterrestrials in shanty-town encampments that resemble South Africa’s bantustans.

It’s been 33 years since South Africa’s Soweto riots stirred the world’s disgust with that country’s regime where legal segregation kept blacks “apart” and in “hoods” (thus, Apartheid) unequal to whites. District 9’s sci-fi concept celebrates—yes, that’s the word—Soweto’s legacy by ignoring the issues of self-determination (where a mass demonstration by African students on June 16, 1976, protested their refusal to learn the dominant culture’s Afrikaans language). District 9 also trivializes the bloody outcome where an estimated 500 students were killed, by ignoring that complex history and enjoying its chaos. Let’s see if the Spielberg bashers put-off by the metaphysics in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be as offended by District 9’s mangled anthropology.

District 9 represents the sloppiest and dopiest pop cinema—the kind that comes from a second-rate film culture. No surprise, this South African fantasia from director Neill Blomkamp was produced by the intellectually juvenile New Zealander Peter Jackson. It idiotically combines sci-fi wonderment with the inane “realism” of a mockumentary to show the South African government’s xenophobic response to a global threat: Alien-on-earth population has reached one million, all housed—like Katrina refugees or Soweto protesters—in restricted territories. “Before we knew it, it was a slum,” says Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, a nervous, Daniel Day-Lewis type) who is a white executive for multinational corporation MNU. He brings a camera crew when he serves eviction notices to relocate the aliens. These restless, hostile (thus dangerous) foreigners resemble bi-ped crustaceans and are derisively referred to as “prawns” just as South African blacks were derogatively tagged “kaffir.”Wikus tells the camera, “The prawn doesn’t understand. One has to say ‘This is our land. Please, will you go?’”
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Wikus’ semi-polite attitude is a reversal of the European imperialism that started South African colonization. But the allegory is also misapplied because the prawn, who resent their mistreatment, primarily yearn to beamup back to their Mothership. Blomkamp and Jackson want it every which way:The actuality-video threat of The Blair Witch Project, unstoppable violence like ID4 plus Spielberg’s otherworldly benevolence: factitiousness, killing and cosmic agape.This is how cinema gets turned into trash. Blomkamp and Jackson’s outrageously stupid idea boasts comicbook logic—Wikus gets infected alien fluid and starts to metamorphose into a Prawn Like Me monstrosity. But this cheap, darkhumored pass at empathy disgraces any greater cinematic potential.

When Luc Besson produced the 2007 parkour action film District B-13, he adapted genre mechanics to real-life historical problems in an attempt to come to terms with the current class and race conflicts in Parisian banlieus and their rising social tension. Besson understands how pop cinema can exercise and alleviate social frustration. District 9 becomes sheer exploitation—a sign of decayed compassion like the perverse vampirism as AIDS-and-homophobia allegory in HBO’s True Blood. Amidst the grotesqueries and social squalor, Blomkamp and Jackson interject the satiric mode of the Down Under mockumentary Cane Toads to depict the fearful encroachment of Others. It brings back ugly profiling from the bad-old-days of Apartheid: Scared humans describe Prawn satirically (“They steal sneakers, then check for the brand”) but the disdain has unfunny familiarity.

Even older racial stereotyping occurs when Nigerian immigrants enter the game as interlopers who operate a criminal underworld that exploits both aliens and the South Africans. Because the Prawns (“called bottomfeeders”) subsist on canned cat food, the Nigerian mob run a scam selling cat food at exorbitant prices.Their viciousness is almost comical in its Sam Jackson–style exaggeration.These malevolent blacks are also grinning cannibals who later threaten Wikus’ life. They’re a new breed of racist swagger; the kingpin sits in a wheelchair, big, black and scary. By this point, District 9 stops making sense and becomes careless agitation using social fears and filmmaking tropes Blomkamp and Jackson are ill-equipped to control.

“You f**king mizungo [white person], I’m gonna get you!,” screams the menacing black Nigerian cannibal.This contemporaryset dystopic, sci-fi flick never becomes fun. (Michael Bay bashers who stupidly complain about the cultural-status of the twin Autobots in Transformers 2 should park their rectitude here.) Instead, District 9 illustrates the strange new state of racial and political identity. It suggests some lingering Afrikaans’ fear or, possibly, how Jackson really thinks about the Maori and Aborigines.

Fools will accept District 9 for fantasy, yet its use of parable and symbolism also evoke the almost total misunderstanding that surrounds the circumstance of racial confusion and frustration recently seen when Harvard University tycoon Henry Louis Gates Jr. played the race card against a white Cambridge cop. Opening so soon after that event—and adding to its unending media distortion—District 9 confirms that few media makers know how to perceive history, race and class relations.

http://www.nypress.com/print-article-20206-print.html

Interesting review. I had heard mixed views of this film but I don't think this is worth wasting my time on. O well lets just hope zombieland will be much better.  Cheers


OK, I've now had the opportunity to check out the film and re-read the review. 

First off, White has cried wolf too many times, in the critical sense, for me to give him much credit.  That said, I guess it doesn't really matter much whether he's sincere or not, the words of the review stand by themselves.

I do agree with his point about the portrayal of the Nigerians, which I found off-putting as well.  True, both white and black South Africans come off bad, but the Nigerians are both morally corrupt and backwards and superstitious.  I certainly wouldn't say that this reveals any hidden racial prejudice, or a cynical attempt to appeal to prejudice, on Bloomkamp and Jackson's part.  But I did find the cannibalism subtext uncomfortable, despite the fact that it served a plot purpose.

I do not agree with the rest of the article, to the extent I can figure out what White's getting at (clarity isn't as important to him as smug superiority is).
He may find the movie "dopey" and "preposterous," but that's a question of how an individual calibrates his personal suspension of disbelief meter, not an absolute standard.  It's hard to credit someone who champions MAX PAYNE as a great work of art when he criticizes something else as "dopey."

In the end, it seems his main criticism is that the filmmakers didn't make the point-by-point historical allegory that Armond White would have written if he had been assigned the script.  "By ignoring" certain historical scenarios he concludes that the movie "trivializes" (that's a reasonable position, though I don't share it) or even "celebrates" (that's an irresponsible accusation) "Soweto's legacy".

I say, so what?  I don't see how the DISTRICT 9 could be interpreted to encourage the xenophobia and racism it claims to disparage; even if White thinks it's hamhanded and could have been done better, I don't see how he can seriously imply the movie is irresponsible.  A point-by-point political allegory of South African apartheid would have been a different movie than the generalized attack on intolerance and xenophobia DISTRICT 9 turned out to be.  Perhaps the movie White imagines wold have been a better one, perhaps not.  But you have to criticize the movie that was actually made.  It's fair to point out that the movie might have been stronger if it had stuck closer to actual South African history is a fair point to make; to imply that because it doesn't the film is crap, or even racist (which White falls just shy of saying) is a shot below the belt.   

I've already spent too much time addressing this, but there is one more point I want to make.  What the hell does White mean when he says, "Scared humans describe Prawn satirically ('They steal sneakers, then check for the brand') but the disdain has unfunny familiarity."  Satire should be funny and familiar (we should recognize the vice the satire's lampooned).  So when he says it's familiar, he's saying that the satire has done half its job already.  White seems to be implying (again, he's no model of clarity) that the satire is unfunny because its familiar, because it's too close to the way white South Africans once spoke about black South Africans.  It's as if he's saying racial prejudice and apartheid should be out of bounds for satire.  If that's his point, I have to strongly disagree.  I think it's dangerous to make anything so sacrosanct that it's beyond the reach of satire.   
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« Reply #20 on: September 07, 2009, 10:55:56 PM »

Thanks for that Rev.  That was a much better criticism of this review (if it can truly be called that, since he spends so much of the "review" reviewing what the movie ISN'T) than has been seen on this thread so far.   Thumbup
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« Reply #21 on: June 28, 2010, 04:32:13 PM »

Wow, just wow. That review was written by a man who just plain hates fun. Yes the movie can be a bit heavy handed with its implications of racism, and segregation. But some people just need to be reminded about how some of the world still thinks of other cultures/races.
All in all, the movie was fun and entertaining. It has spaceships, aliens, explosions, and a moral lesson to be learned. I give it two thumbs up.

I just finished this movie up today.  My wife stopped watching it because of it being depressing and dark.  I thought the same.  But then I realized it was about a father trying to get his son out of the ghetto and back to the homeworld.  The MNU (??) man was just a sad bystander that got caught up (his father-in-law was a real turd!  Hatred).  Real good movie after I thought of it from the point of view of a father giving his son more.  Great affects.  I loved the realism.  Very gory in some parts, but I think this was done for the shock value.  The aliens were well done.  I loved the weaponary that was created for the movie.  The Mech Warrior outfit was very real looking.  I would watch this movie again.  I would recommend it to anyone, but them that they must see past the darkness of the movie and root for the alien father and his son.   Cheers

Just my two cents.

Later,

John
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« Reply #22 on: June 28, 2010, 05:20:25 PM »

Wow, just wow. That review was written by a man who just plain hates fun. Yes the movie can be a bit heavy handed with its implications of racism, and segregation. But some people just need to be reminded about how some of the world still thinks of other cultures/races.
All in all, the movie was fun and entertaining. It has spaceships, aliens, explosions, and a moral lesson to be learned. I give it two thumbs up.

I just finished this movie up today.  My wife stopped watching it because of it being depressing and dark.  I thought the same.  But then I realized it was about a father trying to get his son out of the ghetto and back to the homeworld.  The MNU (??) man was just a sad bystander that got caught up (his father-in-law was a real turd!  Hatred).  Real good movie after I thought of it from the point of view of a father giving his son more.  Great affects.  I loved the realism.  Very gory in some parts, but I think this was done for the shock value.  The aliens were well done.  I loved the weaponary that was created for the movie.  The Mech Warrior outfit was very real looking.  I would watch this movie again.  I would recommend it to anyone, but them that they must see past the darkness of the movie and root for the alien father and his son.   Cheers

Just my two cents.

Later,

John

That does remind me.  I recently rewatched District 9, and I still think I would have liked this movie significantly more if Christopher and his child had been the main characters and Wikus a secondary lead (perhaps with Chris doing a little rabble rousing in his attempts to help his people?).  But we're not allowed to have such a radically different lead perspective in a high budget film as it damages commercial value too much.  Which is a shame. 

Somewhat related, I think the same thing of Avatar - why not have the whole film from Neytiri's view (and better yet, make the Na'vi a little more responsible for their own salvation, instead of almost entirely relying on outside help)?  The answer, of course, is we need a window into an alien world, which a human is there for.  But, sometimes I like being dropped into a confusing situation I have to struggle to understand.  It makes for more rewarding repeat viewings, and makes the narrative a little more interesting and unique.
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« Reply #23 on: June 29, 2010, 10:57:20 AM »

Yeah, he lost me at "high concept inanity featured in Children of Men."  Lookingup  Everything I've read from Armond White suggests to me that he cares more about getting a reaction than providing any kind of insight on film. I honestly don't think he even LIKES watching movies.

I loved District 9; the most troubling thing to me was the fact that Christopher seems to be the only creature that projects much intelligence (beyond instinct).  While the basic message was against apartheid, the director's attitude about race did seem a little troubling to me (Rev mentioned the portrayal of the Nigerians, and that stood out to me too; of course to be fair, NOBODY really comes off as looking good in this movie).   
@Jim, I would've liked to have seen Christopher and his son more in the forefront too, but I also have to give a lot of credit to Sharlto Copley because he managed to make me care about a largely despicable (until the very end) character.
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« Reply #24 on: June 29, 2010, 02:26:59 PM »

Sharlto Copley was extraordinary.  No disrespect to him intended.
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« Reply #25 on: July 25, 2010, 07:16:09 PM »

Disctrict 9 was a movie that made the point that racism and racial oppression are bad, thereby heroically taking on the hoards of pro racism, pro racial oppression movies being made every year. TongueOut
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