Archive for September, 2009
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
District 9
In Alive in Joburg, a film that was only six-and-a-half minutes in length, Neill Blomkamp toyed with an ingenious idea. Aliens are marooned in South Africa, and come seemingly in peace; but when they start moving into human neighborhoods, the authoritarian apartheid government locks them away in concentration camps. They’re treated as subhuman and forced […]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Sorority Row
Don’t hang out with bitches. In Sorority Row, that could get you killed—but not after a little disreputable fun. It’s another remake of a bargain-bin slasher that probably shouldn’t have been remade, and the word “exploitation” is practically tattooed to the buxom heroines’ chests. But the movie nabbed me from the start and knocked the […]
3 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 10th, 2009
The Hurt Locker
The press has fallen in love with The Hurt Locker. For those of us who came of age during the combat-movie drought that wars like Iraq tend to engender—and who are typically disinclined to browse that genre at Blockbuster, besides—The Hurt Locker is like a first kiss. But I hesitate to stretch the metaphor, a.) […]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by elliott
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
In the Loop
Dressing up the march toward war in the heightened-mundanity style of The Office might seem like a ludicrously insensitive sneak attack, but the makers of In the Loop are savvy wolves in sheep’s clothing. They use faux-reality-TV looseness as an antidote to high-flown demagoguery, yet they get their complex points across with the clarity of […]