your racism, let me show you it

[extemporanea]

So, District 9 - voted Film Most Likely To Resist Coherent Review For Anything Up To Weeks. I've found it extremely difficult to formulate a response to this movie, not only because of its own political and narrative qualities, but because there's such a buzz about it. Everyone seems to have seen it; everyone has some sort of reaction, either

Comments

[veratiny]

I felt very torn...while conceptually and in a lot of ways it was very strong. The story started big with huge conceptual potential and engaging technique and then ended as sci-fi mash up. I felt the cherry picking nature of the plot detracted somewhat and for me left in languishing in the realms of good as opposed to excellent. But I am still percolating...

I’ve seen a couple of interviews with the director...and very much identified with his obsession about understanding the real SA when circumstance relocated him. I think there is an age thing that comes into it too. Like the director I was 16 in 1994-old enough to know what it meant but not old enough to participate...

Still given the timeline he chose to use with the aliens arriving 1989 and given the extreme political shifts in that period occuring in formative part of the directors development (and something I get the impression from interviews that he is grappling with on a personal level) I was disappointed to see a new South African flag in the background of one shot. It seemed incongruous to me--a divergent timeline and yet everything else politically apparently occurred as is, I think there was an opportunity there to explore the effect of a substitute other on the last 20 years in SA and push more against the commonly held ideas of race in Africa. Choosing to include the Nigerians a commonly accepted other and modern African stereotype, it seemed like he wanted to go there but didn’t for some reason.

But then again it probably would have been a political film...not science fiction!

I loved your review (nice to have some good ideas to throw into my own grapplings)...I’ve been in crisis: my Croatian Australian boyfriend hated it (so I can’t even talk about it with him) and my parents have talked about nothing but prawns since they saw it (even my brother has been into the cat food).

[veratiny]

Things I have learnt: it is very hard to know how to feel about this film when one is a stranger in a strange land!

Thank you again for the review...very helpful...I think given another week I'll be almost ready to have a considered opinion!

I might have to watch it again though :-)

[extemporanea]

I'm happy if my wurblings on the subject were helpful, they're fairly personal wurblings so it's good to think they have more general applicability. As to being an exile - you're really in exactly the same position as the director, the film is probably more relevant to you than to me on a basic level!

I think the difficulty in coming to terms with it is that it's meant to be disturbing and complicated and difficult, so a failure to grok it in a holistic sense is actually about the film, not about any failure in the viewer.