Banlieue 13 (District B13)
Remember those awesome parkour bits in the last 2 Bond films? This is an action movie all about parkour. The stars are founders of parkour and professional martial artists, and they commit absolutely to showing off what they do. You'll probably like this. Also, Luc Besson wanted to do a film like The Killer. Liked that? You'll probably like this. Liked Ong-Bak? ...well, it's not about the illicit cultural heritage trade, sorry.
Remember District 9, which was all about apartheid? This is all about Palestine and its "Fence," only in Paris. About the whole philosophy of ghetto creation.
Parkour. Apartheid. Imagining the possibilities? How could you fail to make a provocative, thoughtful, city-redefining movie?
...well, by dropping the whole apartheid issue and settling for a dodgy SF threat/eucatastrophe plot setup, is how.* By engineering an illusory crisis issue and then having it go magically away. By throwing all the difficult political work into a smiling one-minute verbal briefing at the wrap up of the film that defuses every hanging implication, and sealing it with a kiss. Don't get me wrong, it's a hugely entertaining bit of work. Beautifully done, exemplary action filming. But with a slightly more thoughtful script, which didn't peddle fantasies of comfort quite so energetically - something more like City of God and less like The Wizard of Oz, it could have been a massive event.
The sequel, of course, does it all bigger, but with no more relevance. If anything, it looks like it sidles up a bit closer to the real problems of Paris' ghettoes, but has its getaway car even more thoroughly primed.
Here is the action film of the city I want to see: the contagion fears dramatized in The Host, plus the mobility fears of Banlieue 13, plus the NIMBY gated community critique of District 9, plus the deep thinking about intractable, embedded problems, self-reproducing relations of violence, chaos and injustice of City of God. And no aliens or nukes to provide magic bean solutions or straw man metaphors. I might even have a scene where the propaganda officer, watching the excrement hit the fan, daydreams about selling the mediated public on a Jack and the Beanstalk dramatization of the real events unfolding outside his window - one he can set up and then tear down, before reality catches up with him and shatters his reverie. The film should make it clear that fortresses don't work, ignoring the problem doesn't work, lying about it doesn't work and starving the population by cutting funding doesn't work. City of God and Central Station show how you can stop such a film from turning into a wrist-slashing fest: small victories, incremental change, building ally bases, planting the seeds for a society. Maybe I should make it.
* Also District 9's big problem, of course: the premise that if you replace the black people with aliens we might start to care about them.
Remember District 9, which was all about apartheid? This is all about Palestine and its "Fence," only in Paris. About the whole philosophy of ghetto creation.
Parkour. Apartheid. Imagining the possibilities? How could you fail to make a provocative, thoughtful, city-redefining movie?
...well, by dropping the whole apartheid issue and settling for a dodgy SF threat/eucatastrophe plot setup, is how.* By engineering an illusory crisis issue and then having it go magically away. By throwing all the difficult political work into a smiling one-minute verbal briefing at the wrap up of the film that defuses every hanging implication, and sealing it with a kiss. Don't get me wrong, it's a hugely entertaining bit of work. Beautifully done, exemplary action filming. But with a slightly more thoughtful script, which didn't peddle fantasies of comfort quite so energetically - something more like City of God and less like The Wizard of Oz, it could have been a massive event.
The sequel, of course, does it all bigger, but with no more relevance. If anything, it looks like it sidles up a bit closer to the real problems of Paris' ghettoes, but has its getaway car even more thoroughly primed.
Here is the action film of the city I want to see: the contagion fears dramatized in The Host, plus the mobility fears of Banlieue 13, plus the NIMBY gated community critique of District 9, plus the deep thinking about intractable, embedded problems, self-reproducing relations of violence, chaos and injustice of City of God. And no aliens or nukes to provide magic bean solutions or straw man metaphors. I might even have a scene where the propaganda officer, watching the excrement hit the fan, daydreams about selling the mediated public on a Jack and the Beanstalk dramatization of the real events unfolding outside his window - one he can set up and then tear down, before reality catches up with him and shatters his reverie. The film should make it clear that fortresses don't work, ignoring the problem doesn't work, lying about it doesn't work and starving the population by cutting funding doesn't work. City of God and Central Station show how you can stop such a film from turning into a wrist-slashing fest: small victories, incremental change, building ally bases, planting the seeds for a society. Maybe I should make it.
* Also District 9's big problem, of course: the premise that if you replace the black people with aliens we might start to care about them.