Julie & Julia and District 9
This weekend and the last one, I saw two movies which couldn't be more different, and which I both enjoyed.
Julie & Julia was an ideal film to relax with, fluff, but not of the stupid kind. Meryl Streep as Julia Childs was as great as advertised - hooray for middle-aged joie de vivre! - and so was Stanley Tucci as her husband, but to my surprise I took slightly more to Amy Adams as Julie Powell. Perhaps because I had seen her attacked in so many other reviews - the character, I mean, not Ms. Adams; from the New York Times downwards, I hardly saw a review, whether in the print media or on lj world, who didn't express some degree of contempt for Julie and her blogging ways, and declared her unworthy to share screentime with Julia/Meryl Streep, wishing the entire movie was about Julia Childs instead. Whereas I immediately saw why Nora Ephron went for the parallel structure (again, this is hardly the first time Ephron does this in her scripts). Julia, as Julie who idolizes her states at one point, is perfect. She does have her moments of sadness, but they're very rare, and by and large, she's always upbeat. Her marriage to Paul is always harmonious. She makes friends - again with just one exception - wherever she goes. She's how you want your real life idol to be, with no unpleasant surprises waiting. To balance this, you need a second character who can be depicted as flawed. So we have Julie, who can be openly ambitious and wanting to be famous, who can get into hysterics now and then if things don't work out, who does have arguments with her husband. (And who is something of a coward when it comes to lobster killing.) I found her amusing and endearing because of this. The criticial loathing I've seen in reviews often focuses on the fact she's thrilled when her blog starts to get comments, and then many comments. To me, this felt immensely familiar. Anyone who's in lj and claims not to care at all about whether or not people comment is... not exactly believable to me, let's put it like that. In conclusion: Selena's thing for the fannish underdog strikes again. Also, this movie isn't helpful if you're on a diet.
District 9, by contrast, is anything but fluff. Though on one level a summer action-adventure movie. A technical detail first: interestingly, the subtitling seems to be handled differently in different countries. I've read a review observe that the black characters are subtitled as opposed to the white ones, which certainly wasn't the case in the version I saw, which was one with the original language (i.e. English), and subtitles only for the aliens (who did not speak English). (The subtitles for the aliens, however, were in German because I saw it in Germany, which means they show you the film as prepared for the German audience but with the original English soundtrack.) Why is this whole subtitle or not business relevant? Because this is a South African movie, and one where discrimination, prejudice, privilege, loss of same etc. is very much an issue.
The premise is a spin on Encounter and Invasion movies both: twenty years ago, an alien ship arrives over Johannesburg. And stays there, doing nothing. The surviving crew, however, deragotorily nicknamed "Prawns" by the humans because of their crustecean-arachnid appearance, ends up living in a Johannesburg slum and is about to be resettled in something a character will later admit is "more like a concentration camp", partly due to complaints by the local population, partly due to coorporate greed (more about that later). (The very title of the movie is a pun on District Six, which was a mixed-race area of Cape Town that was declared whites-only in 1966, after which there was violent and forced resettlement of 60.000 of its inhabitants.) The initial mockumentary-style sequence which brings us up to speed on the history of the aliens in Johannesburg has a lot of satire, like the information the Nigerians are pulling "cat food scams" on the aliens, and of course the big cooperation who is this movie's most ostensible bad guy, MNU, is every Blackwater/Halliburton/Insert-your-private-firm here written large. But the satire elements fade in the background as the story proceeds. The main character, not exactly the hero (I'd say anti-hero, but that's also a wrong term as he's deliberately not glamorized that way), is Wikus van der Merwe, who starts out as a none-too-bright tool of MNU in charge of overseeing the resettlement, a job he got due to being the son-in-law of the head of the company. Then an accident Magneto would approve of happens, and Wikus starts to slowly turn into an alien, which makes him a target for basically everyone in this film... except the very people he victimized in the beginning, the aliens.
Something debate-worthy is the question whether this is yet another spin on the "white man gets morally educated via suffering of people of colour/obvious stand-ins for people of colour" tale seen in many a movie. For myself, I didn't think so, because while Wikus does get a moral clue or two and slowly becomes more sympathetic the more alien he gets, this isn't actually the drive of the narrative. He may be the main character, but the heroes are the alien named "Christopher" (human names given to the aliens whether they like them or not has another obvious parallel in human history) and his/her (Christopher's gender is by no means clear) son. Christopher has worked for near twenty years on a way to get the ship going again, and helping him and his son to the ship so they can a) escape and b) get help for their people is the main goal. Neither of them gets sacrificed for Wikus; his moment of redemption is the point where he stops thinking of himself first and genuinenly starts to help them (instead of the alliance of necessity because he needed SOMEONE to help him which was the case earlier), which leads to his own sort-of-sacrifice. ("Sort of" because Wikus neither gets the heroic death or the return-to-human status ending usual storytelling leads you to expect. The ending he does get seems to me narratively just.)
Mind you: if District 9 is a monster movie, humanity is the monster. Picking a look for the aliens which resembles that of many a "bug-like" alien-as-villain movie instead of something soft and Disney-esque was a good way to underscore the point here. This deliberate turnaround catches you for the first time when early on Wikus in the "mockumentary" introduction sequence lets a lot of alien eggs be set on fire. Which is the very thing that when, say, Ripley does it in Aliens is something cheered by the audience, except here we think of those eggs as babies and what Wikus does is horrible. One of the most harrowing sequences is when a newly infected Wikus is brought into MNU's labs and you see the experiments on aliens that have been going on there. (Because the alien weaponry from the ship the humans salvaged is DNA-coded so it can be used only by the aliens, something MNU has been trying to get around for years, which is where the accidentally transformed Wikus comes in so handy for them, bad pun unintended.) Meanwhile, the alien characters never stop speaking their subtitled own language (you never hear them talk in English) and continue to look like a cross between lobsters and crickets, but they're the ones evidencing compassion, courage and endurance; in short, the qualities usually termed "human" by reviewers. And while MNU and its corporate greed is just the tip of the iceberg, the rest of the human characters aren't depicted in more flattering style; it's just a matter of degrees. But because this movie has you rooting for the aliens so much, this doesn't come across as hopeless. To misquote The Importance of being Earnest, the heroes are victorious and the villains defeated, which is how you can tell it is fiction.
Julie & Julia was an ideal film to relax with, fluff, but not of the stupid kind. Meryl Streep as Julia Childs was as great as advertised - hooray for middle-aged joie de vivre! - and so was Stanley Tucci as her husband, but to my surprise I took slightly more to Amy Adams as Julie Powell. Perhaps because I had seen her attacked in so many other reviews - the character, I mean, not Ms. Adams; from the New York Times downwards, I hardly saw a review, whether in the print media or on lj world, who didn't express some degree of contempt for Julie and her blogging ways, and declared her unworthy to share screentime with Julia/Meryl Streep, wishing the entire movie was about Julia Childs instead. Whereas I immediately saw why Nora Ephron went for the parallel structure (again, this is hardly the first time Ephron does this in her scripts). Julia, as Julie who idolizes her states at one point, is perfect. She does have her moments of sadness, but they're very rare, and by and large, she's always upbeat. Her marriage to Paul is always harmonious. She makes friends - again with just one exception - wherever she goes. She's how you want your real life idol to be, with no unpleasant surprises waiting. To balance this, you need a second character who can be depicted as flawed. So we have Julie, who can be openly ambitious and wanting to be famous, who can get into hysterics now and then if things don't work out, who does have arguments with her husband. (And who is something of a coward when it comes to lobster killing.) I found her amusing and endearing because of this. The criticial loathing I've seen in reviews often focuses on the fact she's thrilled when her blog starts to get comments, and then many comments. To me, this felt immensely familiar. Anyone who's in lj and claims not to care at all about whether or not people comment is... not exactly believable to me, let's put it like that. In conclusion: Selena's thing for the fannish underdog strikes again. Also, this movie isn't helpful if you're on a diet.
District 9, by contrast, is anything but fluff. Though on one level a summer action-adventure movie. A technical detail first: interestingly, the subtitling seems to be handled differently in different countries. I've read a review observe that the black characters are subtitled as opposed to the white ones, which certainly wasn't the case in the version I saw, which was one with the original language (i.e. English), and subtitles only for the aliens (who did not speak English). (The subtitles for the aliens, however, were in German because I saw it in Germany, which means they show you the film as prepared for the German audience but with the original English soundtrack.) Why is this whole subtitle or not business relevant? Because this is a South African movie, and one where discrimination, prejudice, privilege, loss of same etc. is very much an issue.
The premise is a spin on Encounter and Invasion movies both: twenty years ago, an alien ship arrives over Johannesburg. And stays there, doing nothing. The surviving crew, however, deragotorily nicknamed "Prawns" by the humans because of their crustecean-arachnid appearance, ends up living in a Johannesburg slum and is about to be resettled in something a character will later admit is "more like a concentration camp", partly due to complaints by the local population, partly due to coorporate greed (more about that later). (The very title of the movie is a pun on District Six, which was a mixed-race area of Cape Town that was declared whites-only in 1966, after which there was violent and forced resettlement of 60.000 of its inhabitants.) The initial mockumentary-style sequence which brings us up to speed on the history of the aliens in Johannesburg has a lot of satire, like the information the Nigerians are pulling "cat food scams" on the aliens, and of course the big cooperation who is this movie's most ostensible bad guy, MNU, is every Blackwater/Halliburton/Insert-your-private-firm here written large. But the satire elements fade in the background as the story proceeds. The main character, not exactly the hero (I'd say anti-hero, but that's also a wrong term as he's deliberately not glamorized that way), is Wikus van der Merwe, who starts out as a none-too-bright tool of MNU in charge of overseeing the resettlement, a job he got due to being the son-in-law of the head of the company. Then an accident Magneto would approve of happens, and Wikus starts to slowly turn into an alien, which makes him a target for basically everyone in this film... except the very people he victimized in the beginning, the aliens.
Something debate-worthy is the question whether this is yet another spin on the "white man gets morally educated via suffering of people of colour/obvious stand-ins for people of colour" tale seen in many a movie. For myself, I didn't think so, because while Wikus does get a moral clue or two and slowly becomes more sympathetic the more alien he gets, this isn't actually the drive of the narrative. He may be the main character, but the heroes are the alien named "Christopher" (human names given to the aliens whether they like them or not has another obvious parallel in human history) and his/her (Christopher's gender is by no means clear) son. Christopher has worked for near twenty years on a way to get the ship going again, and helping him and his son to the ship so they can a) escape and b) get help for their people is the main goal. Neither of them gets sacrificed for Wikus; his moment of redemption is the point where he stops thinking of himself first and genuinenly starts to help them (instead of the alliance of necessity because he needed SOMEONE to help him which was the case earlier), which leads to his own sort-of-sacrifice. ("Sort of" because Wikus neither gets the heroic death or the return-to-human status ending usual storytelling leads you to expect. The ending he does get seems to me narratively just.)
Mind you: if District 9 is a monster movie, humanity is the monster. Picking a look for the aliens which resembles that of many a "bug-like" alien-as-villain movie instead of something soft and Disney-esque was a good way to underscore the point here. This deliberate turnaround catches you for the first time when early on Wikus in the "mockumentary" introduction sequence lets a lot of alien eggs be set on fire. Which is the very thing that when, say, Ripley does it in Aliens is something cheered by the audience, except here we think of those eggs as babies and what Wikus does is horrible. One of the most harrowing sequences is when a newly infected Wikus is brought into MNU's labs and you see the experiments on aliens that have been going on there. (Because the alien weaponry from the ship the humans salvaged is DNA-coded so it can be used only by the aliens, something MNU has been trying to get around for years, which is where the accidentally transformed Wikus comes in so handy for them, bad pun unintended.) Meanwhile, the alien characters never stop speaking their subtitled own language (you never hear them talk in English) and continue to look like a cross between lobsters and crickets, but they're the ones evidencing compassion, courage and endurance; in short, the qualities usually termed "human" by reviewers. And while MNU and its corporate greed is just the tip of the iceberg, the rest of the human characters aren't depicted in more flattering style; it's just a matter of degrees. But because this movie has you rooting for the aliens so much, this doesn't come across as hopeless. To misquote The Importance of being Earnest, the heroes are victorious and the villains defeated, which is how you can tell it is fiction.