District 9 (review)

August 31, 2009 //
1

District 9

There’s a scene in Dis­trict 9 when the main char­ac­ter, after endur­ing a lot of pain and humil­i­a­tion, has to make the choice of either run­ning into bat­tle guns ablaze or retreat. He chooses the lat­ter know­ing full well that his actions are dri­ven by fear and selfishness.

Dis­trict 9 or “D9” is many things all rolled up into a hard to describe pack­age. Among them it’s a sci-fi adven­ture with all the ele­ments you’d expect like blaster guns and an enor­mous space­ship. It’s also an unre­lent­ing social com­men­tary and an action-packed romp that refuses to let down its guard.

The effects and cin­e­matog­ra­phy com­pli­ment each other quite well and at times it’s hard to dis­tin­guish between the two. That said, they are not of the slick vari­ety that other films con­vey, but the grimy tex­ture is beau­ti­ful and per­fect for the por­trayal of a enslaved race of aliens liv­ing in South African slums.

It’s an unfor­giv­ing, rav­ished and self­ish envi­ron­ment, leav­ing barely any room for sur­vival. It’s a film that is best expe­ri­enced with­out dig­ging for holes in the plot (of which they are a few) or mak­ing assump­tions deal­ing with the char­ac­ter por­trayal or progression.

I enjoyed it because it didn’t reveal too much of itself and yet what it did expose was raw (human and alien) emo­tion, flaws in the human fab­ric and a detached feel­ing of human­ity, or at least I felt detached at times.

★★★★★

Sketches

July 20, 2009 //
5

Even though my kids are aware that their Dad is an artist, it’s not often I get requests from them. That might sound sur­pris­ing, but I prob­a­bly don’t sketch as much as I should. Most of my art­work is gen­er­ated on the com­puter and they just assume the zeros and bytes do most of the work.

Recently, my three-year-old son Quinn asked me to draw Beast from Beauty and the Beast. He handed me a Cray­ola Twistable crayon and two sheets of copy paper and stood by my side wait­ing for the results. He also reminded me that he wanted it deliv­ered pretty quickly, as if he had a pitch meet­ing to attend or something.

Since then I’ve been doing some sketches of other char­ac­ters you might rec­og­nize, the idea being that these are quick, dirty and recognizable.

The Sketches

The Beast [Flickr]

Mate­ri­als: A blue Cray­ola Twistable, reg­u­lar copy paper.

Sarah [Flickr]

Donald Duck [sketch]

Old Owl [Flickr]

Mate­ri­als: Pris­ma­color col­ored pen­cil, reg­u­lar copy paper. Source: Don Bluth Animation

A rag-tag band led by the infamous Captain EO

July 9, 2009 //
0

I watched Cap­tain EO (not sure what the EO means) with my kids (the toe-head twins) and it occurred to me that I had never showed it to them until now.

Their favorite line was one uttered by The Supreme Leader:

You infect my world with your pres­ence! Turn the oth­ers into… trashcans!

Even though Cap­tain EO was a favorite from my child­hood, hav­ing seen it for the first time in the late 80s/early 90s, it took the pass­ing of Michael Jack­son and a flood of nos­tal­gia to con­vince me to do so. What a shame.

We also watched Moonwalker’s Smooth Crim­i­nal sequence, but that wasn’t nearly as cool to them. I tried to explain that when I was a kid (early 80s), Michael Jack­son was some­thing spe­cial and even after all these years he’s still con­sid­ered a true tal­ent. What I didn’t go into was all the media hype, spec­u­la­tion, accu­sa­tions, strange behav­ior or gig­gly inter­views because none of that mat­tered to me and some­day they can get the scoop on all of that if they really want to.

Michael’s mes­sage to the world was sim­ple: be inspired and imag­i­na­tive, lov­ing, cre­ative and good.

It’s some­thing we all can aspire to be and for that I thank “MJ” for his influence.

Howard the Duck

July 8, 2009 //
3

Howard the DuckGeorge Lucas has cre­ated some won­der­ful movies and is unde­ni­ably a vision­ary film­maker, story-teller and influ­ence in the film indus­try. Recently, evi­dence of this has sur­faced in the form of a PDF out­lin­ing the “Raiders” story con­fer­ence.

He’s also respon­si­ble for some real stinkers. Movie stink that could quickly foul a room full of under­de­vel­oped daisies and sel­dom come up in con­ver­sa­tion for fear of one being exiled or worse, thrown to a bunch of rav­en­ous movie crit­ics. Now I’m begin­ning to feel nos­tal­gic for the car­toon, The Critic, but anyways…

Howard the Duck is per­haps the worst movie on George’s resume (yes, fouler than even Clone Wars), failed mis­er­ably at the box office and yet it retains a charm all its own. There are even days when the movie strangely hov­ers around in my thoughts from time to time.

If this were VH1’s Behind the Music, this is the part when the guy would say.. “And now, the story behind the story.”

It all started with some comics

From Wikipedia:

[Howard the Duck] first appeared in Adven­ture into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and sev­eral sub­se­quent series have chron­i­cled the mis­ad­ven­tures of the ill-tempered, anthro­po­mor­phic, “funny ani­mal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard’s adven­tures are gen­er­ally social satires, and also often par­o­dies of genre fic­tion with a meta-fictional aware­ness of the medium. [Wikipedia]

If you were to pick up a Howard comic dur­ing this time you’d notice very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between him and Don­ald Duck. This was inten­tional on the part of its cre­ators but for obvi­ous rea­sons wasn’t car­ried over in the movie.

Quack, Quack!

The movie adap­ta­tion, released in 1986, retained some of the traits from the comic in the form of its star, Howard, who was still ill-tempered and anthro­po­mor­phic. Instead of doing an ani­mated fea­ture, which would’ve been an ideal pre­sen­ta­tion, the film was instead live-action and the duck would be part ani­ma­tronic pup­pet, part diminu­tive actor.

It starred a very young Lea Thomp­son and Tim Rob­bins. Tim Rob­bins, up until this point (with Top Gun’s release loom­ing) had been known for bit roles in TV and film. Lea Thomp­son was (and will prob­a­bly always be) known as the Marty McFly’s mother Lor­raine in Back to the Future.

Together, they were sup­port­ing play­ers to their feath­ered star and despite the sub par script and kooky spe­cial effects, man­aged to give some­what con­vinc­ing per­for­mances. How­ever, there is some­thing to be said about the human/duck rela­tion­ship that is, to this day, uncom­fort­able to watch. I don’t think I was ever fully up to speed on the “birds, ducks and bees.”, but I digress.

Above all us, Howard the Duck, like The Dark Crys­tal, was a child­hood favorite of mine because it was some­thing I enjoyed watch­ing with my family.

It was a fan­tas­tic, awful, bewil­der­ing and grossly under­rated cult classic.

The Trailer

Addi­tional Reading:

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