DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Much like The Hurt Locker, another of the best reviewed films so far this year is a relatively low-budget picture that uses genre conventions to subtly address thorny political and social issues. District 9 takes place in an alternate present-day South Africa in which aliens landed, quite publicly, nearly 30 years ago. This wasn’t an attack; the newcomers are working class refugees, neither a threat, nor able to provide scientific knowledge that might make them valuable. As a result, no one can decide exactly what to do with them, and the aliens are sequestered in the titular detention camp while endless international debate goes on to try to determine their fate, and a shady corporation has been given control of the camp and its residents in the meantime.
An employee of the corporation manages to activate one of the alien weapons that the visitors landed with, and as a result he begins to morph into one of them, making him a valuable commodity, for his newfound DNA has suddenly given him an understanding of much of the alien technology. With the encampment of the “others” and the location, it’s easy to see what some of the themes are that director Neill Blomkamp is going after. Even the marketing for the film is pretty entertaining, as the producers have gone for a viral campaign that features an official website meant to look like a corporate site for the company tasked with containing the aliens, and a blog written by one of the aliens, advocating for equal rights for “non-humans”.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of area theaters.
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Alfred Hitchcock could have quit filmmaking before ever making the move from Britain to Hollywood, and would still have been remembered as a popular and prolific filmmaker. As it is though, he became so famous after the transition that few of the over two dozen films he made before 1940 are still seen very often. And just as the director remade one of his silent films after he started working with sound, he also remade one of his British films after moving on to Hollywood. Most people are familiar with 1956’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, which starred Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day as a couple vacationing in Morocco. They witness an assassination and have their child kidnapped in the aftermath as the assassins attempt to keep them quiet. But Hitchcock already did this story once before, 22 years prior, in a much leaner, more streamlined form with a 1934 feature of the same name. British acting legend Leslie Banks originates the Jimmy Stewart role, which is actually downplayed in this version in favor of a stronger role for his wife, played here by Edna Best. But the real attraction is Peter Lorre, as the leader of the assassins, in his first role in an English movie after he fled Hitler’s Germany. Lorre didn’t even speak English at the time of filming and had to learn all his lines phonetically, yet he still manages to get across all of the creepy menace he was such a genius at creating.
Tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Free.
