Only a Prawn in Their Game.

Neil Blomkamp’s inventive genre mishmash District 9 is a strange and compelling critter alright. On its surface, just as 1988’s Alien Nation was basically a sci-fi revamp of In the Heat of the Night, this is first and foremost the central “E.T.s as undesirables” conceit of Alien Nation as filtered through the sad story of South Africa’s real-life District Six.

Here, the aliens in question — having arrived in a stalled ship under horrifying refugee conditions and been deemed “Prawns” by the disgusted human population — are festering in a slum outside Johannesburg, where they are mostly starving, causing trouble, indulging drug addictions (in their case, cat food), and/or getting exploited by the local (Nigerian) criminal element. Our protagonist in this tale — after you see him at work, you wouldn’t really call him “our hero” — is one Wikus van der Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copley), a eager-to-please bureaucrat for Multi-National United (MNU), who on account of family connections is tasked with supervising the relocation of District 9 to what amounts to a tented concentration camp, farther away from humankind. (Wikus’ other appointed task: to acquire for the Halliburton-like MNU as much alien-tech as possible for the multinational’s very profitable weapons division.)

But there’s more to District 9 than just a socially-conscious apartheid fable (and describing it as follows will give away some mild spoilers.) The head of the film, its first forty minutes or so, feels like a Paul Greengrass movie such as Bloody Sunday: a grim, gripping tale of social and political injustice (and, as per the Bournes, powerful and sinister multinationals) told in naturalistic, faux-documentary style. But the thorax of District 9 delves deeper into old-school David Cronenberg territory, with all the gooey orifices, transformational anxiety, and throbbing gristle that usually portends. (There’s a touch of Blomkamp’s mentor, the Dead Alive-era Peter Jackson, here as well — particularly in those ruthless energy weapons.) And, by the time we get to the abdomen, we’re suddenly watching a George Miller or Jim Cameron-style actioner, with more than enough visceral excitement to keep the antennae twitching.

All stitched together, District 9 is quite a remarkable feat of summer sensation. In the end, I’m pretty sure I enjoyed the more self-contained experiences of Moon and The Hurt Locker more. And I might quibble here and there with Blomkamp’s execution — the lapses back to documentary-style talking heads at times feels like cheap and easy exposition, and cute kid plot-devices are cute kid plot-devices no matter the species involved. But, unlike Terminator: Salvation and (I presume) its Hasbro-minded competition this summer, Blomkamp’s District 9 actually manages to deftly recombine familiar sci-fi elements into something that feels new and original. In short, it’s the clever, gory, mildly thought-provoking, and indisputably kick-ass action thrill-ride genre fans have been waiting for all season.

Gods and Broncos.

The B-movie preview that went over best at the midnight District 9 (even though it blatantly rips off everything off from Constantine to Preacher to The Prophecy to The Matrix): the trailer for Scott Stewart’s Legion, wherein fallen angel Paul Bettany must protect the unborn Chosen One 2.0, as well as the hardest working man in show business (Dennis Quaid) and a gaggle of other puny humans — Lucas Black, Tyrese Gibson, Kate Walsh, Adrianne Palicki, Willa Holland, and Charles S. Dutton — from, apparently, the wrath of God. (If the January release date didn’t tip you off, there’s a way-too-long, spoileriffic red-band trailer floating around which suggests this is basically as good as it gets. Still, it made for a fun two minutes.)

Also in the trailer bin: our first look at Jared Hess’ Gentlemen Broncos, with Michael Angarano (of Snow Angels), Jennifer Coolidge, Jemaine Clement, Mike White, and Sam Rockwell. I’m not a huge fan of the pedigree, tbh — I didn’t think much of Nacho Libre and thought Napoleon Dynamite was wildly overrated — but this does have the power combo of Jemaine and Rockwell in its favor.

The Moon Receding?

“‘If you’re willing to wait until 2028, you’ve got a heavy lift vehicle, but you’ve got nothing to lift,’ she said. ‘You cannot do this program on this budget.‘” President Obama’s Human Space Flight Plans Committee is set to announce that getting back to the moon by 2020 is not feasible given current budgetary constraints, and Mars is definitely out of the question. “The final list of options…will include some variation of a lunar base down the road. But the committee is most animated by what it calls the ‘Deep Space’ option, a strategy that emphasizes getting astronauts far beyond Low Earth Orbit but not necessarily plunking them down on alien worlds.‘” Which basically sounds like unnecessarily strapping astronauts to normally-unmanned fly-by missions — Not sure I see much point in that.

Honestly, this is pathetic. As I said here, it’s time to raise our expectations of what we can achieve in space, and fund manned exploration of the solar system accordingly. Particularly given how much we’re blowing on the Pentagon’s space toys at the moment, we could stand to spend a bit more on one of the most important collective human endeavors still before us.

A Taste for the Theatrical.

A big one I missed the other day (found on Vanity Fair): The trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is now online, with Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Verne Troyer, Lily Cole, and, in his final performance, Heath Ledger (abetted by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law.) Wow. Looks more Gilliamesque than anything Terry’s done in years.

That Les Paul Sound.

“‘For 10 years, I was a laugh,’ he told CNN in an interview. ‘[But I] kept pounding at them and pounding at them saying hey, here’s where it’s at. Here’s where tomorrow, this is it. You can drown out anybody with it. And you can make all these different sounds that you can’t do with a regular guitar.’” Lester William Polfuss, a.k.a. Les Paul, 1915-2009. “In 1948, after being involved in a severe car accident, he asked the doctor to set his arm permanently in a guitar-playing position.“

Dusty and the Black Sites.

“Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, ‘forever.’)“

Charming. The NYT gets a window into the CIA’s top-secret “black sites” program courtesy of former #3 man Dusty Foggo, who — irony alert — is currently serving a three-year term in a Kentucky jail on fraud charges associated with Duke Cunningham. (I presume Kentucky’s finest have yet to break out the “enhanced interrogation techniques” on this joker. Speaking of which, “[n]othing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials…The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.“)

The Circus is in Town.

The woeful state of American political journalism, in a nutshell (and in two parts):

1. CNN and WP media poobah Howard Kurtz, on Twitter today: “Booking hell: All pundits are in the Hamptons or Vineyard. Intelligent discourse apparently ceasing.“

2. CNBC to Teabaggers today: Can you guys please stage us a really violent rally? “We have a media request for an event this week that will have lots of energy and lots of anger. This is for CNBC.“

So. Broken.

AMC’s got Braaaaaains.

“This is not about zombies popping out of closets. This is a story about survival, and the dynamics of what happens when a group is forced to survive under these circumstances. The world (in ‘Walking Dead‘) is portrayed in a smart, sophisticated way.” Don Draper and Walt White, meet the Zombie Apocalypse: Apparently, AMC is close to contracting Frank Darabont to oversee, and Gale Ann Hurd to produce, a television series from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Clever, clever — I’d watch it. (And let’s hope they use the most recent mathematical modeling to keep things on the up-and-up.)

Karl: Get Iglesias.

“‘Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing US Attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse trading and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the US Attorney corps — that of US Attorney Iglesias — because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections,’ Conyers said. ‘When Mr. Iglesias said his firing was a ‘political fragging,’ he was right.‘” The House Judiciary Committee releases the information they’ve collected on the US Attorney scandal, and — hold on to your hats, people — it looks like Karl Rove has been less than truthful with Congress about his role in the illegal firings. A huge surprise, I know.

So…are political firings and lying to Congress still against the law these days, or is the plan to treat these particular criminal offenses like we do torture? In the meantime, I’d expect Rove is on the phone right this very moment, imploring his good friends at FreedomWorks and the like to dial up the crazies for the next few news cycles.

Update: More comes to light on Harriet Miers’ involvement as well.

Absinthe Muse or Demon Rum?

“Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes–to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave…In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner’s prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness.“

By way of Dangerous Meta, The Economist‘s Tom Shone considers the artistic merits of novelists sobering up. “The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Beckett — like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career — were dictated by their creators’ vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work.“