DVD OF THE WEEK

DISTRICT 9 *****
Dir: Neil Blomkamp
Starring: Sharlto Copley, Vanessa Haywood, Jed Brophy

With the name Peter Jackson above the title this will immediately be a Must-See film for most Kiwis. He is, of course, just the producer, but has helped first time South African helmer Blomkamp create one of the most original sci-fi actioners of recent times.
Blomkamp was originally slated to make the Jackson-produced adaptation of video game Halo and when that project fell apart they went back to a short film Blomkamp had made about aliens in Johannesburg and adapted it into a full feature.
Starting as a straight documentary and slowly moving to an action film, this posits the idea of a colony of aliens, sick and dumb, arriving and being housed in a huge detention camp (the titular District 9) in modern day South Africa. As a state-hired corporation roughly evict the aliens to relocate them in a more distant camp the man in charge, a humble civil servant by the name of Wikus, is contaminated with alien fluid and becomes a marked man, caught between evil corporates, Nigerian bandits and over-zealous army thugs.
What is great about this: the pacing; the script; the alien f/x (which are damn near seamless); a brilliant performance from the previously unknown Sharlto Copley which moves from callous disregard for the 'prawns” to some sort of empathy; the playful 'splatter” effects, perhaps a tribute to Jackson's early films; and, well, just about everything.
The only mistake for viewers would be to try and read anything into the bulging political subtext. The Jo'burg setting makes this rife for interpretation but don't bother – whatever analogies are being floated are murky and confused, which doesn't matter in the slightest. It's still a great film.

I had to think hard before making District 9 the 'Pick of the Week” as it could just as easily have been Quentin Tarantino latest offering Inglourious Basterds (****), which is about as audacious a bit of filmmaking as you're likely to see this year. It's a film that so completely rips up the manual for what WW2 movies look like that over the course of three viewing my reaction has ranged from anger to complete admiration and still swings around when I think about it.
Once again Tarantino has made a film set not in the real world but in some fictional movie universe where WW2 is not accompanied by period songs of the time but by cool music from other films, from Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns to Bowie's 'Putting Out Fire” from Cat People. And where – unlike in the recent Valkyrie - a plot to kill Hitler can succeed. It's all incredibly artificial, right down to Brad Pitt's peculiarly over-the-top performance, or the strange theatricality of the main villain, Jew-Hunter Christoph Waltz, who rightly won Best Actor at Cannes.
But it also has all the things that make Tarantino unique and his films compulsively watchable: great dialogue (and lots of it), striking images (even if many are lifted from other movies), and a swaggering confidence which is both mesmerising and exhilarating.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (***) was, I thought, a whole bunch of fun. It is – no surprises here – very very silly, resembling nothing more than a live action version of Team America. But it doesn't take itself even vaguely seriously, which is its saving grace. The colourful saturated cinematography is a breath of fresh air after the bleached-out likes of Terminator Salvation and the action is wild and plentiful. Shut off your brain and take the ride.

Yet another rom-com that insults the intelligence, particularly of women, arrives in the form of The Ugly Truth (**). Straight-laced TV exec Katherine Heigl is appalled when unreconstructed bad boy Gerald Butler is foisted on her show. He's actually quite fun, in a caricature sort of way, but she is required to be both repressed, ditsy, self-assured, clueless, and just about every other thing – presented as a successful career woman she is forced to act like nothing more than a clueless teenager.