Tag Archives: 2009

Aug 28 2021
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Uncategorized

District 9 (2009). Crikey!

I stayed away from this for years. The title annoyed me in its seeming vagueness. I thought it was either about freejumping or a prison escape, neither of which I find particularly arresting.

Elysium (2013) brought me here. It’s a decent movie that doesn’t really fulfill its initial promise, and Jodie Foster’s dreadful impression of Christine Lagarde is just embarrassing (why did this happen?). But the wildly entertaining histrionics of Sharlto Copley were enough to lure me to District 9. He is mesmerising in it and his transformation into something resembling a human being (by weirdly becoming an alien) is a shocker. But it’s not just the out-of-nowhere star turn, it’s everything. The style – this may be the only time that a found-footage aesthetic works in a film – the action, the boldness with which the picture realises the potential of its premise and runs with it, how a Predator-lookalike alien can be a fully-fledged character.

District Six actually happened. It’s movies, aye, but they say art imitates life.

I should have seen this a decade ago. But I have no regrets. A 5/5 movie.

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Aug 28 2019
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Art, Cinema, Film, Movie, Movies, Uncategorized

Inglourious Basterds – a decade on.

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Discussing Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019) with a friend after seeing it the other evening, I was reminded that Tarantino’s genre-bending WWII-era masterpiece is now 10 years old this month. Some critics took umbrage at QT’s depiction of a commando unit of Jewish American soldiers as Allied equivalent Otto Skorzenies, but they’re missing the point: Tarantino is more likely including such things for the purpose of annoying his detractors rather than drawing any historical comparisons. He does it because he can.

Regardless of any ethical considerations when it comes to shooting history (and re imagining it), the movie is so witty and sometimes outright hilarious. It’s pure entertainment, and of all the post-Pulp Fiction (1994) Tarantino films, his least indulgent, with no unnecessary scenes stretching out the running time. We can also christen this ‘The Christoph Waltz show’. His Hans Landa is a behemoth, a cunning, sociopathic polyglot five steps ahead of everyone else. He even makes the eating of strudel captivating.

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N.B. There is an outrageous ‘Antonio Margheriti’ connection between Basterds and Hollywood, Donnie Donowitz’s alias he adopts for Landa the same moniker as the real-life Spaghetti Western director whom DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton stars for in Hollywood. 

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Jun 30 2019
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Berlin, Germany, Photography, Technology, Tourism, Travel, Uncategorized

Berlin 2009 was my own private kick-starter.

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A full 10 years next week since I first set foot in Germany, this extended Berlin jaunt the beginning of many more liver-swelling shenanigans. In a decade the following have been … surmounted:

Amsterdam, Munich, Bratislava, Vienna, Brussels, Prague, Budapest, Kraków, Amsterdam again, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Bremen, Gothenburg, Tallinn, Amsterdam again, Munich again, Stockholm, Frankfurt again, Poznań, Bangkok, Oslo, Hamburg, Osnabrück, Bremen again, Tokyo, Kaunas, Riga, Warsaw, Gdańsk, Dublin, Kraków again, Oslo again, Sliema, Geneva, Copenhagen, Bremen again, Dortmund, Cologne, Bonn, Amsterdam again, Milan, Venice, Rome, Dublin again, Warsaw again, Berlin again, Basel, Bilbao, Reykjavík, Salzburg, Sliema again, Albufeira, Straubing, Berlin again, Szczecin, Salzburg again, Munich again, Wroclaw, Porto, Sofia, Straubing again.

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Hitler’s Bunker today.

Berlin 2009 was unique in that I did it entirely internet free. I had no snazzy smartphone and wasn’t on any social media platforms. I had a mere camera and that was it. Consequently, I actually saw shit and took it in. No phone = no distraction, no barrier between me and the Grey City’s peculiarities. It was the most productive slice of tourism I’ve ever done and the last time I’ve used a paper map. In a sense it was a crossroads trip, the last archaic adventure.

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