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Attack the Block (2011)

  Attack the Block (2011)   I didn’t expect to love this film as much as I did. Its central conceit promises something narrow and dumb: Aliens attack the Ghetto and it’s up to the Gangbangers to push them back. It appeared to be a one joke movie, and that joke was borrowed from another movie, “Cockneys vs Zombies” (2012), which was entertaining, but entirely forgettable.   Now, note the dates: “Attack the Block,” actually came out first, but I became aware of it second. Though this movie received surprisingly rave reviews, it failed in the box-office. Because of “Attack the Block’s” undeserved obscurity, I had thought it borrowed from “Cockneys vs Zombies” but it was actually the other way around. I’m not exactly sure how a low-budget, well-reviewed, comedic, Monster Movie with lots of action, fails to properly recoup, but this isn’t the first time it has happened (example: “Slither” (2006)).   One of the film’s greatest achievements was how it negotiated...
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District 9 (2009)

  Top of Form Bottom of Form District 9 (2009)   This is a wholly remarkable film, Politically Charged, speaking of Global Issues, but potent because it kept a narrowly Local Focus. Unlike most fictions about the Chaos of much of sub-Saharan Africa that are supposed to speak of the News of the World, it isn’t set in some Fictional Country but a very specific Time-and-Place. The nation is South Africa, the town, though unnamed, was likely Soweto mixed with another town, Alexandera (it was filmed in Soweto, as Alexandra was more violent at-that-time). It’s a subtle Alternate History buttressing and un-subtle narrative, starting with Aliens arriving on Earth in 1982, and their presence in South Africa may have preserved the Apartheid system (officially dismantled in the Real World in 1994), but the film makes a point that the mess laid out before us is as much post-Apartheid as it was Apartheid-inspired.   The film is about Xenophobia, Segregati...
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Inception (2010)

  Inception  (2010)   The unstated question in “Inception” seems to be: When we Dream, do we tell the truth?   A lot of Psychology seems to assume we do, but we confuse those truths because they are expressed in a symbolic language rooted in our pre-Verbal Experience. In this film, high-level Corporate Espionage is conducted through Dream-Hacking (entering another’s dreams) and explicitly states that we tell the truth in Dreams, because the Spies in the film trick their Targets into revealing cherished Secrets by inventing complex scenarios that demand some Confession. Implicitly though, the film’s plot hinges on the fact though while we tell the truth to others in Dreams, we continue to lie to ourselves.   Writer/Director Chris Nolan described the thinking behind the story, “At the heart of the movie is the notion that an idea is indeed the most resilient and powerful parasite. A trace of it will always be there in your mind … somewhere. The thought...
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