In the Ghetto

I stopped by Linda's new digs in Westchester last week. We had lunch at Johnny Rockets at The Bridge last week, and saw "District 9" in the fancy Director's theater. The theater itself is fancy anyway, with fancy popcorn and chicken wings, and they'll even take your order in the theater and bring your order to your seat. We sat in comfy leather seats, and the seats themselves were assigned, which we chose when we purchased them at the box office. Expensive, but nice!

My thoughts on "District 9":

• The movie started off Documentary-style, which I thought would end a lot sooner than it actually did. Interesting effect, as it educated the audience about what we were watching.
• I didn't understand how the inter-species prostitution was supposed to work. I mean, I know that they didn't show the aliens up close in that much detail, but how are you supposed to even know what gender they were? Oh, I guess prostitutes don't care? But how do they...oh, whatever. I was confused.
• Why didn't all of the people at the surprise party notice how sick Venter was? I don't think he normally looks that pale and sweaty, with a big bandage on his arm. They were just asking for him to do that to the cake when they were being so inattentive.
• Lots of disturbing stuff to see, not just because it was dirty and eew-y, but also the way that the aliens were treated, with the experimentation and the "abortion," when the MNU people lit the eggs on fire. That's the image that disturbed me the most, actually.
• I loved Christopher's little boy: cute, intelligent, just wanted to go home.
• I'm confused by the term "non-human." Wouldn't that include animals, too? Or is that the point? It's humans versus everyone else?
• There were several times during the movie where I hated my own human race.
• Loved how the bad guy got his come-uppance. It was like Ancient Rome.
• I was a complete wreck after that movie. The love story was quite touching, the wish for Christopher to get to his son and get into the mothership brought tension, and all of the hatred and violence had my psyche all wound up. It was quite a relief when it was all over.

This was an AMAZING movie. If you're interested in good social drama, with some dark humor mixed in, I highly recommend it to you. Just get past the sci-fi aspect of it if you don't like alien stories: it's much, much more than that.