Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Shutter ’08 is good at explaining the mechanics of Asian horror, but little better than other American remakes. It may even be too late to resurrect American interest in the import subgenre.

The 2004 Thai original and American remake are almost identical, save for the fact that in the American version protagonists Ben and Jane are visiting Japan from the United States, whereas the original’s Tun and Jane are Bangkok locals. Ben-Tun is, in both cases, a photographer with a past. Thai-Jane is a student, while American-Jane is a schoolteacher. American-Jane and Ben are newlyweds, while Jane and Tun are presumably just dating.

It’s fairly clear that the original Thai Shutter of ’04 was inspired by the Japanese Ringu franchise — the Hideo Nakata film that gained popularity in Japan, then spun off into 2 sequels and a South Korean television series. Aside from the stringy-haired ghost, there’s a moment when an iconic, Sadako-like figure starts to rise from a darkroom sink.

Interestingly, it’s the original version of this viral ghost-story that raises the ante for Western audiences by tipping its hat to Chris Marker’s ‘La Jettée‘. Though it’s just a little didactic, there’s a good moment in the original film where student-Jane’s instructor explains that “photography does not reproduce reality. It depends on how the image is framed. What is revealed, [and] what is concealed. Your perspective is critical.”

The original film features more inventive camera work and better production design despite the re$ource$ the American version had going for it. Because their Shutter entered the field at the end of a wave of Asian tech-virus horror movies, Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom really are able to improve upon everybody else’s stories of haunted cell phones and watering holes: Spirit Photography has been a cult fascination throughout the world since the 19th c. What better ay to populate an Asian horror film than with a technology or phenomenon that Westerners might already be familiar with?

Moreover, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom borrow numerous Western ideas ideas about photography and it’s aesthetics as plot-points — specifically, the heretofore mentioned matters of framing and perspective. But this effort at staging and blocking doesn’t make it into Luke Dawson’s screenplay adaptation . Curiously, there’s a Larry Craig moment in the original that might have entertained American audiences but for some reason it didn’t make the American cut of the film.

One thing I have noticed about these movies, especially in the Thai original is the attention to shot composition. Here, more than most American movies, the original emphasizes shot composition because you’re constantly surveying the background for ghostly apparitions. Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go one further than any of the directors that preceded them by paying homage to both Nakata and Stanley Kubrick in closing pursuit scene absent from Dawson’s adaptation.

Another nice invention by Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom is a sequence where Jane assembles her snapshots only to discover that they’re haunted by a zoetroped ghost in an image sequence. This is repeated in the American remake, but of course the pictures here are in color.

For all of the ‘Ringu’, ‘Grudge’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘One Missed Call’ rip-offs that have been projected onto American screens these past few years, the original ‘Shutter’ has the best ending, something that surprising and thoughtful, but aped in the American version. See it, but see the original.

Original Thai version Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Japanese-directed U.S. remake Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

That’s not to say that there aren’t impressive things going on in it — it just seems that my expectations became distorted after what seemed to me an elaborate and meticulous emphasis on direction and production design to refer to European nouvelle vague films that goes entirely nowhere.

In the disk’s promotional blurb, the film is described as a first-hand account of Tianamen Square in Beijung, c. 1989. The film’s writer-director, Lou Ye apparently participated in those protests back in the day, but the film does very little to communicate exactly what those students were after — was it more ‘democracy’? More civil rights? Greater freedom of self-expression?

The film may have been forbidden to cross those thematic threshholds on account of domestic funding, but what Lou Ye starts to create is a visually compelling film that self-consciously references French and Italian cinema of the 1960 only to sputter out when it comes to the Tianamen Square elephant in the middle of the room.

Granted, Summer Palace deals with sexuality with an unexpected frankness that invoked the ire of the Central Committee, but like (forgive me) Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ the film’s A and B storylines have *nothing* to do with one another — there is nothing but a superficial relationship between the June 4th Incident and the romantic engagements of the protagonist; the film explores neither subject in any substantive depth.

It’s a shame, really. A film that could have told the West a lot about life in China detourns into an exposition of Yu Hong’s personal life and her sexual liberation — boyfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend, hook-up — rather than give us any concrete appreciation of the historical forces at work in China during the late ’80′s. It’s particularly disappointing that the film failed to deliver it’s central narrative because Ye’s set-up — and the degree to which she ‘quotes’ films like ‘Jules and Jim‘ (1962) and ‘The Bicycle Thief‘ (1948) get entirely lost when she shifts the focus of the story to Ye’s sexual diarism.

When deliberate quotes are made to other movies, they should, IMHO, be incorporated into the plot and not just be used to demonstrate the creators’ historical knowledge.

I lost interest in the film as it shifted from the concerns of the ’60′s-cum-’80′s comparison of Europe’s 1968 and China’s Cultural Revolution to place Yu Hong and her friends as ex-pats in Berlin after 2000. The central effects of Tianamen Square failed to pay off. The sudden shift to Berlin and Yu’s ultimate repatriation sell the film short given the attention that had been spent on the music and production design of the film’s early scenes.

Then again, meybe I just need to watch the film’s bonus materials and acquaint myself better with contemporary Chinese history.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

After watching the British version of ‘Traffik‘ alongside a broadcast of 2000′s Steven Soderbergh remake, both courtesy of the Sundance Channel, I think I like the original more, even though Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle aren’t in it. The Brits are less black-and-white about the subject – the criminals aren’t all resident aliens, and fewer prominent characters live in the suburbs. Many are ‘respectable’ natural-born citizens, and international monetary policy (read IMF) is as culpable in the propagation of the drug trade as the well-to-do professionals of Southern California. Interesting, isn’t it, how Soderbergh moved the incidence of drug use and propagation out of the ‘Heartland’ of America into those ‘blue’ Gore margins. But we all know who’s catalyzing crystal-meth in Iowa – and his name don’t end with ‘Rodriguez’…

The Soderbergh film is substantially Goddard-ized, and full of editorial commentary, whilst the British made-for-tv version is remarkably ‘pure’. It’s much more like a real documentary – like an early Wenders film – that simply watches it’s protagonists as the story unfolds, and makes no comments. But then the Brits had 6 hours to play with, and Soderbergh only has 2-1/2.

There are currently two cable programs that pick on the lost Soderbergh narrative – HBO’s ‘The Wire‘, which follows an ongoing narcotics investigation in Baltimore, MD, and Showtime’s ‘Street Time‘ (w/ Rob Morrow of ‘Northern Exposure’ fame), set in a less-than-yuppie, less-than-Hollywood LA. Both of these programs pull the drug issue out of the rarefied realms of the idle rich and the destitute poor, to color the middle-classes. The better program, ‘The Wire’ offers the unspoken truism:”You follow the drugs, and you get a drug dealer; you follow the money, and you don’t know where you’ll end up – a City Councilman, a banker, you don’t know…” – and really, that’s what’s missing from Soderbergh’s list of tropes and exoticisms – the real criminals, like Jefferey Skilling , Ken Lay, Adelphia and WorldCom – are the vaunted business leaders who walk above us, and pocket our politicians. The criminals in ‘The Wire’ are as disciplined and organized as any Fortune 500 company, despite the fact that they make most of their cash operating out of the projects on Baltimore’s West-side. Soderbergh would have you believe that only yuppies and corrupt Mexican Generals could be so efficient.

Showtime’s ‘Street Time’ inverts the equation some, placing Rob Morrow in the role of a parolee trying to make good after incarceration. He’s out after a five year stint, though his brother and brother-in-law escaped the rap an are still plying their hash and marijuana importing concern out of their LA club (An interesting sub-plot indicates that Morrow’s affable retiree parents are unwittingly living off of their sons’ drug money in beautifully gladed Carmel, CA. Presumably, their retirement funds got tanked in the stock market…). Morrow’s got a wife and a kid he’s trying to do well by, but he feels his business partners owe him $1.5mil for the years he spent in the can. On the flip side, his over-eager parole officer (also a family man) has both an ethical streak and a gambling problem. Both are solidly middle-class, though the Morrow character is a bit more bohemian, if not a natural entrepreneur. Morrow’s character is addicted to the dealmaking, but not the drugs.

‘Traffik’(1989) Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
‘Traffic’(2000) Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars