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ekwright
Reviews
District 9 (2009)
There has got to be massive rating manipulation going on?
I went to see this movie on the strength of the ratings. It was a massive disappointment. IMDb - I think you need to check the IP addresses of reviewers. Are they all from South Africa by any chance? The movie is a hodge podge of borrowed clichés and visuals from start to finish. First the spaceship arrives over Johannesburg in the manner of Independence Day. However the rest of the world fail to notice when the aliens (prawns) inside are discovered to be malnourished and confused, so a local company is contracted to put them all in unguarded shanty towns where they can mix freely with the poor human population. At this point the movie shifts from being a sci-fi movie (not that it ever was, because the spaceship is inert the whole time) to a social commentary type with thinly veiled references to Apartheid. The local Nigerian gangsters are portrayed in the film pretty much the same way as they are demonised by local South Africans in reality. Its also only a matter of time before the locals start calling Zimbabweans Prawns. Yes, the film actually adds to the already hateful xenophobia which exists in South Africa.
Setting aside the appallingly superficial and narrow minded social commentary - we are then treated to a Blade Runner type landscape where Transformer like Mechs fight it out with stereotypical mercenary types. We even have the hero mutating into a Prawn in the manner of the Fly, whereupon he is taken away for medical experiments. By the way, the Prawns look a lot like the monsters in Predator, although less menacing.
The whole thing is very grating because it is so illogical and without vision. Awful movie - and I wont trust IMDb ratings again.
Supernova (2005)
I give it cult movie status on account of making it to Hallmark
This movie was so bad I could not resist going on the Internet to find out what others had to say. The whole thing seems to have been shot in and around Cape Town, and if you watch the credits, you can see that it was mostly a South African production. Their assumption that the rest of the world is maybe as dumb as the film makers regarding the topography of the Maldives (what we saw was False Bay, Cape Provence)and other places is disproved by the posts here.
All along I thought there were three "locations", Washington, Sydney and somewhere in South Africa. The prison guard scenes were unmistakably South Africa, as were the African Nanny scenes - I could not quite figure out how our hero (who appeared to be in Australia)ended up in South Africa whilst driving a truck, or how our heroine intended getting back to St Louis in the same truck. And why was our professor, who was apparently sitting in Siding Springs Observatory NSW waiting for evacuation orders from Washington? The accents, uniforms, geography, minor details, plot, science was all so bad it was actually funny. I wonder did the South African Government give a grant for this film? I smell government involvement here - no commercial production would ever have survived the first cut.
San wa (2005)
Powerful cinematography and soundtrack
Great cinematography and soundtrack. The acting is superb too, and I thought the out-takes at the end were a nice touch. There were parts of the movie that resembled a David Lean production. Five languages spoken in this movie - English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and (I think) Tamil! The costume design is reminiscent of Roman Army epics which make the columns of soldiers look very majestic - but their Chinese character is also retained.
The movie takes part in two time periods - the Qin Dynasty and today. We are transported from one to the other through Jackie Chan's dreams. In the Qin Dynasty he plays the part of a general whose main responsibility is to protect a Korean princess who has been sent to serve as a concubine in the Imperial Chinese Court. Things get in the way of course, and the two time periods are brought together by a weaving of mythology which involves Indian temples and underground tombs at Xian. Well worth watching - but if you are not used to the genre you may find some aspects a little far fetched.