District 9

Just returned from seeing District 9 and I am BLOWN AWAY! We had been anxiously awaiting this movie and we were not disappointed - in fact we were just amazed!

In a nutshell the premise is that a huge alien ship is hovering over South Africa and there are over a million aliens that come with it. What else can I tell you that will not give something critical away? Nothing really. :)

This film is so original, interesting, funny, violent, gross, and absolutely fascinating. It has many lessons on many levels, and it flips the whole "What if the aliens come to earth" theories on their heads.

An actor by the name of Sharlto Copley stars in this movie and he is just fantastic. He has a great character arc - plays every bit of his role to the hilt and is so much fun to watch. We don't remember ever seeing him before but I know we'll see him alot more.

The aliens are stunning - amazing - never saw this kind of .... what are they? Animatronics? CG? Effects? I was stunned in scene after scene wondering "HOW did they do that?"

We are sure this will be a tremendous success and will produce some sequels.

There are some downsides - there is extreme violence, gross scenes, and quite a constant run of action, killing, shooting, action. It's definitely not for kids and may not be for some squeamish or more peace-loving adults either.

We had one big problem with the movie and that is the excessive use of the dreaded 'Shaky Cam'. Again, the handheld camera that shakes and you can't see what's going on. In our opinion it's used in faulty movies when they don't have confidence in their scenes or their actors so they just shake things around knowing the audience's mind will fill in the blanks. It's a cheap way of taking advantage of our brain's ability to see things that aren't actually there. We feel that we saw more detail and saw more amazing stuff when in fact we saw very little and that was all scrambled and shaken.

For that reason we both felt queasy with a bit of motion sickness, but the story is so strong that we were glued to our seats and eyes glued to the screen, shaky cam and all, trying to find out what would happen.

If you ask us was it a great movie - yes. Was it original? Yes. Fascinating? Yes. Great story? Yes. Was it an enjoyable movie - no not really. Hard to watch because of the grittiness, violence, gross parts and shaky cam. But it still gets a '4' from us so you know it's fresh and the story and acting is great.

Pueblo Tinseltown was the place. The Lovely Eden sold us our tickets with a smile and nice words, popcorn was fresh and delish with the new real butter, and we noted that the new flat screens at the concession stand are activated and full of content and motion. Much more interesting than the old menu boards. It was a nice afternoon out of the heat and into the world of aliens!