District 9, Basterds, and Cold Souls: three interesting new films

Excerpts from three reviews in World-- the first by Megan Basham and the last two (here and here) by Sam Thielman...

Anyone want to provide their own review(s)?

District 9:

According to director and Peter Jackson protégé Neill Blomkamp, his new film, District 9 incorporates the conceits of two genres: the metaphorical probing of the best sci-fi and the smash-em-up sequences of big-budget action. When his movie focuses on the former, it succeeds wildly. When it focuses on the latter, it becomes, well, a smash-em-up adrenaline fest—ably done, but not particularly interesting...

Wikus wields his meager authority with a zest reserved to small-minded men until he meets Christopher, an alien desperate to protect his son and determined to improve conditions for his race....

As director Blomkamp makes clear with a documentary style in which so-called experts—historians, sociologists, law enforcement, etc.—give interviews regarding events in District 9, there are few obvious right answers on how to solve such problems. But there are many wrong ones...

Particularly grotesque is a scene in which Wikus laughs with easy jocularity while ordering the burning of alien eggs. His later disgust at how quickly the impoverished prawns "breed" calls to mind certain ideologies driving the abortion movement....

Inglorious Basterds:

Two things make the utter lunacy of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds worth watching for dedicated adult cinephiles with strong stomachs (and pretty much nobody else). The first is Tarantino's incredible flair for the lengthy verbal jousts that precede the bloodletting, and the second is the movie's Big Idea: the Jews finally take revenge on Hitler...

Inglourious Basterds is a genre riff—an R-rated, curse-filled, ultraviolent spaghetti Western version of The Pianist—that is trying to break the mold. Tarantino is the only filmmaker who could ever make this work, and even he has a hard time striking the right balance: We never know whether to snicker or cringe...

Tarantino puts the onus on us, suggesting that by rooting for the Basterds, we're condoning their actions. Given the movie's rock-'em-sock-'em style, it's a weirdly sobering thought....

And the one we're, by far, the most likely to see-- Cold Souls:

What is the soul, exactly? Is it a force that acts on "a small gland" in the center of the brain, to quote Rene Descartes? Is it a meaningless construct created by ignorant people who fear change, to paraphrase Richard Dawkins?...

Paul Giamatti (beautifully playing an unflattering version of himself) is a deeply unhappy, neurotic actor going through a crisis: He can't seem to play the title role of a deeply unhappy, neurotic aristocrat in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

Rather than scare up a prescription for the anti­depressant of the month, Paul hunts down an organization he's read about in The New Yorker: The Soul Storage Company, a clinic that extracts your immortal soul and stores it, either at its facility or at a warehouse in New Jersey....

And that is the beginning of one of the funniest, driest comedies of the year, and also one of the strangest movies I've ever seen...

Ultimately, Cold Souls is a movie that asks its viewers to examine seriously how they could be better people—and even better, makes the question a funny one.