Filmmaker Brian Lonan has a lot to say about Science Fiction movies, which is a good thing because his new film, Attackazoids, Deploy!!, is full of killer robots in the future. He joins the candler blog this week for a chat about all things movies. On Satruday, Deploy! will be making its world première at the Coney Island Film Festival and he has a booked docket from there on out. It will be a busy few months for Mr. Lonano, so it’s a good thing we nabbed him when we could.
Tune in and you will also a conversation about the persistence of aging filmmakers, a gaff involving two Reiners, Werner Herzog’s film school, and where to find the best pizza in New York City. This week’s candlercast is one not to be missed. Stream, download, or subscribe below.
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Though Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 evokes many of the classical elements of science fiction films, the movie that kept coming back to me as I sat through the disturbingly realistic pic was Melvin Van Peebles’ Watermelon Man. That 1970 film, which depicts a white racist waking up one day as a black man, hides a poignant and timely message beneath the glimmering façade of a Hollywood comedy. In much the same way, Mr. Blomkamp relies on familiar sci-fi conventions to get to his many-layered message: if we are not alone in the universe, do we deserve to know who shares it with us?
In an age when digital wizardry has opened up the floodgates to science-fiction pics of all shapes and sizes, the genre seems to have become reliant on the overall wow-factor, each film attempting to out-do the other in terms of creature screentime. I remember a time when films would advertise how many minutes more of digital special effects they had than Jurassic Park. (Brad Silberling’s 1995 Casper, as in the friendly ghost, was particularly fond of this statistic.) The main casualty of this shift has been the presence of a theme and a message. Enter District 9.
Multi-National United (MNU) is a ubiquitous corporation charged with managing the transfer of an alien race known as “prawns” from the makeshift “district 9″ to the better controlled area known as “district 10″. Having landed for no known reason two decades ago over Johannesburg, the prawns have become one of the most marginalized group of refugees on the planet. MNU appears to be taking on the impossible by dealing with the safe passage of the prawns, but as you may have guessed, their intentions aren’t quite so pure. They are aliens and they have huge freaking weapons which are linked to their DNA, only a prawn can fire them. For twenty years, MNU has been trying to get a human to fire one of these things. Their opportunity comes when Wikus Van De Merwe, a high-level grunt at MNU, accidentally sprays space-goop in his face and grows a prawn arm. Read on…
