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Awesomeness Featured Movies Video Clips Weirdness

Neill Blomkamp Mystery Teaser

Awesome District 9 director Neill Blomkamp seems to have secreted a mysterious trailer into the latest iPad issue of Wired Magazine. We may not have an iPad but thankfully we have the Internet, and while the the teaser is not so secret anymore, the happenings in the clip are certainly inexplicable to us. In the 1-minute teaser, shaky handicam footage shows two lads coming upon a hideous dead alien creature that seems to have been discarded along the side of a dirt road. The thing has a stamp on it perhaps like a grading system one would use for edible meat. Check out the creepy teaser below.

Could this be the teaser to his latest film? We fokken hope so.

[via 10and5]

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Entertainment Friday Smackdown Movies

Lucy Furr’s Friday Smackdown

Hello Dear Reader! Are we all happy little campers because it’s Friday at last? I know I am. It’s only been a three day week for me, but somehow the shorter weeks are even worse than the normal ones. Guess it’s because all the sh*t is condensed. Anyway I’m a bit hung over and slightly on edge (don’t ask, it’s a woman thing) so I thought this week’s Smackdown might as well be contentious.

I’ve decided that a whole District 9 versus Avatar thing is in order.

So here goes nothing or everything or something…

This movie SUCKS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1_JBMrrYw8

This movie ROCKS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjihaK7HfGs

I know I’m not going to get away with just saying that Avatar sucks with you lot, so I’ll explain myself a little. I’ll admit that the CGI and 3Dness of Avatar was awesome, and for the first 40 minutes of the movie I was like a hillbilly at a gun show – all excited and drooling into my popcorn. However my powers of higher reasoning kicked in pretty soon and I realised that the very beautiful pictures didn’t make up for the ailing story line. It has been put much more succinctly by others before me, but Avatar is just Pocahontas in space. Big bad colonisers invade and destroy, the forbidden love that overcomes all, the resolution that allows for the natives to live on peacefully in the end. I also don’t really buy Cameron’s whole “we’re doing it to save the planet” thing – I wonder how big Avatar’s carbon foot print is? How many air miles the cast travelled to promote the film? What the cost is to the environment of producing and shipping millions of DVDs and Blu-Rays? Wouldn’t it have been a more powerful message if Cameron had spent that half billion dollars making a movie that really was all about saving our Earth, not some imaginary planet that exists in the future? I know someone is going to smack me down with the whole art for art’s sake argument in relation to Avatar, and it may be true in other forms, but I’ve always felt that cinema owes us more than just pretty pictures.

District 9 may not have matched Avatar’s CGI awesomeness, but then it only had a fraction of the budget. The beauty of D9 was all in the story, the story and the fact that it was set in South Africa! Yay hooray for SA! The gritty oily depressing plight of a race of prawns stranded indefinitely in grim and dusty Johannesburg meant the story lead your emotions on an insane roller coaster ride the entire length of the film. The character development was excellent and Wikus will always be one of my favourite movie heros. And then there’s the sub-text, D9 can be viewed on many levels ranging from straight up alien skop skiet en donner to the underlying filth of apartheid and xenophobia depending on how you’re feeling.

Well that’s my opinion anyway. What do you think?

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Link Loving

Link Loving – August 31, 2009

After a hectically busy day, the night shows no signs of letting up. Whilst I try to gather the remains of my sanity, here are some after-dinner links.

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Awesomeness Cautionary Tales Featured Movies

Aliens Among Us: District 9 Soars to Box Office Glory!

An aliens-among-us story by a first time director has topped the American box office, raking in US$37 million this past weekend!

Helmed by 29-year-old South African born director, Niell Blomkamp, District 9 has no big name stars – in fact, the lead actor (Sharlto Copley) had never acted in a movie before – but that didn’t prevent the film from outgrossing G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra by a whopping USD 14.5 million! District 9 is no slouch in the ratings either, scoring a solid 88% at Rotten Tomatoes.

We South Africans have to wait a bit longer to watch Wikus Van De Merwe and “prawn” friend Christopher Johnson taking the fight to the seedy MNU corporation. District 9 releases officially in local theatres on August 28th, but word is that Joburg will see a premiere screening this Wednesday, August 19th, at the Zone in Rosebank – full details are available at SterKinekor. Canal Walk in Cape Town might be hosting a premiere too, but no details have surfaced as yet. We’ll keep you posted though.

[ Sources: 1 | 2 | 3 ]

BONUS: Vanity Fair had a chat with Sharlto Copley about working on District 9. Read the Q&A HERE.

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Movies Video Clips

District 9: Extended Featurette

In case you missed our last post on District 9, here’s an extended featurette where the producer, director, and actors discuss the upcoming sci-fi flick.

District 9 will be invading South African shores on Friday, August 28th according to SterKinekor.

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Cautionary Tales Movies Video Clips

District 9: For Humans Only

I was speaking to a bunch of friends last night and none of them had heard of District 9. That was not the answer I was looking for, considering I didn’t know what the frack it was either. Until now.

Produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 is the directorial debut of Jackson’s protege and South African born Neill Blomkamp. In this mysterious sci-fi flick, it seems that Johannesburg, South Africa has become a haven for refugees, both human and extraterrestrial.

Shot in a faux-documentary style, District 9 is slated for release August 14th, 2009. Check out the uncensored trailer below or watch it in HD at Apple.com.

From the teaser, I assume that the big-ass alien ship has run out of petrol and can’t leave the earth, so it begs the question – why would the visitors from outer space be forced to live in a shantytown when they could stay aboard their ship? There must be more to this and I’m very interested to find out.

The official website d-9.com with its media-rich interface allows you to either enter the human side or non-human side and provides a lot of information, most of which I don’t understand or know what to do with. I chose the non-human side and entered an obviously false alien ID. Alarm bells started ringing, things were scanned, I was told my connection was being monitored, and got redirected to some company called Multi-National United. The plot thickens…

[via Digital Citizen]