WHAT I’VE BEEN WATCHING: Gamer, District 9, and The Hurt Locker

Gamer is a terrific piece of trash cinema. Neveldine/Taylor’s brilliantly stupid piss-take on Second Life, gaming, the American penal system, and mass media is, in nerd-soundbite-friendly terms, Sin City-era Frank Miller adapting William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Even as the movie played out a fairly inevitable story, I found myself thoroughly enjoying the choices it made along the way, particularly when it came to the bugfuck performance by Michael C. Hall as the big bad, who’s given some of the funniest material a villain has ever had to play with. It’s high octane, smart enough to get by with everything it does and represents the kinetic, fast-and-dirty possibilities of digital cinema at a much more realizable level than any big-budget blockbusters.

Another modestly budgeted film with a high level of polish, District 9 starts off as a documentary-style science fiction film and ends up feeling like a proof-of-concept for the eventual Robotech live-action adaptation. There’s a few very huge leaps the movie fails to make and they nagged at me throughout the second half. Why did the aliens choose to do nothing with the weapons technology they possessed for twenty years before the events of the film? Is there no United Nations? Why bother with the cinema verité approach of the bookending material if you’re just going to have tightly-edited running and gunning over the middle 75% of the film? I can see why many enjoyed the movie — the acting is fine, the script does some interesting things with some of the same themes that Avatar furiously masturbates over, and the special effects were top-flight — but I was left disappointed by the final product’s faux intelligence and inability to say anything new in either of the formats presented.

While District 9 and Gamer both throw more and more at the viewer to varying levels of success, The Hurt Locker keeps things minimal and manages to redefine the modern war movie. Kathryn Bigelow’s a director I’ve long admired (Near Dark is the only modern vampire movie I take seriously) and the way she approaches the stripped-down screenplay is admirable. She tells the story visually, with long passages of near-silence, clipped dialogue, and Barry Ackroyd’s casually elegant cinematography heightening the tension without ever being cheap. In an era of overblown emotionalism, the movie’s lack of speeches and cheap platitudes is refreshing, making the events of the last act even more stunning.