A Tale of Two Parables

District 9 is in part a parable about discrimination, prejudice, humanity's inhumanity, etc.; True Blood is, well, for the sake of comparison, I am obliged to concede that somewhere in the dark, jangling junkyard of Alan Ball's post-syphilitic reptile brain is the shadow of the echo of the fog of the haze of the the notion that his pan-seared abortion of a television program is sorta-kinda-like about discrimination against The Gays, maybe. So they are similar, except that District 9 is a legitimately good movie, a fine entertainment, at turns funny and gross, occasionally almost moving, whereas True Blood is The Worst, having this past Sunday jumped into the water with a motorcycle, hunted down a shark, tied the motorcycle to the shark, ridden the shark, goaded the shark nearly to madness, and forced the shark to jump over another shark that was, in turn, jumping over a third shark.

The one prominent critique of District 9 is that it begins in a documentary style but becomes a standard chase flick. This is partly, but only partly true. It's a very canny movie, full of documentary bits, but also full of security cams, corporate video, staged newscasts, and, yes, standard 3rd-person semi-omnipotent movie cameras, but at no point is it ever wholly one or the other, not even when it sheds most of the trappings of the faux documentary in order to stage scenes of elaborate urban combat that, while still inferior to those in Cuaron's Children of Men, are nevertheless a thousand times superior to the canned, quick-cut battles of every other mainstream movie. That they manage to be so with the addition of alien creatures and scifi rayguns is nigh unto miraculous. District 9 is by no means a perfect movie; it has several cringe-inducing moments of High Movie Science, particularly one where A Scientist explains that our protagonist's (I won't say hero, 'cause what's a here?) "DNA is in perfect balance," half-human, half-alien. Yuh-huh. Step slowly away from the genome, son, and no one is gonna get hurt here.

The movie effectively mines our fear of the other, and though its metaphor is obvious, it is not heavy-handed. Its villains are handled clumsily in places, but its fictional downtrodden, ghettoized aliens are shown with a much more complex and sophisticated treatment than I expected. Perhaps it is because Neill Blomkamp, the director, grew up in apartheid South Africa. He shows his "prawns" with a good mixture of pathos and degradation--there is nobility, but there is also venality. The real literatures of apartheid, Jim Crow, interment, and the ghetto reveal much the same.

It bears repeating. This is a movie about bug-shaped aliens, a summer scifi flick, and yet unequivocally the finest, smartest, best wide-release film of the year.

Meanwhile, in the swamps of Looooooooweeeezeeeaaaaaanaaaaaw, Anna Paquin et alia have no idea. I find myself unable to articulate the preening awfulness of this show, which treats its own premises with all the filial love and respect of the Menendez brothers. Try to imagine, if you will, that The Sopranos featured James Gandolfini one day as a mob boss, the next as an astronaut, the third as a beagle, and then in the season finale it was revealed that Edie Falco was really a mermaid and Jamie-Lynn Sigler has been working for al-Qaeda all along. It's worth recalling that, however clumsy, True Blood did commence with a recognizable setup. Vampires are real, and now that they no longer have to kill people to survive, they are coming out into the open. How will society react? And from time to time, the show still recalls this fundamental fact of its fictional universe. Then a fly buzzes, a car honks in the distance . . . ooo, pretty, shiny.