The District!
Simple, we just build a time machine
Posted by: ThirteenDamnDollars, September 15, 2005 12:58 AM
Aron Gauder
Tuesday September 13, 11:59PM
Ryerson
The best thing I can say about The District! is that it looks really neat. Photographs and animations are combined and lain over 3-D models for a really spectacular visual effect. This movie was sold as a Hungarian South-Park, but visually, it's in a class by itself.
But for me, that's about it. I think this was meant to be a sort of social satire, skewering the multicultural ghetos and world politics. But the jokes were either tame, lame or just fell flat. I chuckled a few times, but that's not enough to save the movie.
It may be the case that the movie is saved by the Hungarian hip-hop musical numbers, but the subtitlers made the choice to try and make the translation rhyme and thus probably lost much of the meaning and point of the lyrics.
R-rated cartoons are taking over the world
Posted by: Task, September 14, 2005 12:29 PM
Tuesday, September 13 11:59 PM RYERSON
The biggest problem with animated features might be the great difficulty of creating a realistic enough face to convey the incredible range of human emotion that can be read from it. This problem has been completely overcome in this feature by filming actual faces and pasting them onto animated bodies. It works well. So it looks good, and I thought the musical scenes were great, that leaves us with just one question: Is the story any good?
Well, it's basically a "rival street gangs" movie, featuring LOTS of "money, drugs, and whores". The fact that it's animated makes if real easy to not take it very seriously, and serious enjoyment is quite possible. So it all works real well in my opinion. You know, if you're in for this kind of thing. 8 )
If you want to know a bit more about the plot...
The plot is kind of Romeo & Juliet, but with a focus on making hella cash. These street kids are still in school, but the main focus of their lives is representing the small criminal organizations run by their fathers. So the first scene is a fight scene that ends up just being the two of them fronting to each other in rap until one of them has to go home. It's well done, so it doesn't seem at all stupid at the time, even though that's how it sounds it should be.
Realizing that he's going to need money to get the girl (this wisdom is imparted to him via his grandfather), he asks "the smart kid" what the best way to make money is. To which the quick answer is: Oil is the most valuable mineral resource on the planet. So let's get some oil. It would be convenient if it was right under our feet. So the smart kid builds a time machine that night (looks like a speak & spell with a phone and a fork and an antenna stuck on) and the next day they're time travelling back to the distant past when their ancestors hunted the wooly mammoth. Yes, they've got the same faces as their parents, just on different bodies.
The story continues to get incrementally more ridiculous, believe it or not. Until you reach the sitcom-like ending. Apparently, there's going to be a sequel.