According to Colwell

The second pleasant science fiction surprise of the year (after Moon) is District 9, a movie that goes beyond its superficial alien bug hunt appearance to tell a story of discrimination, prejudice, justice and injustice, and the commercialization of the military. Sharlto Copley plays Wikus Van De Merwe in his first acting job. The movie was written and directed by Neill Blomkamp whose previous experience was primarily doing special effects work. Peter Jackson saw something he liked and helped make District 9 a reality. Copley, a friend of Blomkamp’s from school, does an impressively convincing job as a bureaucratic schlub working for a commercial military outfit (think Blackwater) charged with relocating nearly 2 million aliens from one shanty town to a tent city that is a more comfortable distance from Johannesburg South Africa.

As Wikus (pronounced Vikkus) makes his clumsy way through District 9 issuing eviction notices to the “prawns” he becomes infected. His company immediately seizes him as a potential weapons asset. The movie then follows his struggle to reclaim his life while some aliens try to find a way to get their giant floating mother ship functioning again. The aliens are made to be as repugnant as possible. Calling them prawns is an insult to the appearance of shellfish everywhere. They have disgusting eating habits. When they are not scavenging for hunks of meat in garbage piles, they are bartering for their favorite delicacy: cat food. The brilliance of the movie lies in not going for the easy stereotypes. It is easy to root for E.T. against the military. The prawns are less obvious heroes.

Wikus, as an everyman thrust into the middle of the oppression of 2 million aliens, is forced to confront his own prejudices. The moral story is a backdrop to an exciting chase story. The movie has a raw, documentary style. The slums of Johannesburg make District 9 realistic, even though it is overrun with oversized talking insects.

“Dying is easy, comedy is hard” the saying goes. Another bit of conventional wisdom is that comedy is born of misery. That is the case in Funny People for George Simmons, a comedy superstar played by Adam Sandler whose hit movies (Merman, and Re-Do, in which he has the body of an infant but an adult head and mind) call to mind some of Sandler’s lesser movies, not to mention many of those of other alums of Saturday Night Live. Which is to say one wonders why exactly George is such a popular and successful comedian. When he is diagnosed with a fatal blood disease at the beginning of the movie, his comedy routine takes a sharp turn to the macabre. And so Funny People, the third movie directed by Judd Apatow, begins its exploration of the connections between death, suffering, laughter and love. If that doesn’t sound like a recipe for a raucous comedy, it isn’t. Funny People succeeds on the strengths of its personal story, not its jokes or situational humor. While those hit the mark at times, they are not the movie’s backbone.

Apatow gives us a view of funny people that suggests that in their personal lives they are lonely and awkward and not very funny. Their humor comes primarily from mocking their own inadequacies. When George learns his days are numbered, his inadequacies no longer seem so funny to him. His luxurious house is empty, and he has no friends. After a disastrous night at a stand-up club, he hires Ira Wright (Seth Rogan), an aspiring comic whose talents have not yet fully developed, to put it kindly, as a personal assistant and joke writer.

Ira, George tells him, will never be very funny because he comes from the generation of kids whose parents divorced each other, while George came from a generation whose parents stayed together and exacted their misery on their children. As Ira fills the many voids in George’s empty personal life, he grows as a comedian. George, meanwhile, yearns for a life of meaning he never led. This takes him back to his ex-fiancee, Laura (Leslie Mann), now married with children. The movie explores whether George finds himself a lonely, needy, self-centered child because he actively chose the life of the rich celebrity, or if his nature made it impossible for him to make any other choice. Recognizing his mistakes, how easy - or possible - is it for him to correct them? Like the ship of state, the ship of personality and lifestyle is no speedboat and cannot quickly be steered to a new course.

The movie runs a bit long, and that is mostly noticeable when the 500th penis joke rolls around. But on the whole it is successfuly in part because of its length (no pun intended). It is in some ways a movie in two parts - the story of the comedy world, illustrated by denizens of two ends of the spectrum with the successful George and desperate Ira, and on the other hand the story of his attempt at rehabilitation. Apatow wisely doesn’t shortchange either story.

War is unpredictable, and perhaps no more so than on the streets of Baghdad during the Iraq war for the team responsible for defusing and disposing of bombs. The soldiers of Bravo company’s bomb squad face an urban landscape where every bag of trash in the road could conceal a bomb and every bystander could be waiting to detonate it. The movie starts with two soldiers, Sergeant Sanborn and Specialist Eldrige, a month away from the end of their rotation with a new Staff Sergeant, William James, who apparently takes great delight in personally defusing bombs with inadequate precautions.

But part of the company’s problem is that there are no adequate precautions. When their remote controlled robot fails and the bomb requires hands-on attention, it falls to the Staff Sergeant to put on a bulky suit and helmet designed to protect the wearer from shrapnel. The only time we see it put to the test it fails miserably. James (Jeremy Renner) recognizes during one particularly nasty bomb scare that the suit is only slowing him down and making him more miserably hot.

Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is cool, rational, and has a healthy interest in self-preservation. Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is constantly on edge (understandably), showing early signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (except he’s not really post-trauma yet), and also has a healthy interest in self-preservation. The arrival of James, who is insistent on getting up close and personal with bombs (rather than, for example, evacuating the area and exploding the bomb) just weeks before they are about to complete their duty relatively intact, understandably creates some tension. The way the movie, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal (who co-wrote In the Valley of Elah), portrays the interactions between the soldiers in the field and in between sorties has a tremendously realistic feel. To say it is tense is an understatement. The Hurt Locker shows the nearly impossible task given to the U.S. military in Iraq: to fight a war where the enemy is unknown and hiding amongst your allies.