Posts by BenWilson
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By the way, the battlesuit was a cool idea I could just about buy, but IMO the other guns were ridiculous – if your idea is alien handweapons with a serious punch, why not make them tiny and menacing, rather than colourful BFGs at every turn?
Are you serious? I'd pick a BFG over some wimpy little Star Trek phazer any time. When you kill someone in an action flick, you don't want them to just lie down and die in their own time, you want them to splatter all over their buddies, and the gun to hum down like a gigantic dynamo coming to rest.
My take was that alien guns weren't meant for day to day use, menacing muggers etc, but for 'when the shit hits the fan'. Which it didn't, ironically, until a human manages to work out how to use one.
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Had the same bind with the Matrix – couldn’t wait to get the whole story, got it in spades, immediately wished the sequels had never happened…
I had the same thought - a friend told me a bunch of reviewers had said District 9 was the 'best thing since the Matrix', to which I instantly shot back 'which one?'.
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Then you have White's tendency to use whatever film is under discussion as the foundation for some socio-political rant that bears no relation to the text, or is (more often) pretentiously incoherent.
Quite. Some reviewers seem to be unable to realize that just because there is a hint of allegory in a work, that it is to be judged entirely on its factual connection to whatever it is allegorizing. In case the dipshit didn't notice, it's a Sci Fi film about aliens , not a blaxploitation flick about Apartheid South Africa. Of course throughout the entire film, you're wondering exactly when the obvious technological advancement of the aliens is going to start showing up. Not something that ever really applied to oppressed Bantustans.
It's more of a comment on the modern South Africa, than the 20th Century, the crazy clash between modern bureaucracy and OIA reality. I'm less reminded of Apartheid than I am of "The Gods Must be Crazy", particularly the courtroom scene where the little Bushman is being prosecuted for killing a goat, and the only guy who can actually speak Bushman is trying to explain the concept of "How do you plead?".
I'm sure there are biblical imaginings going on in the actual SciFi side of things, some kind of Exodus references, but again, allegory falls down, because Exodus again dealt with the movement of oppressed peoples with no power, not incomprehensible aliens. How different these aliens are to human beings - when a boatload of technologically advanced human beings ever lands somewhere they tend to blast the locals to oblivion, not settle in some kind of shanty town. But the inscrutability of these aliens is one of the best parts of the film.
The ending has some typical Rambo style silliness, with one man and one alien against the whole army really being used to showcase exactly what it is that is silly about treating these aliens like they are human, when all they have to do is take up their awesomely powerful arsenal, and they'd be pretty hard to stop. The real question isn't "how should humans treat the aliens?" but "Why haven't the aliens gone ape yet?". Perhaps they have fundamentally misconceived humans, and see us only as dangerous animals, rather like a pack of dogs. Individually not that fearsome, as a group something to be generally avoided, as a species not really a threat, useful at times. Then again, perhaps from their point of view this is not a misconception.
As for the racism of the Nigerian depictions, I imagine it's not so much the idea that they're gangsters that's offensive, as the idea that they are such nasty vicious primitive gangsters, obsessed with witchcrafty ideas like eating the aliens to get their power, and stockpiling weapons that they can't use.
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There's the problem with a blasé attitude to freedom of expression: if it is a weak right, as you still seem to be maintaining, why would you need more than a weak justification to override it?
You don't. That's why it gets overridden all the time. The 'freedom to express anything you like' is akin to the 'freedom to do anything you like'. Which is one of our much cherished freedoms, caveated only by the entire volume of laws our nation has saying just exactly what it is you are not allowed to do. But, if it's not in there, then you're allowed. Unless we change our minds, as we do every single day.
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Mind you 58% of Herald Digipoll respondents think Laws is "The voice of reason".
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It also show that they, and local Police, are either dangerously naive or wilfully disingenuous if they believe this by-law is going to even begin to "stop gang intimidation".
On the flipside, they'll find out soon enough, so at least the debate can end and the question of the mayor being a dick can be settled.
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I don't wonder very much about Laws. I wonder about why people listen to him. I guess the power of trolling goes well beyond the web.
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Wow. Will whaleoil be next?
If only, when he arrives, we could get some Days of Our Lives villain music to automatically play. When will he stage his own death for publicity?
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I don't think we're disagreeing much now Steve. If we can agree that the right to freedom of speech is not paramount, much less absolute, then all we're discussing is the extent to which a council could breach that right wrt items of clothing in their patch. I think it's a weak expression of a weak right being overridden by a weak justification that probably will not work. To that extent I think it shouldn't be done, but I'm not heartbroken. The only thing that comes through strongly in this affair is that Whanganui doesn't know how to solve it's gang problem, and it has a dick for a mayor.
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As far as I'm aware, the rule against touching the kids has been around for a long time. It's one of those ones specifically designed to prevent abuse and is seldom used, on grounds to sheer impracticality. But in cases of abuse it could be used. Although why you'd bother when you could actually bust them for abuse, I don't know.
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