The best part of Cronenberg’s The Fly is the scene where the protagonist bites his fingernail and it squirts and flakes off.  The makers of District 9 have obviously studied the masters, blending as it does the best of the biological nastiness of Cronenberg, the suspense of mindless blockbuster action flicks, the grit of television crime dramas, the ridiculousness of the objective point of view in Attenborough’s Life series, and of course the prerequisite “all men are created equal” moral mantra that is necessary to get a film sold and distributed across the civilized world.

Aliens have arrived on Earth and are living in squalor in refugee camps outside of town.  Derogatorily known as “prawns”, these creatures spend most of their time prowling piles of refuse looking for any remnants of discarded cat food to eat. They wear trashy clothing, are querulous in their disregard for private property, and so ignorant they are easily exploited by Nigerian warlords who deliver them overpriced cat food and prostitutes in exchange for anything they might have of value.

And that’s just the beginning.  This movie has all the things missing from Philip Glass’s ex-wife’s miserable rendition of Bacchae, including a multi-touch alien interface.  Go see it.

Bittersweet endings aren’t in fashion these days.  Obama is going to win.  Israel must change.  GM will be reborn.  The economy is fundamentally sound.  America does not torture.  Two shorts from the 1950’s by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse, listed by Netflix as local favorites in Brooklyn, provide a welcome respite from today’s perennial certainty and optimism.

The Red Balloon and White Mane are dark parables disguised as stories for children.  And the two have some moralistic similarities.  The Red Balloon is the story of love between a young boy and a balloon.  White Mane is the story of love between a young boy and a wild horse.

Disclaimer: What I have to say is, as always, very interesting.  And you may feel compelled to finish reading.  But I will disclose details of each film’s ending.  Such is the bittersweet reality of this post.  Whether you choose to engage is something I cannot control.

The Red Balloon goes like this: a young boy comes across an attractive big red balloon on the way to school one day in Paris.  The red balloon is tied to a lamp post, and the film does not explain whether the balloon has been abandoned or whether the boy simply steals it.  The balloon seems perfectly happy to devote itself to its new owner, following the young boy around like a dependent animal whether or not pulled by its string. The young boy and the balloon play cute games with each other and become inseparable.

When the boy arrives at school, he asks a retarded old man loitering in the boys’ school yard to hold the balloon while he is in class.   All other adults in the film are either irritated or totally impervious to the balloon’s remarkable sentience.  After school, the child and ripe red balloon then go for a walk.

Somewhere along their travels, boy and balloon begin to be hunted by savage kids who inexplicably want to capture boy and balloon and do terrible things to them.  Hunting like a pack, they succeed in capturing the balloon, begin molesting it, but the boy is able with luck to set it free.  Relentless in their pursuit, the pack of kids again capture both boy and balloon, and succeed in molesting the boy and puncturing the balloon.  We watch as the balloon, with resignation to its fate, slowly deflates and falls cold and shriveled silently to the ground.

The boy, beaten and broken, is stricken with despair for a half-second, until a swarm of balloons arrives and whisks him up and away into the air.  He floats above the city, ecstatic and full of life, having apparently forgotten his recently deceased best friend rotting in an abandoned lot down below.  The End.

Similarly, White Mane begins with a beautiful wild horse hunted by swarthy French gauchos.  They want to capture it and do who knows what to it, but the horse is wily and eludes its predators.  And while the young boy’s adoration of the horse seems at first to be innocent, he soon lures the horse towards him and savagely lunges at it with a lasso, exposing his true intentions.  The horse drags the boy around like a young Indiana Jones for a while until they both tire.  When the horse finally glances demurely over its shoulder and the two exchange exhausted looks into each other’s eyes, they fall in love.

The boy ties his beloved horse up in his backyard, along with his existing animal collection: a domesticated flamingo and harassed turtle.   Boy and horse have but a brief moment of domestic bliss before the horse becomes impatient and dissatisfied.  It hears its equine friends neighing out in the field, having just been captured by the gauchos.  The narrator informs us that the restless horse would rather return to its friends than continue living an idle domestic life with the boy. So the horse breaks free, runs to its friends, and is captured by the gauchos.

Once penned in by the gauchos, the horse changes its mind and breaks free again.  The gauchos, relentless in their pursuit, like the children in The Red Balloon, encircle the horse and light fire to the grass surrounding it in order to smoke it out.  The boy, obsessed by the horse despite his rejection, rushes to the horse’s defense and leads it through the fire towards a river.  Boy and horse begin swimming together out into the river.

The gauchos beg the boy to return to land.  They insist that he can keep the horse rather than kill himself rushing out into the river’s deadly currents.  But boy and horse obstinately continue.  The narrator informs us ominously that horse and boy reach a place where horses and men live together in peace.  The End.

The moral of these movies seems as clear as a sunny day. Perfect for the next crop of children who suffer our generation’s groundless optimism.  Happiness is fleeting.  The world is an awful place.  Love is easily spurned in favor of the next best thing.  People are savages.  True happiness is found only through death.

The filmmaker, who died prematurely in a helicopter crash while filming a movie aptly entitled The Lovers’ Wind, is also the inventor of the board game Risk.

Siobahn is a white blonde cute girl from Wales living in Brooklyn. She wanders into the dirty Dominican restaurant one day to order chicken stew from the buxom waitress and read the “New York Times”. The chicken arrives, and as the waft of odor arrives at her nose, she goes through a list of all spices and ingredients used to make the dish, exhibiting an exquisitely fine-tuned olfactory apparatus.

The paper is the usual crap, so she starts doodling on it. As she doodles, we notice that she is doodling over a picture of a cow. This brings on a flashback of her early childhood in her rural hometown in Wales, where a competition is taking place and her mother is being awarded a second place red ribbon for the pig spleen eating contest.

While being awarded the prize, the mother begins to vomit and dies in a pool of her own semi-digested entrails. Siobahn, watching in amazement as her mother collapses, spies Bonnie, the family prize-winning cow, who is being awarded the first place blue ribbon for most-recognizable-scent competition. Immediately as Bonnie moos in the background, there is a transfer of maternal affection away from the mother towards to cow. Bonnie becomes her mother in that instant.

Back to the present in Brooklyn, Siobahn snaps out of the past and realizes that the picture she is doodling over is that of her mother/cow Bonnie (who is still wearing the blue ribbon, of course). She goes on to read the article which is about the foot-and-mouth epidemic in Britain. She must save Bonnie from destruction.

She immediately departs for her hometown in Wales, where she finds that the bank has auctioned off the family farm. She interrogates the new owners, an old simple farmer couple, only to find that they have volunteered to have their livestock slaughtered, and have handed over Bonnie, along with others, to the local government. This volunteering of cattle is steeped in plot to get their retarded grandson, Noah, out of the foster home in which he is held. Noah’s father was killed in the Gulf War by friendly fire, and his mother, a crack-whore junkie, is in no shape to take care of him, but refuses to give custody to the grandparents.

The local mayor wants to buy a yaght for his bitchy American mistress Gladia, but needs the funds. Luckily, the foot-and-mouth epidemic has created opportunity to siphon off federal government funds in recompense for slaughtered livestock. The mayor is thus on a campaign to increase the number of slaughtered animals in his town, and is eager for local farmers to volunteer their cattle. So a deal is struck between the grandparents of retarded Noah and the mayor to volunteer cattle in exchange for legal manouvering to transfer custody of retarded Noah to the grandparents.

Bonnie has therefore been transported to a federal government detention camp outside of town for cattle marked for slaughter. Siobahn, hot on the trail of Bonnie’s most-recognizable-scent, wanders through smokey fields of cattle, soldiers, and smoldering slaughtered animals. With a zoo of the dead and dying all around her, and soldiers organizing the animals into camps and transport lines in all directions towards countless cow concentration camps, Siobahn forges a path towards Bonnie .

Meanwhile, somewhere on the edge of a field, retarded Noah, at this time is escaping the foster home and pushes off into the ocean on a homemade raft.

Surrounded by gas-masked farmers and government agents with brain-guns and funeral pyres adjacent to mass grave ditches, Siobahn finds Bonnie and they have a moo together for a split second before a soldier brain-guns Bonnie between the eyes, and she is hauled via crane to the funeral pyre among the scorched remains of 970,000 other cattle.

1. Establish that Bielski brothers are macho, vodka drinking Jews with a mild case of sibling rivalry
2. Add a scene to show that they were unwillingly thrown in the position of leaders
3. Frame shots to include at least one intellectual Jew in the background in various stages of approval/disapproval whenever violence occurs
4. Alternate between helpless big-nosed gaunt older Jewish women, and sexy industrious big-eyed round-faced young Jewesses
5. Include one nasty uppity Jew to illustrate why dissent could not be tolerated given the tenuous circumstances of survival
6. God parted the Red Sea for Desert Jew, but Forest Jew gets no help
7. Deceitful drunkard Russian use honest hardworking Jew fight big bad German
8. Key to success: Forest Jew stick together and work hard
9. No waiting for miracles