Managed to catch not one but two movies in the theater this weekend: District 9 last Thursday and then Inglourious Basterds yesterday.  Both are actually quite good and worth seeing though each has issues.

District 9 was the more interesting of the two — drawing an obvious but not overbearing correlation to apartheid and with more than a few curious plot inconsistencies, it still managed to come across as a great action & special effects movie with a smart backstory.  It’s told in a newsroom/documentary-style that I thought worked pretty well even if the shaky-cam was probably a bit overdone.  It also wasn’t trying to tell the “whole” story and that explains some (but not all) of the aforementioned plot-holes.  That said, if you are looking for a movie that tells the whole story from start to finish, you are not going to appreciate the “incompleteness” of District 9.

Inglourious Basterds has Tarantino at his best… and his worst.  If you appreciate Buschemi ranting about tipping or Jackson preaching, you should definitely see Inglourious Basterds.  The dairy farmhouse and tavern basement scenes are worth the price of admission — some of the most entertaining scenes I’ve ever seen.  The rest of the movie is quite good as well though Tarantino doesn’t know how to pull on the brakes for some of the more sadistic violence scenes.  There are 2 or 3 parts in the movie that are essentially completely unnecessary and break the audience out of the movie’s spell as they look away in disgust.  A better filmmaker would probably have left un-shown the violence and just left it to the audiences imagination.  The last scene in particular could have been one of the greatest final scenes ever but instead, most people walked out of the theater disgusted.  A few minutes later, everyone will recall how good the movie was but why he took that approach, I don’t know.  Lastly, if Christopher Waltz doesn’t get a nomination for his role in the movie, it’s a travesty — his character is the one you want to hate the most but will be talking about long after the movie ends.

If I could only see one of the two movies, it would be District 9.  Basterds was, at its core, just another WW2 movie (granted one with extreme historic license) while District 9 actually broke fairly unknown ground with its story.  That said, I would highly recommend them both.