Everything old is new again, so they say. And it's certainly true of movies.
Take last week's unexpected box-office hit, the relatively low-budget, no-star sci-fi thriller "District 9."
Something I've read in several reviews is how "original" the film is. Really?
The plot is right out of "Alien Nation," "V" and "The Fly" (both versions). Much of the set design is "The Road Warrior." The aliens are computer-graphic upgrades of cheesy 1950s monsters by way of "Starship Troopers." There's a robot/weapon toward the end that is sort of an upgraded Ed 209 from "RoboCop." And having some of the narrative unfold through TV news reports owes something to both "RoboCop" and "Starship Troopers."
Is "District 9" eye-catching? Yes. Adrenalin-pumping? Yes. With a message related to South Africa's former apartheid system? Yes. Original? No.
Sometimes I feel that many of today's movie critics have no sense of film history, and that some haven't gone back to watch anything pre-Judd Apatow. Hey, with modern Internet and DVD capability there's really no excuse for any "critic" to be in the dark, so to speak, regarding films of the past.
But don't take any of this as denigrating "District 9." Lots of movies echo motion pictures of the past. In fact, most do. And there's nothing wrong with that if they're done well. And "District 9" is done very well (although the gross-out factor is amped up a bit too high for my taste).
And when modern moviemakers do "borrow" from other movies, there's also nothing wrong with critics calling them on it. This is especially true with movie cliches, things that turn up in movie after movie as if the filmmakers are following a rulebook.
Even when a movie attempts to be inventive by sidestepping cliches of the past, it often falls into lockstep with more recent cliches. How else do you explain so many current movies embracing shaky-cam? Including "District 9."
I believe shaky-cam has now officially become more common than shooting with a stable camera. Tripod manufacturers might as well hang it up. They're as endangered a species as journalists.
The shaky camera technique became fashionable in the late 1990s, thanks to "The Blair Witch Project." Not that "Blair Witch" was the first to employ the device; it was simply the first to take shaky-cam to the masses. And that film's enormous, unexpected box-office success prompted other moviemakers to copy the style ad nauseum.
Of course, what these other filmmakers seem to forget is that "Blair Witch" used it as a legitimate point of view — the entire movie took place as a story unfolding on footage that had been recorded by the characters with a handheld camera.
But too many movies now use shaky-cam without any basis in logic.
"District 9" begins by establishing a specific point of view. What we see is from a camera that is filming a documentary. But jump cuts reveal that this is edited tape, which means we're not in real time, it's not a camera crew in action.
Then the viewpoint shifts to a TV news report or what has been recorded by security cameras in various locations, which could have been edited into the documentary.
But later, we start to see things that are outside the realm of these "real-life" cameras, and yet the storytelling point of view is no less shaky.
In defending shaky-cam, a lot of filmmakers use one word more than any other — they say it's more "realistic." Apparently, they believe it gives a movie a sense of realism to have the camera shaking, bouncing and generally making the surroundings indecipherable.
Yeah, right. When's the last time you drove — or walked or ran — down a street and everything around you was so blurry that you couldn't tell where you were or what was happening? And were you pulled over for a sobriety test?
When shaky-cam is used in scenes such as these, it gives the impression that the character's head is jerking around so much it could be in danger of flying off. In "reality," it would mean that vertigo is kicking in, soon to be followed by nausea and a trip to the doctor.
But it makes even less sense when the camera pulls back to show the driver — or walker or runner — and the image remains just as bouncy and blurry. Apparently, observing movement also makes your vision shake uncontrollably.
I've decided that "shaky-cam" is too gentle a term for this ridiculous and annoying technique.
How about "loopy-cam"? Or "chaos-cam"? Or "wacky-cam"? Or "drunken-cam"?
Or as a friend suggested, "Bobble-Head-cam"?
Come to think of it, before "The Blair Witch Project" there was David Letterman's "monkey-cam," with a camera strapped to the back of a monkey that was then let loose to run around the studio.
So that's how they make these movies!
e-mail: hicks@desnews.com