Movie Monday 5/27

Happy Memorial Day to everyone in the U.S.! I've been thinking a lot today about my grandfather, my uncle, and my great-uncles, who all served in the military at various times and are no longer with us. They are all missed.

We had a very low-key, relaxing holiday weekend. Just what we needed! Our younger son traveled to Connecticut to help his grandparents get their sailboat ready for the season, and our older son came home from college last week, so it was odd having the older one here but not the younger one. Our  college son, Jamie, was off with friends for much of the weekend (he is still feeling great!), but he also spent some down time watching movies with us and catching up on TV shows:

Friday night, while my husband was out golfing, Jamie and I ordered pizza and found an interesting-sounding movie available for free on amazon, Surveillance. We were both a little disappointed in it, but it was OK. It's about two FBI agents who come to a small town to help the local police track down some brutal serial killers. There were three survivors from the killers' latest massacre: a little girl, a woman who's a drug addict, and a police officer. The movie follows each of their interviews, but their stories just don't add up. There are some surprises here (though Jamie said he figured it out half-way through!), and it's a unique story. It's just not an excellent movie - decent but not excellent.

Saturday night, we watched a much better movie, District 9, a unique sci fi story. A giant alien spaceship came to Earth 20 years earlier, hovering over Johannesburg, South Africa. Humans broke into the spaceship, captured all the aliens (who look kind of like giant insects and are nicknamed Prawns by the locals), and segregated them into one area of the city, known as District 9. The area soon became a slum, but violence and problems between the local humans and the Prawns have accelerated. When the movie opens, the humans have decided to relocate the aliens into a desolate area outside of the city, and members of a huge corporation that has been put in charge of the aliens are going into District 9 to evict all the Prawns. This was a fantastic movie, far better than I expected. I thought it would be all action and violence - and there is certainly some of that - but the heart of the story is the humans' mistreatment of the alien species and what happens to one particular alien and one particular human. All three of us loved it - interestingly, you find yourself rooting for the aliens!

We also tried a new TV show this weekend, Defiance. It's another sci fi story, this one set 30 years into the future after aliens have invaded earth, in a town called Defiance where humans and various alien species live side by side peacefully. We've watched the first two episodes and are hooked already!

Have you seen any good movies or TV shows lately?