The John Batchelor Show

Brief

Americans as Aliens

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There looks to be a plush selection of Hollywood-built dystopian romances this summer and fall, and this strangeness, "Alive in Joburg," looks to be a gem despite the fact that it was made in 2005 as a short film by the director of the new "District 9," Neil Blomkamp, and is not to be released. I like everything about the notion of alien indigents disrupting the routines of deprivation in Africa and Asia. Saturday 8 and Sunday will be speaking to two authors, Helene Cooper and Kwei Quartey, who have books about Liberia and Ghana, respectively.    Also hope to speak more than once with Ann Marlowe in Kabul waiting the Afghanistan re-election of the Karzai kleptocrats.  Africa and Asia are familiar other planets, where poverty and the rudiments of fantastic wealth are all mixed in a fantastic landscape with compelling fundamental homo sapiens.  "District 9" is a massively well-financed version of "Alive."  The core vision is intact, who is an alien, and who says so?  The other possibility is that the ransacked and needy spacecrafts and the junkyard aliens are all from America.

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