The District!
The Orpheum was awash in film fest activity well into Thursday night, as a line stretched around the block for the late-night Hungarian animated feature The District! Luckily, the movie was more amusing than the one-liners sent off by people waiting in the cold, but that wasn't hard to do.
The main room at the theater was loosely filled with a mixed crowd that didn't seem like they knew what was in store. Billed as South Park-esque social commentary, the film was overall highly repetitive and sensational, as it followed the seedy lives of Budapest's 8th District pimps and whores and their children, who were trying to play the same games as the adults.
More like South Park on Hungarian crack, the movie made its points about racial tension, sex trafficking, corrupt government, and the world's fascination with oil early on, leaving the greater part of the movie to beat the proverbial drum -- in this case, a drugged-up, over-sexed, eastern-European trance beat.
The sub-titles were hard to read and the characters were too shallow to care about, though.
Nevertheless, the animation was impressive, the pot-shots at George W. Bush surprisingly original, and the Hungarian hip-hop sampled left a desire for more -- more entertaining than standing out in the cold, surely.