THE MOVIE:

Watching a film like The District, I can truly see why sometimes other nations talk about the influx of American culture on the rest of the world as a negative. If my country is responsible in any way for this piece of trash, I am truly sorry. From where I'm sitting, it appears that the Hungarian animators who put the movie together mistook our MTV junk culture as treasure.

The District based on a popular European television skit that ran as part of a show on Hungarian TV. The lazy comparison that the film often gets (including on the DVD cover) is to South Park. In the sense that both are created digitally by manipulating cut-out-style drawings, that comparison is correct; in terms of humor, it couldn't be further from the truth. Where South Park's rude jokes are subversive and its satire smarter than its blunt delivery would initially suggest, The District is neither funny nor intelligent. It lacks any kind of moral compass to give it any weight as a critique of modern culture or the current political climate. There is no redeeming conclusion or scintillating punchline to excuse away its sexism, homophobia, or racism. It's merely dreck.

Set in Budapest, this cartoon features a bunch of street kids who are looking for a way to make money so that their parents can't tell them what to do. More specifically, Richie, a young gypsy, wants to have enough cash to smooth things over between his family and their Urkainian rivals so that he can date Julia. This is a very broad nod to Romeo & Juliet, a "poncy play" that the kids are having to read in school. Instead of aristocratic families at war, however, these children are the descendents of pimps and hustlers. Like the hip-hop that influenced The District, the filmmakers sample Shakespeare just enough to give them a hook, reducing the original source to a mere footnote.

I enjoy hip-hop, don't get me wrong, but just like anything, there is a good side to the music and its culture and a bad side. The folks who made The District have only seen the party videos and gotten the exaggerated version of inner-city life. It's Snoop Dogg hosting Girls Gone Wild and the "pimps up, ho's down" doctrine without any of the darker cautionary tales. The kids wear baggy clothes, and Richie and his pals perform bad rap songs (the tunes make the comedy look positively sophisticated by comparison). Cops are fools, women are sex objects who only want money and are only good for earning it, and the multicultural cast only exists to perpetuate stereotypes--the Chinese kid loves Bruce Lee and mysticism, the Arab kid is the one you send to get a bomb (Osama Bin Laden is living in his basement). It's the kind of broad-based attempt at comedy that could have been made anywhere, posted on the internet, and giggled over by frat boys between beer bongs. If the world is going to become so homogenized, why can't we get together on the good stuff?

Then again, discussing The District in these terms is probably giving it too much credit for having any logic behind it whatsoever. Forgetting that this movie wants to be a satire and looking at it as just dumb comedy, the bottom line is that it's simply not funny. The main plot involves the gang traveling back in time, burying a herd of wooly mammoths under what will ultimately become Budapest's red light district, and then striking it rich in the 21st century when those prehistoric beasts have turned into fossil fuel, propelling the teens onto the world stage, garnering the attention of Bush, Blair, Sharon, Chirac, and Putin. You know, it certainly sounds like South Park, but where are Trey Parker and Matt Stone when you need them?

The District's woes are only compounded by its annoying animation style. Though it starts off looking kind of cool, the figures are stiff and awkward, and since the faces are all composites and manipulations of actual photos, the look of the characters is only rivaled in its limitations by the writing. The default expression of all of the characters is one of smug defiance, as if they are challenging the audience not to think they are the coolest thing in the world. Well, guess what? I take that challenge, and it's not so hard to win.

In any other case, I'd chalk my failure to laugh at The District up to humor not always being able to cross oceans. Different parts of the world laugh at different things. The downfall here is that in this case, I feel like this lame humor already traveled across the oceans once, going from the U.S. to Hungary, and then Hungary sent it back here. Like a game of Broken Telephone, it's losing meaning with every new whisper.

THE DVD

Video:
As the cliché goes, if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. Well, here is my one nice thing: the picture quality of The District is fantastic. The colors are really strong, and the detail of the backgrounds, which are often quite deep and photorealistic, comes through in spades in the 16:9 anamorphic transfer.

Sound:
The Dolby sound mix comes in both 5.1 and a more standard stereo option. The quality of the audio is good, creating a well-rounded atmosphere in all the speakers. The subtitles are so-so. They move at a decent speed, but they also have multiple typos and some of the attempts to represent certain speech inflections and accents come off as odd and not very effective.

Extras:
There are two substantial extras on The District: a four-minute sample of the original television production and a half-hour making-of featurette that shows the transition from little to big screen, the photo process for creating the animation, the voice recording sessions, and more.

There are also trailers for various releases by the DVD company and for The District itself.

FINAL THOUGHTS:
I'm sure it won't surprise anyone who has read this far when I suggest you Skip It. The District is a complete waste of time. I thought it was going to be cool when it first arrived in my review box, but I was barely through the opening credits before I realized I had woefully misjudged. Inspired by American hip-hop culture, this mean-spirited attempt at satire either misses its target by a mile or never really had any intention of having any smarts to begin with. Its stillborn plot about star-crossed lovers gives over to an inane time-travel story and geopolitical wankery, all the while showcasing a jittery animation style that quickly loses its appeal. The District isn't even a nice place to visit, forget about it altogether.

Jamie S. Rich is a novelist and comic book writer. He is best known for his collaborations with Joelle Jones, including the hardboiled crime comic book You Have Killed Me, the challenging romance 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, and the 2007 prose novel Have You Seen the Horizon Lately?, for which Jones did the cover. All three were published by Oni Press. His most recent projects include the futuristic romance A Boy and a Girl with Natalie Nourigat; Archer Coe and the Thousand Natural Shocks, a loopy crime tale drawn by Dan Christensen; and the horror miniseries Madame Frankenstein, a collaboration with Megan Levens. Follow Rich's blog at Confessions123.com.