This might be a good weekend to sit in the dark with a bucket full of empty carbs covered in animal fat.
There are two movies playing that I would like to check out this weekend.
The first one is Tsotsi. This film gained noteriety as this year's Oscar winner for best foreign language film. I heard lots of buzz about the performance of Presley Chweneyagae as the main character, but what really made me curious about the film is that it was made in South Africa.
The South African film scene is pretty tepid, though it's still light years ahead of much of Africa. For the longest, their international claim to fame was Jamie Uys' nutty comedy The Gods Must be Crazy and its sequel. Then in 1999, filmmaker Gavin Hood made a film called A Reasonable Man.
I happened to catch A Reasonable Man at the Pan African Film Festival that is a part of the annual National Black Arts Festival here in Atlanta where I couldn't help but relish the sweet irony in the fact that Gavin Hood is a white South African. Fortunately that technicality didn't disqualify the film as seeing that movie was truly a life-changing experience for me. It is the moment that I credit for changing me from a person enthused about watching movies to a person passionate about making movies.
A Reasonable Man is the story of a white South African (played by Hood) attorney who is defending a Zulu tribesman on trial for murdering a young child who he thought was an mythical evil creature called a Tikoloshe. The premise is what constitutes the behavior of a reasonable man given the circumstances presented. To say much more would say too much but suffice it to say that it is a fascinating study of the types of culture clashes that still happen daily around the world and the various ways of reconciling the differences between them. A truly powerful representation of the power of the media in general and film in particular. Years after seeing it at the festival, it still doesn't appear to be available via DVD which dissappoints me as I would love to add it to my foreign film collection that it also motivated me to develop.
Quite naturally when I heard about the country of origin for Tsotsi I was curious to know who directed it. Sure enough: Gavin Hood. It's playing at Tara this weekend. If anybody wants to roll with me, let me know.
The other film that I want to see is Inside Man. You wouldn't know it from the ad campaign, but this is a Spike Lee film. Perhaps the marketoids don't think that labeling this film as "A Spike Lee Joint" would attract the type of audience that they are looking to draw. That would seem to be a reasonable assumption as Spike has never been one to produce many blockbusters. I would go into my conflicted feelings on Mr. Lee here, but I happen to have another post in the works that will take care of that so I'll just say that I try to support everything that he does because I truly believe him to be one of the great film makers of all time.
Denzel Washington isn't a bad actor either.
Or so I've heard.