going in i was prepared to be annoyed at a movie in africa through white eyes, but the protaganist is so flawed it was a lot more interesting than that. the third act was all ’save the white neck’ so it dipped, but amin’s speech to him was pretty great. ‘name one good thing you’ve done’ or something like that.
technically the film was pretty impressive. the flow and pace the first while was nice - i especially liked how economically they established the main character and got things going pretty quick. i flat out loved the cinematography - the colors, the angles, the moves. and of course whitaker was great. i liked most of the choices they made in the soundtrack - a lot of african pop or covers of american pop, but not all smoothed out - there was a little dirt in it. otherwise the score was pretty traditional but stayed out of the way until the final scene when it went all big and annoying. then they followed that up with some xylophone african-song-on-the-world-music-sampler sounding bit on the postscript that was a bit annoying.
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oh they also re-created the infamous swim race from the documentary general idi amin dada. that scene is one of my top favorites ever. hmm, sounds like the start of a list… |
Okay, I am totally puting this into the liston’s netflix queue.
Left by nate on October 13th, 2006