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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Roman Polanski's (The Tragedy of) Macbeth (1971)


The Beginning: On a deserted beach, the Three Weird Sisters ("Witches") dig a hole in the sand and place a human arm with a dagger in its hand and some blood into it. They cover it up and talk about meeting Macbeth later. As they walk away, fog enshrouds the screen and the titles come on. Over the titles we hear what sounds like an enormous battle raging. We also see the credit "Executive Producer Hugh M. Hefner". The credits end, the fog lifts, and armored soldiers appear on the bloody beach as we watch a victor bash to a bloody pulp the back of a combatant from the losing side.

The Cinematography of Gilbert Taylor: Taylor was the DP of such films as Dr. Strangelove, Star Wars, A Hard Day's Night, The Omen, Frenzy and Repulsion. Here he paints a world separated from our own by over a millenium's distance - mid-11th century Scotland. It is a brutal, primitive world, yet somehow it's occasionally bathed in warm sunlight or the beautiful green of the unscathed countryside. But mostly, even (or especially so) in its characters' dreams, their flawed humanity outshines whatever goodness may be buried within.

The Shakespeare Dialogue: This is a somewhat faithful version of the play but it's an incredibly cinematic one. Even so, many of the film's highlights include some of the best dialogue ever written. Some of my faves are: "Nothing in this life became him like the leaving of it"; "Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble"; "Out, damned spot! Out I say."; "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!"; and my favorite, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."


The Music by the Third Ear Band: The sounds heard in Macbeth are just as eerie as the visuals. The score sounds like something Roxy Music might have recorded if asked to go even more medieval and lose Bryan Ferry's vocals. The strings and oboe-sounding instrument, in particular, are often enough to drive one up a wall, so it's a perfect accompaniment to the guilty and hateful inner lives of Lord and Lady Macbeth.

Polanski's Direction, especially in response to the Murder of his wife and unborn child: The film has many blatant references to the murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family, but that is why Polanski choose this subject to film next after that terrible incident. There are numerous penetrating knives, including one into a woman's abdomen, and children are killed on screen. There are decapitations, hangings and loads of blood. I would call this film suspense/horror, so it definitely fits into Polanski's films thematically, but often the personal nature of what this film shows adds an extra dimension of true terror to the watching of it. The staging of the Mirror Scene, the Future shown in the Witches' Bubbling Cauldron, and all the other Fantasy/Dream scenes are extremely well done and make this film perhaps the most "modern" Shakespearean film which still keeps it setting intact.

The Acting: All the acting seems to be at least good, but much of it, especially Jon Finch's Macbeth, is extraordinary. The play is written and staged so that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have to be the standouts and get most of the best lines and scenes, but here, Martin Shaw's Banquo, Nicholas Selby's Duncan and Terence Bayler's Macduff almost match him. This is a realistic depiction shot in castles and forests so the acting is not overly theatrical, yet it is certainly Shakespearean, if you believe there can be a difference. Finch is great whether he's doing a mental soliloquy, a physical one or interacting with other actors.


The Verisimilitude: This appears to be one of the most-realistic depictions of the Middle Ages ever. Unlike Excalibur, another of my fave films, this one has totally believable armor, costumes and sets. They look so great, you can almost feel them. The land itself is seen as clean and capable of beauty, but the skies above it are often very dark and the humans scheming beneath them are even darker. Technically, this film takes place after the Dark Ages, but it's difficult to conceive of a darker, yet more-realistic, world set in the Middle Ages.

The Climax: When birnam wood does come to Dunsinane, Macbeth still shows no fear, as he does battle and makes child's play out of all attackers. It's a violent and well-staged action set-piece. It's only after an announcement that there may actually be someone who is "not of woman born" that Macbeth starts to go psycho and the tables are turned on him in.

The Ending: The film's ending, back at the home of the Three Weird Sisters, implies that the themes of the play and the film are a never-ending cycle where whoever is not in power will do whatever is necessary to try to gain it. It really does paint humanity in a dark light, but I'm sure that many will accept it just as readily as I do.

Eternal (?) Themes: While telling a semi-historically-based Shakespearean tragedy, this film shows Mankind at its most barbaric and greedy. Human life is shown as perhaps the cheapest commodity on earth. I realize that these themes date back to the Bible and other cultural tomes, but Polanski is able to bring it up to date by using his own personal tragedy while also tying the actions in this film into something resembling a gangster saga. All the different sides here seem to have their own ethics up to a point but those who feel undervalued or shunned will sell themselves to the highest bidder. At least "The Family" in a film such as The Godfather (released the year after Macbeth) will tend to stick together, but that only goes so far, and often water is thicker than blood. The "gangs" in this film don't resemble the ones in Romeo + Juliet, except that they are willing to kill, but in that case it's for pointless, stubborn family pride. Here, Macbeth and his wife seem more akin to the Manson Family, willing to kill to fulfill some prophetic dream ("Helter Skelter") which makes no sense to anyone at all, except themselves. As time goes on in the real world, heartless greed seems to extend beyond obvious murders, pointless wars and bureaucratic power struggles. It now seems to involve the collapse of peoples' modest savings and homes so some amoral punk can grab millions of dollars and actually be proud of it. Today, there seems to be no guilt, which was the bane of Macbeth. Is this the new Dark Ages?
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It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. - John Wooden
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Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977)
+


I rewatched this film which I labeled a camp classic just a few months ago, but it too seems to have improved with age. It doesn't seem as completely idiotic as it did originally. Part of this probably has to do with the fact that Boorman reedited the film after I watched it on opening day. Another thing going for it is that Boorman seems deadly serious in exploring the horrors of The Exorcist from a completely different perspective. In the original, we feel the demon is working to trash the faith of the two priests who ultimately perform the exorcism. Here, Regan is seen as a "super-good" person who attracts the demon Pazuzu who wants to destroy her. The original had carvings of a strange Iraqi demon to infer the dreaded evil. This film, which begins seriously enough, later introduces a locust stand-in for Pazuzu and when James Earl Jones shows up spitting an orange and the locusts attack Washington, D.C. a la The Swarm, the whole film turns laughable. While it's true that back in the day, the new scenes showing some of what might have happened in Regan's bedroom during the original exorcism would incur the wrath of the original's fans, nowadays, they simply seem silly and almost twisted in the way they reinterpret the events. However, The Heretic still has a trippy Ennio Morricone score, some evocative William A. Fraker cinematography, especially the set-bound scenes supposedly taking place in Africa, and a kind of misplaced desire to freak people out with that strobe machine/hypnosis do-hickey. It's not really as bad as I thought before, and it's certainly no worse than many horror films and sequels coming out in the late 1970s.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Altered States (Ken Russell, 1980)


Anybody calling this a "mellow Ken Russell flick" seems out of his mind but I stand by that statement based on most of the work he had done during the previous decade. Somehow this film is able to juggle intellectualism, extreme drug use, sensory deprivation tanks, the search for the first self, the concept of faith, at least in the context of loving another person, religious imagery, especially of the Judeo-Christian ethic, sexual attraction and obsession. overlapping dialogue, genetic changes and reconstitution, etc., so obviously it has plenty of fish to fry and can topple over into absurdity at almost any moment. Screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky apparently thought it did and had his name removed from the screenplay credits, but Ken Russell got the last laugh as he was able to turn the whole thing into a 2001-ish trip while never being boring and filling the screen with memorable imagery provided by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, complimented by an intense musical score by John Corigliano. William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid all give solid acting turns, and look fast for several actors in early roles, including a pre-E.T. Drew Barrymore.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958)


Glorious Movie-Movie is one of the best westerns ever made, with a ton of memorable characters, albeit centered around a rather strange central character for a western. That character is former ship captain Jim McKay (Gregory Peck) who has gotten fianced into a Texas ranching family by way of Pat Terrell (Carroll Baker), who eventually shows herself to misunderstand him and be extremely superficial. Pat's father, The Major (Charles Bickford), tries to rule his neck of the prairie with the help of his practically-adopted son Steve Leach (Charlton Heston) who has a yearning for Pat himself. What McKay doesn't know is that he's walked into the middle of a feud between The Major and rival Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives) who has his own cross to bear in the person of his oldest son Buck (Chuck Connors). The person who seems to hold the key to this war is schoolteacher Julie (Jean Simmons) who owns the Big Muddy, the river where both families need to water their cattle.

Aside from just being tremendous cinematic storytelling on every level, The Big Country shows a love of the land even when the humans roaming over that land are incredibly corrupt and violent. Nobody seems to respect McKay, except for perhaps the Major's Mexican jack-of-all-trades Ramón (the awesome Alfonso Bedoya). They constantly think that he's a coward, a dude, or just plain stupid, but they have no concept of what it takes to navigate a ship through two oceans and command the men onboard at the same time. All the acting is beautiful, almost all of them playing iconic characters. William Wyler likes to emphasize how "big" the "country" is, and he's aided by DP Franz Planer and especially composer Jerome Moross, whose score seems to have later been interpolated into both Elmer Bernstein's The Magnificent Seven and the Marlboro commercials. I suppose if The Big Country were to remind me of another movie it would be George Stevens' Giant which I also need to add to my mafo 100.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Hard Candy (David Slade, 2005)
+


This is a modern-day variation on the Little Red Riding Hood/Big Bad Wolf Fairytale, tricked out with cyber-stocking, and played out with a combo of suspense and dark humor. Fourteen-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) begins an internet relationship with older photographer David (Patrick Wilson), and after a quick in-person meeting, she goes with him to his home where flirtatious banter suddenly turns deadly serious. Eventually, Hayley drugs Patrick, ties him up, accuses him of pedophilia and also questions him about a missing girl, although the relationship between this other girl and Hayley is unclear. Patrick denies any wrongdoing, but Hayley increases the psychological and physical torture she's willing to put him through to make him confess to something.

Hard Candy plays out as a small, basically two-character play, but it was written for the screen, albeit by playwright Brian Nelson. It's quite clear that although the subject matter is disturbing, there is a sense of sexual tension up front and the humor maintains itself for most of the running time although I suppose there are some viewers who won't find the subject matter amusing. To tell you the truth, the filmmakers don't go out of their way accenting all the laughs, often leaving them to a tone of voice or the way a 14-year-old might say something she personally knows about sex even if you wish it not to be true. The soul of the movie is the way the young girl is able to bully and abuse the experienced man in ways that make everything seem to play out the opposite of what one might expect in real life. In fact, Hard Candy isn't really anything resembling real life, but it's good drama, with two solid performances and something of a vigilante fantasy for those who are sick and tired of watching the news every day and hearing about another child abuse/pedophilia case tearing apart a school or school district.



No popcorn rating for The Big Country Mark?
Just from the obvious love in your write-up I'd guess it gets at least an
from you??



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
On Guard (Phillippe De Broca, 1997)




De Broca has always been one of France's better "commercial" filmmakers in that he can make shimmering entertainments which have plenty of heart and depth. This one seems to almost be a reprise of his Cartouche filmed 35 years earlier. Here, Daniel Auteuil plays a fencer who loves to take on any and everyone he meets, especially if they're nobles. He crosses swords with a Duke (Vincent Perez) who initially disdains him but then befriends him when he needs an assistant for a dangerous journey he has to undertake. The Duke has just learned that he's a father and he goes to marry the mother of his child and become a family man. The problem is that disrupts the machinations of the Duke's cousin and heir (Fabrice Luchini) who now becomes a former heir and tries to stop the Duke. This is only the first third of the movie which is full of swordfights and last-second escapes, as well as plenty of tragedy. But what really separates this story is the way that Auteuil grows as a character and the almost-mysterious pull of romance which gradually infuses the second half of the film. (I'm intentionally omitting an important character in here.) When the film came to its almost magical ending, I said to myself that is such a perfect and wonderful ending but I'm having a difficult time remembering many American films which end in such a manner. Maybe the French really are just more romantic... or are there just more Dirty Old Frenchmen out there?



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)




I don't know exactly what else there is to say about Paths of Glory except that it's my vote for the Best War film ever made. I suppose I can say that each time I watch it, I'm amazed at how each scene plays out as its own different mini-movie. Although all the scenes build one-upon-the-other, they all seem to be shot and lit in a different manner and on different locations and sets in order to elicit different emotions. Paths of Glory is so on-target in delivering it's War is Hell and Insane message that it doesn't really seem to be stacking the deck all that much. Even in the opening scene, General Mireau (George Macready) tells General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) that an attack upon the strategic Ant Hill is impossible, but when the carrot of another star on his uniform appears, Mireau quickly changes his mind. The way Mireau walks through the trenches and gives "pep talks" to the men who later play such an important part in the film works as masterful storytelling rather than lazy coincidence. Kirk Douglas gives a superb performance as the humanistic lawyer Colonel Dax who's the only officer in the film who seems to truly care about his men, but all the performances are terrific right down to the smallest ones. At the end of the film, I always cry while the future Mrs. Kubrick sings her song in German to all the French soldiers who have one brief respite of normalcy before being sent out to do more unthinkable acts upon their fellow man.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Seance on a Wet Afternoon (Bryan Forbes, 1964)
+



Looking at the title, you'd probably expect a horror flick, and although it's a psychological suspense thriller, there really doesn't seem to be anything supernatural going on, at least depending on how you interpret the three seances in the film. Kim Stanley is brilliant as psychic Myra who concocts a scheme to become famous by getting her husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) to kidnap the daughter of a rich family. Myra will then volunteer herself to the family and solve the crime. As you can see, Myra isn't exactly all there, and she seems to be getting crazier the more she convinces herself that she's an honest-to-God medium who uses her son (who died at birth) as her contact during her seances. In fact, Myra is now listening to her dead son who says he'd like the little girl to "stay with him", so maybe she'll become famous no matter how the kidnapping turns out. Attenborough has to do most of the heavy lifting as the actual kidnapper and the guy who picks up the ransom while Stanley has the showier part and delivers the goods without going off the deep end. As a nice touch, Patrick Magee shows near the end as a Police Superintendent who fancies himself as an expert on the paranormal and asks Myra to perform one more seance to help him catch the kidnappers.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Fires Were Started aka I Was a Fireman (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
+



Thinking about this film a bit more and the rating I give it, I get the feeling that I'm either very closed-minded, mean or just too damn hesitant to award things which are "too-different" no matter how well-done they are. Fires Were Started is a stirring and almost beautiful celebration of firefighters in England during WWII who had to fight fires caused by German bombing on a daily basis at the height of the war. Director Jennings and his crew capture them in the midst of glory and tragedy and show that the War at Home had a much bigger effect on the people in Great Britain (and Europe for that matter) than it did for us here in the U.S. mainland. Much of the footage is neorealist in nature but even more so borders on impressionistic poetry the way the image is captured, edited together and put to music. So why would I give this film only a borderline recommendation? Maybe I'm certifiable but even too much of a good thing can seem like overkill. I cannot exactly tell you what I'd excise, but it did seem a bit too long, especially compared to all the other, shorter films I watched on the same DVD. On the other hand, if I lived in England, I'd probably shoot the rating up at least one more popcorn box and maybe even more so if I started feeling nostalgic.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
The Call of Cthulhu (Andrew Leman, 2005)




Here's a low-budget 47-minute flick, filmed as a silent movie with no campiness anywhere in sight. It's extremely faithful to Lovecraft's novella and it uses its budget in a positive way in almost every scene. Some of the film resembles The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in the stylized sets and cinematography, but the special effects are really a lot of fun, especially in the way the scenes shot aboard ship in the middle of the ocean are accomplished using "traditional bathtub" effects along with some thoughtful modern (decidedly-un-CGI) tweaking using lenses and distorted perspectives. I don't want to give away too much, but the film is set at about the same time that Lovecraft wrote his story, and besides being probably the best visual presentation of Lovecraft on screen, it's also very cleverly written and carries the viewer back in time through a diary and journal and even ties up everything neatly at the end so the story can move forward even after the film ends. Some of the other movies I was reminded of by watching this mini-wonder are Gunga Din and King Kong (both 1933 and 2005), and it also has a Guy Maddin vibe. I recommend you check this out if you can access it. My brother bought the DVD so that's how I saw it.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Zaat (Don Barton, 1975)




This seems to have been filmed by a group of Florida friends and family members who were "inspired" by such classics as my recently-reviewed "It's Alive!" and the Killer Turkey flick Blood Freak. As far as I can tell there is no real plot to Zaat. Some part-time scientist/underachieving bum finds a way to transform himself into a walking catfish with strong swimming powers similar to the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He grabs various swimmers and pulls their arms and heads off (no real violence shown though). Eventually he becomes attracted to some young women frequenting the local swimmin' hole and captures them, apparently to change them into similar type creatures so that he can breed a new race to take over the world because he's pissed off about something or other. The film contains little dialogue, no psychology or acting, lots of swimming, a few bottles of window cleaner (what better way to make a mutant?), and no reason for being since it's incapable of even telling the rudiments of a story in both written and cinematic terms. However, if that's your cuppa, have at it. It's not really as fun as it sounds though.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Diary of a Lost Girl (G.W. Pabst, 1929)




I find this far superior to Louise Brooks' more-famous film by Pabst, Pandora's Box. That didn't really have the guts to show all the sex and violence inherent in the story while this film is basically a sensory overload of such dimensions that it becomes one of the most erotic films ever made. Brooks' teenager Thymian is brought up in a home where her father throws out her governess when the latter becomes pregnant. Immediately, the father employs another, even-more-attractive governess, and Thymian falls victim to her father's partner, a pharmacist who rapes and impregnates her. When she refuses to marry the pharmacist, her baby is taken away and Thymian is sent to live in a reform school and after she escapes from there, she and her new friend find themselves working in a brothel. The sets, costumes and performances are all created to play up the exotic nature of unknown sex which later translates into a world of never-ending sensuality which seems to make it easier to survive in a world without any real love. Thymian doesn't really want to be a whore, but she's been abused so many times in her young life that it's almost comforting for awhile, at least until she learns better from a rich old man who seeks nothing but to treat her with fatherly affection. The resolution of the film makes it clear that despite it all, Thymian's heart is ultimately full of both wisdom and innocence, things not possessed by the socialites who try to help girls such as she. Louise Brooks is beautiful and heartbreaking in her presence and performance here.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
The Battle of Russia (Frank Capra & Anatole Litvak, 1943)




Part Five of the Why We Fight series is the two-part The Battle of Russia which not only explains the history of invasions into Russia during the 700 years leading up to WWII but goes into detail about the major battles of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad where the Soviet army and strategy successfully repelled the Nazi invaders. Some early scenes even use Russian movies (Alexander Nevsky) to show how the Russians have repulsed the Teutonic Knights, the Swedes, Napoleon and various others before the onslaught of Hitler's blitzkrieg. The strategy of falling back and strengthening each line of resistance is clearly explained as well as the Nazis need to invade several countries before entering Russia in order to get natural resources and land and sea bases from which to launch their attacks. The striking imagery of actual combat footage, combined with archival footage, special effects, cartoon graphics, quick editing and Dimitri Tiomkin's stirring Russian score all add up to an educational, yet fast-paced and entertaining dissection of current events almost at the time of their occurrence. This film is about par for the series although it does contain some of the more potent images, including a haunting one showing Russian villagers hanging along the Eastern Front as the Nazis retreat.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
Art House Rating



To me, this is Tarkovsky's masterpiece, but I realize that some members believe that the man can do no wrong. To me, that seems really weird. Tarkovsky went out of his way to make films which people could not understand on any basic level. If I could somehow magically understand everything which an artist goes out of his way to make sure that I cannot understand on first appearance, then I would have to think that I was some sort of Idiot Savant. Tarkovsky wants people to understand but I'd say it's impossible to understand most of his flicks without repetitive viewings and discussions with similar viewers. This film is about an artist who makes no art whatsoever during the film. It's also about a monk/iconographer who believes in beauty but is completely surrounded by ugliness, pain and death. Obviously, the film is full of contradictions and bizarre, unique visuals and characters. I watched the restored version. The claim was that the Criterion version added 20 minutes to make it go from 165 minutes to 185 minutes. I'll admit that the first time I watched this, long ago, it was 165 minutes, and this version included much more spiritual material, but it was NOT 185 minutes. It was actually about 198 minutes, and of course, the highlight of the film was the conclusion where the B&W film turned to color, and while some intense 2001-type soundtrack was playing, we can see the actual icons which Rublev painted. I easily found this the most moving Tarkovsky I've seen, but it's also incredibly repulsive in the way it shows how far Man truly is from God.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
+


Maybe I just live in an Alternate Universe from everybody (or an alternate movie universe since there's no difference). You remember the awesome scene in Pulp Fiction where the Uma Thurman character draws a "square"? I agree it's an awesome scene, but she draws a rectangle which somewhat mitigates the "Coolness Factor".

I don't hold Tarantino in any special regard. In fact, the more I learn about him, the more immature I believe the guy is. I'd rather have you MoFos be in our discussions about Powell/Pressburger, Persona, Alain Resnais, The Tenant, The Innocents, etc. because I believe that Tarantino wants everything to be easily representational, except for perhaps his idiotic changing of his movie's title to somehow make it seem that he's DEEP. HA! C'mon, QT, join MoFo and talk to us. We'll show you deep!

Inglourious Basterds, I have no problem giving it a
+. It obviously doesn't stand up as a legit war adventure. It's not The Guns of Navarone, The Train, Where Eagles Dare, The Dirty Dozen, Operation Crossbow, Von Ryan's Express, etc. It just doesn't have that strong a plot, but it does have a hook, a gimmick and a reason to want to watch the thing. The hook is obviously that this guy (Brad Pitt), who stole his name from Aldo Ray, wants scalps of all dead Nazis and wants all living Nazis to wear something which will always identify them as Nazis. Now, this Guy has American Indian "Blood" in him (even if it's not Apache), so the scalp thing makes sense to some people even if it's mostly BS.

Tarantino does seem more oibsessed with namedropping Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst, and then he even brings in Oscar winner Emil Jannings to the conclusion. It's unclear what, if anything, Tarantino understands about pre-WWII German cinema and WWII Goebbels propaganda, but since his movie doesn't even take place in any form of reality, it doesn't matter to me. I'd probably say that overall, I gave the film extra points for trying to act like Tarantino knew "anything" about German cinema at all while just faking it to try to make his film better and more "realistic".

I have a few more points to make. Tarantino goes out of his way to have the SS Officer compare King Kong to African slaves and then he has another Officer do the same to try to condemn an African-Frenchman who seems so conducive to the Jewish woman's plot to destroy the Third Reich. On the other hand, the Nazis are quite disturbed that African slave blood helped the U.S. during the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. I find the film very complex politically, but since it's a fantasy, you have to decide for yourself whether that's a strength or a wimpy weakness.



Bright light. Bright light. Uh oh.
District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, 2009)



I will agree, up to a point, that it's an original concept, but even so, I was strongly reminded for obvious reasons of several other films. Both versions of The Fly came to mind, and I'll admit that Sarah hit it on the nose that the original might have been more-influential. Besides that, Independence Day, Children of Men, Aliens, Robocop 2 (or Iron Man if you can't think that far back), all cried out to me at various times. My wife Brenda was grabbing my arm, hard, at several times. At first, it was just because it was all so damn intense, and afterwards, when you totally got into the Christopher character, she said that she really wanted him and his son to get back to their family just like she wanted Tom Hanks' character to get back to his wife in Saving Private Ryan.

I'm not sure what else to add which hasn't been said. I did laugh at quite a few of the deaths. I thought the inclusion of the Nigerians was a masterstroke, but I need to ask our friend no1mccoy what he thinks because I laughed at their wastocity. I really don't understand the complaints about the film's score. There are many different kinds of African music, but since much of the film was shot in Soweto, it makes sense that you would hear music from Soweto, one of the continent's and definitely South Africa's touchstone for apartheid and civil rights. There would be no sense in setting the flick in South Africa and Soweto unless it included appropriate music. Rwanda and South Africa are thousands of miles apart, so learn about African music if you're going to discuss it.

The film is definitely set up for a sequel: District 10, and it's ripe for story strands from both lead characters, one I never even mentioned by name here in this post.