There are other film critics who are intellectual–like Stuart Klawans at The Nation, Armond White (he was good once) and Stanley Kaufmann at The New Republic–but they lacked Ebert’s accessibility and heart. (Ebert, by the way, had an acute sense of the racial political economy in US cinema, as Richard Prince blogged at The Root). Ebert, who traveled to Apartheid South Africa as a young man, also reviewed a lot of African films.
The secret to making a good movie about sport is to make sure there isn’t any sport in it. Remember ‘Invictus‘? Remember ‘Goal‘? Exactly. Distinguished Nigerian filmmaker Tunde Kelani must have known this, because there isn’t any sport in his film, ‘Maami’, even though his hero, Kashy (Wole Ojo), is a global footballing superstar who […]
Like many other mainstream publications, National Geographic Magazine’s June 2010 issue (out May 25) will host a feature on South Africa. The feature is entitled, “Mandela’s Children” (titled for Mandela’s comments when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993: “It will… be measured by the happiness and welfare of the children”) and is completed […]
A friend (he’s a filmmaker himself) emailed me his opinion about “Invictus,” the film in which Nelson Mandela conspires with Matt Damon to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and absolve white people from all responsibility for wealth and privilege amassed under Apartheid: I saw Invictus … I just wanted to tell you that from […]
As you may have figured out my now (from my earlier post), I don’t particularly like the idea behind “Invictus.” I’ve seen it to and had to prevent myself from walking out of the theater a few times for its historical inaccuracies, banal “rainbow” politics, and reducing South Africa’s political transition to being dependent on […]
