I’m shoehorning Stander
here because it doesn’t
easily fit anywhere else. Andre Stander
was a South African police officer in the 1980s who became a bank
robber (the
movie suggests it started as a protest against being forced to shoot
black,
anti-apartheid protesters, but I wonder if it was really that
high-minded). He pulls daring heists
with courtesy and aplomb, even robbing the bank right next to a police
command
center. A stint in prison does little
but supply him with a gang when he escapes.
He becomes something of a folk hero, sort of the less murderous Clyde
Barrow or Ned
Kelly of
It’s easy to see how movie-ready this story is, and Stander does a passable job with this rich material. American Thomas Jane more-or-less convincingly adopts a South African accent, and the supporting cast is good. Something about it, though, keeps it pedestrian and unexceptional. Still, it’s an interesting story, and you could do worse.
Baadasssss! likewise could have been a better rendition of an eminently cinematic tale. Mario Van Peebles wrote and directed this story of his father Melvin’s making of Sweet Sweetback's Baad Asssss Song, the blaxploitation film that followed on the heels of Shaft. Melvin had to raise the money for the production himself, and he pressed various associates and family members into service, including a pre-teen Mario in a sex scene. The movie is wildly unfocused, and it doesn’t make the ties it wants to make to African-American history as well as it could have. It gets a little hazy and psychedelic at times (as I’m sure the filming of Sweet Sweetback did). It’s intriguing but ultimately didn’t keep my interest all the way through. Someone more familiar with that era, or more interested in black cinema, would no doubt appreciate it more.
Another self-made man, Tony
Wilson, at the
forefront of
another cultural movement, New Wave music in
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search