Movie review

  • 2007-02-07
The Last King of Scotland
Turistas

The Last King of Scotland
Based on a novel by Giles Foden, "The Last King of Scotland" combines history with fiction to paint a portrait of Idi Amin, the infamous dictator of Uganda whose brutal regime in the 1970s was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. The device through which we glimpse the tyrant takes the form of an outsider, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy), a young Scottish doctor on his first humanitarian mission. Garrigan befriends the newly elected President Amin (Forest Whitaker) by chance and is wooed into becoming his personal physician and advisor. Seduced by the attentions and privileges bestowed upon him by the leader, he balances a fragile sense of morality with the cruelty and megalomania he notices in his patron. "The Last King of Scotland" is an excellent film. Whitaker's transformation into the larger-than-life African demagogue is extraordinary. And director Kevin Macdonald's superb direction spares us scenes of Amin's horrible deeds in favor of Amin's implied capacity for that horror. As the evil you sense is often more disturbing that the evil you see, it is most effective. This is an intimate depiction of a despot and the bruising journey of a cavalier young man whose foolishness and inertia clearly mirror the world's own impotence in post-colonial Africa.
( Sherwin Das )

"The Last King of Scotland" focuses on the friendship between young Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) and Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). Garrigan travels to Uganda to escape the dull life as a family doctor awaiting him after graduating from medical school. When he meets Amin by chance after a political rally, the president takes an instant shine to him and persuades him to become his personal physician. Set between 1971, when Amin came to power, and 1976, when he became an international pariah, the story brilliantly blends fact and fiction to create a mesmerizing and disturbing account of the infamous dictator. Forest Whitaker's performance is simply brilliant while James McAvoy is also extremely impressive as the naive young Scot who finds a father figure in Amin. "The Last King of Scotland" is an intelligent and perceptive film that goes far deeper than most films about Africa. It hints at the political meddling of the British who helped Amin into power and asks some awkward questions about the chaotic period of transition of power from colonial rule. But the film really belongs to Whitaker, who gives one of the most extraordinary performances I've seen in a long time. 
( Tim Ochser )

Turistas
Imagine a cross between a commercial from the Brazilian Tourism Board and a home video guide for removing human organs. Throw in a little suspense and you've essentially got the plot of "Turistas," a holiday-from-hell horror flick about a group of impossibly beautiful backpackers stranded in rural Brazil who are drugged, robbed and led to a house deep in the jungle. There evil awaits them in the form of a twisted surgeon who plans to make involuntary organ donors out of our heroes to repay the historical debts of the white man in Brazil. He's a kind of psychopathic Robin Hood, stealing livers and kidneys from the unwilling rich to give to Rio's urban poor. Ironically, the doctor treats the indigenous people among his own gang quite miserably. But "Turistas" was not made to shed light on social issues in modern Brazil; it was made to satiate teenage boys aroused by the sight of sultry women in bikinis scrambling to avert a horrible and graphic death. And graphic it is. I still can't shake the image of the not-so-good doctor slicing through a woman's torso like a dish of lasagna, and the squish-plop-squish of her innards being eviscerated in vivid and colorful detail. Yummy.
( Sherwin Das )

A group of young American backpackers befriend two young English guys, a Swedish couple and an attractive young Australian woman after their bus crashes and leaves them stranded in the middle of the Brazilian jungle. Rather than wait for 10 hours for a replacement bus, the fun-loving kids decide to head off to the coast where they promptly rip off their clothes and head into the surf. They then discover a bar, get mindlessly drunk and wake up to discover that they've been robbed of all their belongings. Those cheeky Brazilian beggars even took their shoes, the little monkeys. The kids then hook up with a Brazilian who seems like a friendly guy, but little do they know that he intends to deliver them to a sinister doctor with an enormous chip on his shoulder against foreign tourists. "Turistas" is so staggeringly stupid that it caused a slight throbbing in my left temporal lobe. Like the Slovakian-set "Hostel," it's really rather offensive to its host country, but unlike "Hostel" it doesn't have a sense of humor to redeem itself. If you have nothing else to do, you really should do it instead of wasting your money on this nonsense. 
( Tim Ochser )

 

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