Searching for Sugar Man (***1/4)

I’ve always been impressed by the ability of foreigners to appropriate America’s culture and make it their own. (It happens less the other way around.) We sometimes make a joke of it, as with David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany, or Jerry Lewis’s in France. But, on the evidence presented here, and it’s pretty good evidence, Sixto Rodriguez is bigger that Hasselhoff, or Lewis…in South Africa.

That the Detroit native made only two albums in the early 1970s and remained completely unknown everywhere else, including Detroit, makes the story unlikely. Even more unlikely, and impossible in today’s digitally connected world, is that Rodriguez heard nothing of his overseas following. Nor did the South Africans know anything about the man who was a household name there. (At least among the white population. Although Rodriguez is said to have been an inspiration to whites who opposed apartheid, his fan base does not appear to be multiracial.) Fans pored over lyrics for clues about the artist. There were rumors — he was said to have committed suicide before a hostile audience — but that’s all.

So this documentary — by a Swede, Malik Bendjelloul — is a kind of detective story as much as anything else. Bendjelloul also managed to interview the producers of the two albums, who attest to his genius, but that’s not the interesting part. What turns out to have happened to Rodriguez, including his missed opportunity for 1970s stardom, is both unusual and mundane. And the movie itself has provided its own touching ending to the story, with its soundtrack and Rodriguez’s re-released 1970 debut finally granting him the chart placings that eluded him 40 years ago. The music itself, incidentally, fits into the emerging singer-songwriter sensibility of the time, but with generally grittier lyrics and a haunting musical quality somewhat reminiscent of another 1970s artist who has re-emerged, Nick Drake, with some Bob Dylan influences. There’s plenty of it heard in the movie, which cannot explain its enduring qualities nor the vagaries of circumstance and coincidence that can affect what becomes popular.


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viewed 10/17/12 7:45 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 10/17/12

Blood Diamond (***1/2)

 ? A huge stone found in a Sierra Leone diamond mine offers tantalizing possibilities, and danger, for the conscripted laborer (Djimon Hounsou) who found it as well as a smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a journalist (Jennifer Connelly) with whom he crosses paths. The African country’s recent civil war forms the backdrop for this thriller that shows how diamonds are used to finance civil wars.

+ This isn’t a sprawling, globe-hopping movie in the manner of Traffic or Syriana. But for a movie that doesn’t try to do too much, it does give a remarkably good primer on the seediest side of the global diamond business while managing, in a subplot, to illustrate how child soldiers are “recruited” and indoctrinated. The corporation that buys the “conflict diamonds” called Van De Kamp, is an obvious stand-in for DeBeers. (It would make a whole other fascinating feature or documentary to look at the history of that company, which virtually created the market for diamond jewels and uses its near-monopoly power to regulate their scarcity.) I should mention that the movie is surprisingly action-oriented. Although Hounsou’s character’s story is the thread that the plot follows, DiCaprio’s character is the pivotal one. With this on top of his recent effort in Departed, the one-time Titanic pretty boy continues to demonstrate his versatility. (It took me a few minutes to get used to DiCaprio’s South African accent, which the South Africans on the IMDB message board seem to approve.) The movie doesn’t work if he’s an unbridled villain, but would also have seemed false if he’d turned into a Peace Corps liberal. Instead, he’s the kind of movie character you can discuss afterward and reasonably come to different conclusions about. Director Ed Zwick (Glory), who shot in Mozambique and South Africa, also captures the natural beauty of the land.

- I’m not sure where it would have fit, but perhaps a minute or so where someone explained the history of the tiny country where the movie is set would have been useful. However, at 143 minutes, the movie feels the tiniest bit bloated.

= ***1/2 This is one of the most powerful movies of the year. It’s a “problem” film that doesn’t come off as preachy. It’s also nice to see this and other recent mainstream films being set in Africa, both for the novelty and because it humanizes a place largely unfamiliar to most Americans.

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Catch a Fire (***1/4)

? This is story of a once-apolitical man named Patrick Chamusso (Derek Luke) who becomes a terrorist in the eyes of his government, the apartheid regime of 1980s South Africa. Tim Robbins plays the head of an anti-terrorist unit that goes after Chamusso. Screenwriter Shawn Slovo’s parents were actually anti-apartheid activists.

+  This isn’t one of those Hollywood movies about foreign people that’s really about the American, or about black people that’s really about the white guy. In fact, all of the people in the movie are Africans, and the main character is the black guy. Still, in some ways the man that Tim Robbins brilliantly portrays is the more interesting one. Patrick’s motivations are pretty clear, but what of the guy who can knowingly countenance what some might call “harsh interrogation techniques” but invite his victim for Sunday dinner, who thinks that the system he is fighting for is bound to fail but seems sincere in his desire to protect it. He’s an immoral person, but not a person with no morals. As for Patrick, about half way through I realized that his story was a little bit imperfect somehow, and that therefore it must be a true story. This was a good thing. At the very end, the real Patrick Chamusso appears to movingly complete the tale.

- The story starts just a little bit slowly (but becomes absorbing). I might have hoped the story would tell a bit broader tale about the struggle against the racist government, but it’s a smaller movie than that. The beginning of the movie, though, does show the ways that different people resist and accommodate repressive governments, and the everyday indignities that apartheid imposed on black South Africans.

= ***1/4 An intriguing quasi-thriller than happens to be fact-based and with an exotic setting.

IMDb link

Tsotsi (***1/4)

This year’s foreign-language Oscar-winner is a gritty, realistic urban story of a thug who finds himself with someone else’s baby.

This is only the second of the foreign-language Oscar nominees to open in Philadelphia. (Two others will shortly follow.) With its win last Sunday, the release is rather timely. Tsotsi (translated as “thug” in the movie) is based on the only novel by celebrated South African playwright Athol Fugard. Writer-director Gavin Hood has deftly reset the novel, written during apartheid’s rise, in modern Soweto and Johannesburg. Presley Chweneyagae has the title role of a gangster who finds himself taking care of someone else’s baby. The movie doesn’t shy away from showing Tsotsi’s brutal side, or the environment that hardened him. As Hood has pointed out, the essence of the story, the gangsta with a heart of gold, could have been set in Philadelphia, or the Rio of City of God, or almost any large city. Even so, two particularly South African things stand out. One is the music, mostly an African rap hybrid with songs by Zola, who has a supporting role as a rival gang leader in the film. The other is the language. Even though you’ll need the subtitles, the dialect is a fascinating mélange of tribal languages and English. If there’s a flaw, it’s that the change we see in Tsotsi happens too fast. Even so, the portrayals by Chweneyagae and the other actors (especially those who play the baby’s parents) are first rate, and Hood renders Fugard’s story with subtlety and precision.

IMDb link

posted 9/10/13