Saturday

At last, a proper, contemporary, movie review for you to get your teeth into. Last night I saw Catch a Fire. Not very well publicised, this is a film about apartheid in South Africa, starring Tim Robbins, and directed by Philip Noyce (Dead Calm, Patriot Games, Sliver, Clear and Present Danger, The Saint, The Bone Collector, The Quiet American, and so on). I think this film suffers from being based on a real life - as I've said before about other movies. It is too rambling. It took a long time for me to get motivated and interested in the character. There was no immediate struggle for him to deal with. Sometimes, it seemed, the film-maker was at odds with the facts of the story. He was trying to make the main character a good, honest man, but then had to deal with the fact of him having an affair and a child with another woman. You have to fashion real life to fit the pace of the film, I think. Here it doesn't quite succeed, although there were good moments of deliberate juxtaposition such as the funeral of ANC members cut together with the award ceremony of the soldiers that killed them. Perhaps an even more significant problem was that Noyce seemed sympathetic to the Tim Robbins character who tortured and killed possible terrorists. I found him shown to be fairly human and sensitive, which I thought was brave of Noyce, whereas at the end of the film we were quite obviously supposed to see him as a 'monster'. Overall, a fascinating insight into history, but not a great film.