Not Just Anybody's Help

If racism is a male invention, then one of the strengths of The Help lies in showing how that construct suits certain sections of the so-called opposite sex too.

White madams like Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly might allow maids like Octavia Spencer’s Minny to effectively rear their precious white babies, but the latter still have to use “separate but equal” toilets. In fact, the former has one specially built for her maid, typically expecting gratitude into the bargain.

Their performances, too, are nothing short of spot-on. This goes for 99% of the cast.

As a South African, of course, this is strikingly familiar. All the shades are there in this film which doesn’t feel long, though it is well over two hours; or for women only, though it mainly concerns women and most of the men are either ineffectual or insignificant.

The vastly under-utilised Sissy Spacek gives a wonderfully comic performance to lighten things up occasionally, while Viola Davis gives a seering performance as Abilene who, like most African domestic workers, can’t help loving the spoilt white brats she helps through their most important years. That her son was killed in a racist attack when he was 24 haunts every pore of her performance.

Some may say that this is American history and there are other issues that need addressing, but it’s a problem that is as alive today in South Africa as it is for, say, Philippinas in Saudi Arabia.

My only reservation is with the very watchable Emma Stone’s Skeeter and her back story, in which her mother (Charlotte Phelan) fired a loyal maid (Cicely Tyson) who had effectively been Skeeter's real mother. Skeeter's mother had done so to save face in front of some women’s association friends, and she did it in front of the old maid’s daughter.

When Skeeter finally confronts her mother about this painful incident and wants to make amends to the woman, she discovers that old Constantine Jefferson has died in the very meantime. It’s all very contrite and made up among the white mother and daughter, but no repairs are made to the maid’s daughter, who witnessed that humiliation. A single sentence would have repaired that damage.

Lastly, if Stone took to her role of schoolyard "hussy" in Easy A like a fish to water, then she seems a little out of her depth here. She looks a little too Seventies Romance Illustrated with her shaggy red curls as opposed to a Sixties young woman who is slowly becoming aware of - and doing something about - a social injustice.

She does all the right things by starting to record these women’s painful experiences and sharing her royalties with them, but she seems emotionally quite removed from the whole business. She seems much clearer about what she thinks of Southern men than just how committed she is to the women she has anonymously immortalised.

Even at the end she doesn’t seem terribly convinced that she will stay with them and is easily persuaded to not do so. She is given an oblique camera angle and she doesn’t even hug these women who have, at great risk, bared their souls to her.

If the film was trying to make a point about certain kinds of ambitious writers or liberals, whose concern is directly proportional to their distance from the problem, then it would have been fine. But one would have somehow expected more warmth here, more fire.

***

New Zealand has won the Rugby World Cup for a second time, at home, and everyone’s in a bit of a daze. People and the media seem reluctant to let it go, the former by still flying their tired flags on their cars and porches, the latter by squeezing every bit of mileage out of it that they can.

It’s all deserved, of course, what with most visitors having had a wonderful time. But the curious thing about the media is that every time they so desperately zoomed in on a potential hero, the poor bugger got injured.

First it was Dan Carter (aka Jesus), then his replacement, Colin Slade, then his replacement, cancer survivor Aaron Cruden, until last choice Stephen Donald had to come on in the final and – much to his surprise - kick the winning penalty.

Thank God (aka Richie McCaw) the captain's foot and gouged eye held out. Had he and the boys failed, who knows how many Pacific women would have had bruised eyes too?

***

Also on our screens at the moment are two addictive series. Season two of Downton Abbey has arrived with Dame Maggie Smith saying everything everybody else thinks, as has The Borgias, starring a magnificently depraved Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander, the head of “the original crime family”.

The tagline says it all: Sex. Power. Murder. Amen. And it feels so much more authentic than The Tudors, dripping as it does with the blood and ideas of 15th century Italy, which gave birth to the likes of the fiery Savonarola (Steven Berkoff) and astute Niccolo Machiavelli (Julian Bleach).

But then it’s written and executive produced by that master Irish-Catholic storyteller, Neil Jordan, and you can't get much better than that, can you?

Neil Sonnekus

Cussing Comedy

Two offbeat DVD movies this week.

The first, I Love You Phillip Morris, involves a straight American cop who is everything but straight. Not only is he gay but he’s also crooked, which certain quarters would say is the same thing.

I do not know the ideological arguments of two straight men playing gays, portrayed by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, but from where I stand they seem to do an excellent job.

In fact, if there was ever an argument to remake Some Like It Hot, producers need look no further than these two fine actors.

Carrey’s cop is just camp enough when he’s straight to indicate that he might be closeted, while McGregor gives his Phillip a recognizable kind of steely delicacy someone like Carrey’s Steven might fall for.

Directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who wrote another subversive delight, Bad Santa, the film takes its digs at everything that gets in its exuberant protagonist’s way. Christians, lawyers, criminals (the lines blur), you name it. Nothing is spared, not even dying of Aids.

So, a love story of a very special kind. Steven’s love may be blind but at least it’s passionate and inventive - and there’s always a price to pay for that. 


Not quite as slick but still as tongue in cheek and entertaining is Paul, starring an established comic duo, English actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

They will do such very unEnglish things as attend a sci-fi convention in America and then travel to the country’s UFO heartland. The last thing they really expect is to run into a real alien, especially one that is sassy, has a paunch, smokes pot and has superpowers.

Christians get a much rougher treatment by way of convert to cussing Kristen Wiig, which is another thing these two films have in common: an almost depressing amount of swearing.

Neil Sonnekus

From Miserable to Magical

This week I watched two DVDs about that one thing Hollywood generally avoids like the plague: middle-aged life.

Such people, of course, also have lives and loves. Hell, sometimes they even have sex.

The one film is much lauded and really bad. The other is much less awarded but quietly brilliant. Let’s get the former out of the way as soon as possible.

The script for Mike Leigh’s Another Year was nominated for an Oscar and the film got a special mention at Cannes. It should have got the Dorothy Parker treatment. That is, it shouldn’t have been tossed aside lightly. It should have been hurled across the room with great force.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are quietly happy and content. Their names are probably a gentle dig at Hollywood cartoons, but that’s the least of the film’s irritations.

He’s a geological engineer and she’s a therapist. Their son is a lawyer for the under-privileged. Oh, and they have a black friend too. She’s a doctor. All very cozy, very correct, very middle class.

Tom and Gerri are all cuddles, quiet contentment and endless patience as they work on their allotment in London in their spare time, but they seem to be living in a bubble. There is no news of the outside world in their lives - not regional, national or international. They do not discuss that outside world whatsoever, and they either have perfect sex or, perhaps being British, are happy not to have it all.

Whatever the case, there is not even the slightest smidgen of tension between them, whether sexual, social or familial. Perhaps this is Leigh’s attempt at celebrating the great and alleged sense and sensibility of being English.  

But Tom and Gerri are surrounded by human miseries. One of their best friends and certainly the most frequent one is a woman who works with Ruth. Mary, the deservedly lauded Lesley Mandeville, is one of those neurotics who is so self-obsessed that she undermines her own natural beauty.

We are subjected to the endless minutiae of her dull, uptight existence. She’s in her forties and life is rapidly slipping by. It’s a very astute portrait of such a type but by emphasizing it at the end Leigh is either condemning her or saying we should all try to be like Tom and Gerri, who mysteriously don’t spend any time on screen with people of their own social and professional standing.

If that is the case then they are not merely tolerant of all the struggling miscreants around them, they’re just unbelievably good – or intensely patronising - souls.

Another Year makes the occasional attempt at comedy but it isn’t funny and Chekhov was much, much better at this kind of existential farce. Nor is it the realism Leigh is supposed to be a master at – it’s Britain with its head right up its own deluded, white, liberal arse.

***

By contrast, Cairo Time stars one of the sexiest women on the planet, Patricia Clarkson. At the “ripe old” age of 51 this American actress isn’t sexy because she looks so much younger than her age but because she’s so confident and strong in her age.

Her wide mouth, corn-coloured hair and calm confidence express an American generosity that certainly echoes a more golden age of that country, let alone its film industry. But if the likes of Marilyn Monroe represented a tragic glamour, Clarkson represents a real, up-to-the-minute one.

Here she plays Juliette, the wife of a United Nations official, who is going to meet her husband for a holiday in Cairo. But he gets stuck in Gaza and asks his assistant, Tareq (Sudanese-born Alexander Siddig), to keep her company and, well, blonde West meets swarthy Middle East.

There are all kinds of tensions in the air. She finds it difficult to comprehend the fact that men openly leer at her on the streets, though she is not entirely disgusted by the fact. So too the fact that there are men-only restaurants, that women wear burkas in that heat, that underage girls work on the kinds of carpets she nevertheless has at home.

In one very telling scene Tareq asks her how many hours a day she works on her women’s magazine. After admitting that she can work up to twelve hours a day in that work-obsessed country, he replies in that understated Afro-Arabic accent of his: “This does not sound like a good life.”

If she is represented by a slightly sentimental French piano soundtrack, he’s represented by that mesmerising Middle Eastern music that is shot through with sensuality and danger.

The big question, of course, is: are they going to have an affair or not? There is no hint that she and her husband are unhappy. If she and Tareq do have a sexual affair there are those who will call her liberated and others who will say if her husband did the same he’d be an adulterous bastard.

Like life in the Middle East, it’s all very tenuous, tense - and deeply erotic.

Though it has some negligible continuity mistakes and even less seems to happen in this film than in the aforementioned mess, Canadian director Ruba Nadda comes up with such a quiet, elegant solution to the “problem” of these two individuals that it might well leave you gasping at its powerful simplicity. 

It certainly made my week after the Springboks and their comical coach, Peter de Villiers, seen below right before the Samoa match and with rising star Pat Lambie practising in the background, were beaten by Australia and a New Zealand referee.

Neil Sonnekus

Unsuitable Fellows

Since everything is so macho in New Zealand at the moment, I thought I’d take a look at two DVD thrillers.

The Lincoln Lawyer stars Matthew McConaughey as L.A. defence attorney Mick Haller who keeps people out of jail, mostly the innocent (his personalised number-plate is NTGUILTY) but not entirely.

In one case he’s actually got an innocent man into prison. That the man is Hispanic might say quite a lot about justice in that neck of the woods.

Coming into his galaxy is trouble in the guise of baby-faced millionaire estate agent Louis Roulet (Ryan Philippe). It’s the man’s profession that should have got Haller’s alarm bells ringing, but then he can’t turn down a client either.

Based on the eponymous Michael Connolly thriller, this is not a study on why the killer does what he (or she) does, it’s more about how slick Haller is at getting himself out of a tight situation.

Supported by the ever watchable Marisa Tomei as his ex-wife – she’s a prosecutor – and mother of their child, and the wonderfully craggy William H Macey, McConaughey doesn’t quite pull off the role.

This is because he looks a lot like Paul Newman but without the determined lower jaw and the wardrobe lady insists on dressing him in a suit that emphasises his shortness.

That is debut director Brad Furman’s fault in allowing bad angles and full-length shots to undermine his star, who is a very attractive man - from the waist up.

But at least this ex-music video director gets the retro opening sequence right with Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City by Bobby Bland. It‘s the kind of song and sequence that promises much, like the beginning of To Live and Die in L.A., which does deliver.

But if your film is only memorable for its title sequence you’re in trouble.

***

The Hit List, starring Cuba Gooding Jr, also has a retro opening sequence, but it looks like - and is as dated as – an old James Bond flick's. Its accompanying song, 47 Ways to Die, is also pretty forgettable.

In fact, the only cliché the entire movie avoids – and it’s also at the beginning of the film - is the one of someone sitting up directly from a nightmare.

Gooding’s Jonas is obviously a troubled man, but he’s also fighting a wardrobe lady. She too will emphasise his shortness – and the fact that he’s growing a little sideways. This is not good.

But she was obviously trying to echo Tom Cruise’s slick grey number in Collateral, since it’s a similar kind of story and, again, it’s the director’s fault.

William Kaufman blows things further by casting Cole Hauser as the man who’s getting royally screwed by everyone and might therefore want them dead: the man evokes no sympathy whatsoever.

That he can still talk straight after five full glasses of Jack Daniel’s is also his director’s fault, just like spilling coffee on to his groin and ending up with a messy shirt top is.

Gooding does his best to elevate his role of an avenging angel, but there’s too much militating against him, even though he has one or two good lines like "the trigger's like a fast-forward button. I just skip to the end credits of other people's lives."

One wonders, though, having won an Oscar for best supporting actor in Jerry Maguire and effectively playing in B-grade movies ever since, how much subtext there is when he says somewhat bitterly: “Fame doesn’t make you invincible.”

Neil Sonnekus

The Rugby Will Be Televised

The Rugby World Cup did not start very auspiciously for us.

My son and I tried to catch the local train to Party Central. The first one was full but we were told the next one was a mere five minutes behind it. It was, but it too was packed. So we went home and watched the opening ceremony on TV.

Then we rushed to a hill overlooking the city to watch the fireworks. The owner of the closest house had put a speaker out on his car roof so that we could all hear the commentary. There was a rather charming, old fashioned community feeling about the whole thing. My daughter was in her pyjamas.

When the commentator said the fireworks were an “orgy of colour” everyone burst out laughing. Kiwis, as a South African-born work coach told us, can hear the grass growing. Then we rushed home to watch the opening match, which was a crashing bore.

The next day I had to work in the city and thought I’d better take the train, since town would be jammed. I went an hour early, just in case, but the train was dead on time. "Town" was relatively quiet.

The government had stepped in and used its special powers to go over Auckland supercity mayor Len Brown’s bald head to ensure there wouldn’t be a transport problem again. If this were South Africa they would be accused of being unilateral racists, since they’re mostly white and he’s half Maori. Town was relatively quiet. So was Party Central. The long white cloud looked more like a mutant caterpillar.

Two weeks later my wife and I decided to take the train to town on our way to the big match between N’Zealand and France. If you had a match ticket you got free bus and train rides.

The train was punctual and the announcement matched what was happening. Auckland was bending over backwards to be efficient, and it was working

There was a good vibe on the train. The French fans were relaxed, but then they would be. We took the Fan Trail, which is a good 4.5km walk through the city.

Every restaurant, café and bar had a giant screen showing the match between England and someone else. The fine art and architectural faculties had installations in a park. They had drama students interacting with those installations in a way that Drama 101 students always seem required to do. They writhed.

People were sitting out in their front yards, having barbeques (bahbies, or braais) and drinks, exchanging pleasantries with the passers-by. Most houses were draped in flags, mostly of mixed loyalties. First the homeland, then the new land, New Zealand.

Quite a few French fans wore blue, white and red cocks on their heads. Others dressed up like musketeers or Vikings. They sang. They joked and flirted with the neon stewards, who were all over the place. They were incredibly friendly for people who were being paid nothing.

It was cold but a bunch of Frenchman wore grass skirts, skimpy bras, wigs and nothing else. They were carrying a banner that said Tahiti. Most of the All Blacks supporters wore black. Kiwis do this most of the time anyway.

Always one for the big occasion, I had a stomach bug. I drank water and Coke and couldn’t touch the tasty-looking sandwiches my wife had made, nor the dry wors (sausage) I had bought.

The feeling inside the newly refurbished Eden Park was amazing. The French were singing lustily and we had a seat behind one of the trylines. The seats were very narrow. My wife perved Dan Carter warming up on the field through the binoculars and I perved a French girl in the next row.

I offered the two Kiwis sitting next to us a stick of dry wors each. They politely said they’d share one. They ate it. A bit later they offered me the only beer we were allowed to drink, Heineken, which I had to decline.

“This [sausage] goes well with the beer,” the one said. “That's why it’s our national diet,” I replied.

The game was about to begin. After the anthems there was an electronic countdown on the big screen and the ref blew his whistle. The French attacked well for a while, but their backs ran at half speed. Unsurprisingly, they were smeared.

The first All Blacks try was scored right under our noses. After each score there was an electronic trumpet signal. “Ole!” everyone shouted. But then a lot of black cars with their multi-national flags look like bulls that have been pierced by banderillas.

During boring patches there were Mexican waves. This happened twice. After each referral to the video ref, electronic drums would beat dramatically, as if this were a Roman arena, care of Hollywood, awaiting Caesar’s thumbs up or down.

“All hail king Richard,” a wag said behind us, referring to Richie McCaw, also known as God, playing his 100th test match. The joker sounded like a local drunk.

Soon the French were trailing and every time their fans chanted “allez bleu” he responded, “nineteen-nil”. I looked around and saw a young, red-haired yuppie with his partner. He was probably a very quiet person in the week. Amazing how a bit of beer and crowd anonymity can bring out the joker in one.

Sitting directly behind my right ear was an older woman who clearly knew the rules of the game and kept on coming up with such quiet gems as: “Kill him. Kill him.”

The rest of the match happened so far away that I guiltily watched it on the big screen, trying not to think how much I’d spent on being at this game. Then it was over. We got out easily, passing rows upon rows of buses there to ferry fans wherever. We stepped on to the train and it pulled away. In town we did the same thing, all the while being guided by almost over-friendly officials. It was a relief to be home but I had to do this all over the next day.

It was raining cats and dogs, but my daughter and I caught the train anyway. It was packed with Samoan and Fiji fans. This was going to be the great inter-island war, I had reasoned. My daughter didn’t stop talking and giggling, but then fathers will forgive much, much more than that.

The train stopped at a distant outside platform, which meant we had to walk for about 15 minutes to catch the next train to Eden Park. But the supercity had laid on buses to take us that short distance. We decided to walk and I started thinking there was no way the city was going to make a profit like this.

The train took us to Eden Park and a Fijian brass band was plying Macarena on the street. The men wore sandals, white skirts, stiff blue military tops and white caps. They had a certain swagger to them that got heaps of applause. The rain kept on coming down.

We’d be sitting on the highest stand, held up by a complex of aluminum pipes. We had lunch under the stand, spoke to some South Africans. Amazing how little we had in common. I sat next to a Brazilian who only wore a short-sleeved shirt. He rumbled his feet and slapped his arms for the rest of the game to stay warm. Five young Fijian fans slid past us ten minutes into the game. They ranged from white to Indian to black. One of them had a deeply moronic laugh.

They would scarcely be sitting down before they’d leave again to buy a Heineken or snort a line in the toilets. Sitting this high up we could see better than sitting so low the night before. Pity the game was so boring. There were endless handling mistakes, so there were endless Mexican waves. Every time they approached us people rumbled their feet and I thought about the aluminum pipes.

The sun finally came out, the Brazilian thanked God, my daughter looked happy to have been there and we took a bus and then train back to our station.

Tonight my son and I are going to surprise our two Samoan relatives and take them to the Springboks-Samoa match. My family will be able to say we all attended the Rugby World Cup 2011 tournament.

After that I’m going to watch sport on the people’s medium: Maori TV.

Since most of its viewers are indigent they're showing all the games, free. I’ll be able to stretch my legs, drink the beer of my choice, save a lot of money, mute the commercials, laugh at my son's send-up of local accents and at least see the tries - in countless replays. 

Neil Sonnekus

Somewhat Limited

What would you do if you were a down and out writer and were suddenly given a miracle drug that would unleash the other 80% of your brain you don’t use?

This is not a question Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) loses much sleep about in Limitless (out on DVD).

When he gets the miracle drug, NZT, he does what most writers apparently would do. He starts trading with stocks and, like Faustus, seeks and gets power - in the form of money, cash, moola.

He doesn’t decide to become a Nobel-winning author or a philosopher, for example. He doesn’t try to solve the world’s moral or material problems. No, he becomes a trader. But then writers are such fickle creatures. Oh, he does also learn the piano and a couple of languages in a matter of days, so he’s not completely uncultured.

But if his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) drops him because he is all blocked up, then she’s quick to take him back once he’s gone straight again. That is, rich. And what’s the next logical step for a man of wealth in the United States of America? Why, the White House of course.

If this broad summary sounds cynical then I’d like to add hastily that this is a very entertaining film too. Made by the highly imaginative writer/director Neil Burger (The Illusionist), the story has amazing visuals and effects to match Inception – and it’s less indulgent: it clips along at a good, thriller-like pace.

Burger also very cleverly changes the lighting when Morra is “on” as opposed to when he’s just a struggling hack, and there’s a great soundtrack to be heard.

Obviously drugs like NZT don’t come without snags and where there’s money to be made the worms will come out of the woodwork. This is what gives the film its tension and urgency, but it could have been a little more satirical about that handful of people on Wall Street who are, after all, screwing us so royally.

***

Across the Atlantic there is the “explosive thriller” Incendiary (also on DVD), starring Michelle Williams and Ewan McGregor.

Interestingly, Williams’ character doesn’t have a name, though the backside of her jeans tells us she’s a Sexy Mama. If this is chauvinistic then it’s of a very special kind, because the director is a woman.

Sharon Maguire spends much too much time establishing that there’s a special relationship between what the IMDB calls a Young Mother and The Boy. The first visuals of the two of them trying to outstare each other without blinking at bedtime is tender and more than enough. But other scenes carry on, though admittedly they also illustrate how lonely and isolated this woman is. But it all eats up time.

In her voice-over, Williams tells us she’s a typical chav, watches Top Gear and her and her family’s religion is Arsenal Football Club. Fair enough. Her husband does have a name for some reason. Lenny (Nicholas Gleaves) is a bomb disposal officer and “tense and remote” doesn’t even begin to describe what he’s like.

This leaves Williams on her own much of the time and she will start having an affair with the man, Jasper Black (McGregor), who lives across the road. He’s a journalist and drives an Aston Martin or something equally ostentatious, and he isn’t even an economics reporter or editor.

Anyway, in the middle of coitus the unthinkable happens: there’s a bomb explosion at an Arsenal vs Chelsea match her husband and child are attending.

That’s the explosive part of the film, and there’s no Russian connection, but there’s no thriller part either because director Maguire constantly dwells on the maddening pain of loss Williams is going through. That makes it a drama.

She now befriends the Muslim child of a suspected terrorist and, to cut a very long story short, she ends up in hospital for a second time, which becomes unintentionally funny.

Moreover, her shrink has told her to write letters to Osama bin Laden and we hear those in voiceover too. The final nail in the coffin of this film is when she tells the now late Bin Laden that if he could see her and Black’s newborn infidel his heart would soften.

Neil Sonnekus

* The photographs on this page were taken at the brilliantly refurbished Auckland Art Gallery and feature the works of South Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, among others. The installation on the right,  Flower Chandelier, “breathes”. Furthermore, there is a promised gift from American philanthropists Julian and Josie Robinson and features works by the likes of Picasso, Dali and Cezanne, among many others. But then it can’t be that important because, unlike the Rugby World Cup, entry is free.

Come back, Oliver Stone

Isn’t it strange how so many films about South Africa are made by non-indigenes or, failing that, South Africans who live abroad?

Why would this be? There’s a very simple reason for it. It’s because the National Film and Video Foundation is so busy playing politics and signing co-production agreements in five-star hotels at far-flung festivals overseas that, at the end of the day, very little of that money makes it on to the screen.

And if it does, the final product is usually a pile of politically correct crap.

Anything critical of the present order, like the uneven but powerful Jerusalema, is not going to get a blue farthing because, well, some fellow filmmakers and apparatchiks thought that, “objectively”, it didn’t warrant funding.

I have some personal experience of this. I submitted a script and was told that as a thriller it was “ridiculous”. The gatekeeper, apparently an Iranian-American, was right of course. It didn’t work as a thriller because it was actually a romantic comedy.

So the next best thing for a filmmaker to do is go and live abroad, which most of those who have any talent and money have done, where it’s difficult enough to raise funding for a film as it is.

Then, once they have achieved that and got some big names attached to product Struggle South Africa, they might get some local funding via the Department of Trade and Industry, which will then hasten to stipulate that it doesn’t necessarily agree with the contents of the product.

And so you get a film like The Bang Bang Club, based on the eponymous book by photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva.

I have worked with two of the people depicted in this film and they’re not like they're shown at all, which needn’t be a problem but in this case it is. After all, this film is only “based” on a true story. The end credits assure us that all the characters in this film are fictitious, no doubt for legal reasons.

Marinovich, played by Ryan Philippe, in real life talks fast and walks fast. Maybe it has to do with the fact that if you stand still for too long in a war zone you might get killed, as he almost did – a few times.

But Philippe, who is not a bad actor at all, is directed to talk like what New Zealanders call a “Yarpie” (Japie). Obviously the accent is all over the place, which still needn’t be a problem, though Marinovich ends up looking and sounding more like another local photographer, who isn’t featured in the film anyway.

The next person to get a mauling is Robyn Comley, played by Malin Akerman, who is clearly in the film to provide a bit of female “colour”. As integral as she is to the boys in the “club”, she doesn’t get a postscript (she still works as a picture editor, at The Times in Johannesburg) and has more little devils running around in that blonde head of hers than Silver clearly can begin to imagine.

The point is, he is treading on hallowed territory and I’m not talking about South Africa or its townships. I’m talking about Oliver Stone turf. Say what you like about him, but a film like Salvador “captured” all the fear and madness of war and reporting on it that Bang Bang tries and generally fails to do.

But Silver does succeed in making the romantic depictions between Marinovich and Comley as cringe-worthy of Stone, who nevertheless was/is an expert at depicting contradictory male characters and could have had a field day here.

Silver has four mad glory boys here and fails 75% to delineate them and their private and professional lives. Two of the men are played by local actors, Frank Rautenbach and Neels van Jaarsveld, who still don’t work and I don’t think it’s their fault.

So this is not a let-South-Africans-be-played-by-South-Africans-and-death-to-all-foreigners argument, which is still very prevalent in certain circles there. Ken Oosterbroek (Rautenbach) is supposed to be the main victim of the club, yet he is not given enough background or build-up for us to pity him.

In fact, his fatal shooting is treated as secondary to Marinovich’s wound, which is crazy.

Silva (Van Jaarsveld) seems to tag along until the end, when he suddenly loses his cool, but again, no proper build-up to that moment. Presumably the film was already done by the time he lost both his legs in Afghanistan, because that is not mentioned in the postscript either.

Now, I didn’t know Kevin Carter, but Taylor Kitsch as the talented and morally confused photographer “captures” a little of the universal lunacy and confusion of the profession – even some dopey, Cape Town-like pretension. It’s far from a perfect role, but it does show some kind of vulnerability, some kind of humanity.

Yes, the film tries to address the ethics of clicking away while people are being killed, dying or dead, and yes it covers the territory of why should we care about four photographers' precious whites hides when black lives appear to be so much cheaper. But that should be actively implicit, not showing a red flag that it's trying to cover all bases.

Anyway, it was good to see Fiona Ramsay on screen and not just as having a voice-coach credit. She and Patrick Shai, Vusi Kunene and Russel Savadier, among others, prove that they don’t have to stand back for any international "stars" whatsoever.

So, a failure that succeeds in bringing a little more of South Africa’s troubled history to the world. Hell, one day that country might even succeed in doing so all by itself, but don’t hold your breath - especially not about the mess it's in at present.

Neil Sonnekus