A while back in these pages, I was dumping on a movie ("The Last King Of Scotland") for giving us the same-old white man's view of Africa. What we really needed, I wrote, was an African view of Africa, something like an African "City of God," which gave an insider's look at life and crime in Rio's favelas.
Well, "Blood Diamond," besides being a decent enough adventure movie, sure didn't change the old paradigm, but this month sees a South African film called "Tsotsi" on release, and it promises a local take on contemporary urban Africa.
With its tale of a gang of young thugs stealing and killing to survive amid shantytown squalor, the film certainly promised to be an African "City of God." The film's execution, however, is rather less thrilling. It has nothing like the visual verve and riveting storytelling that made Fernando Melles' "City Of God" such a memorable experience. That film found compelling characters and stories in the reality it depicted, but "Tsotsi" feels far less real, and more like a liberal "issue" film set on showing that even the hardest criminals can be rehabilitated through the "wuv of a widdle boo-boo baby."