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B- |
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N/A |
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N/A |
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A Little Too Manipulative but Had Moments
by Tones (movies profile)
Apr 5, 2005
In the end, I gave this a B- because I survived thru the entire movie despite the fact that I thought the development was too slow.
The director of this movie also did "Salaam Bombay", a movie I love. In that movie, she worked with a lot people who were not actors and she made them incredible.
In this movie, she worked with real actors entirely. I think the acting was too staged, uptight, and not natural. Those who acted well acted too comical to me. The Indian family for example were too stereotypical Indian and Denzel Washington's character's family were too stereotypical deep south African Americans.
So what happens is that both nationalities play to stereotypes and as a result, I wasn't able to get inside their minds and feel or understand their presence in life.
Parts of this movie were brilliant. The footage and scenes relating to and of Uganda were beautiful and important historically. The landscapes of Uganda really worked. Also the young female daughter's father (the one who wanted to go 'back to his home in Uganda') acted brilliantly. I felt his longing and saw it in his character's eyes (A+ acting performance by him).
Unfortunately Denzel Washington and the 24 year old girl were both not convincing to me as lovers. This was mainly because I thought the acting of the 24 year old was shallow, boring, unconvincing, and unpersonable. In a movie, you have to fall in love with the character's for the romance to work. I didn't find either of the character's intersting.
Also, although bold, the story idea of throwing immigrant Indian-Ugandans into the deep south to try and create a message of how similar African Americans in the south were was intriguing but didn't work for me. Clever, but not thought out well enough. Filming Mississippi was interesting too, but the slow development without development made the idea uninteresting.
The attempts at visual were nice (such as the lovemaking scene) but also boring and not effective. Denzel Washington is not a good sex scene actor. He looked uncomfortable. So did she.
Because I wasn't convinced by many of the characters I had trouble staying with this movie.
I still finished thru the movie because of the relationship between the father leaving Uganda and his friend instructor who saved his life. It was heart wrenching when he returned 20 years later at the end to discover that his friend had died.
If the movie had focused on the more interesting aspect of the Indian family being forced to leave Uganda, this could have been an A+. But the scenes in the South were too distant (pardon the pun) from the crux of the story for the movie to work.
All in all, it has moments, but not good enough for me in the end. |
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