While South Africa’s currently high Hollywood profile is putting smiles on the faces (and much-needed cash in the pockets) of many figures in the country’s film industry, it appears that not all local actors are as pleased. The Guardian reports that a number of prominent local thesps have spoken out against the casting of bankable […]
Back off, Hollywood
Posted by Guy Lodge · 10:39 am · December 8th, 2009
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Freeman’s Mandela “less impersonation than incarnation”
Posted by Guy Lodge · 8:34 am · December 3rd, 2009
It goes without saying that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller has a more informed perspective on Nelson Mandela than most of the critics currently assessing Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus.” Keller was, after all, the NYT’s Johannesburg bureau chief in the time that Mandela came to power. So it’s interesting — if not particularly meaningful […]
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Hollywood, Johannesburg
Posted by Guy Lodge · 12:36 pm · November 9th, 2009
In January 2005, exactly one week after I left my birth town of Johannesburg to study film in the brighter lights of London, Darrell James Roodt’s earnest AIDS drama “Yesterday” became South Africa’s first Oscar nominee in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Only a month later, the rather better “uCarmen eKhayelitsha” took the Golden […]
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PAGE TO SCREEN: “Playing the Enemy” by John Carlin
Posted by Guy Lodge · 11:42 am · June 10th, 2009
There are few things as antithetical to great drama as an unmitigated hero, a character rendered almost inhuman by unfailing nobleness and valor. In fiction and non-fiction alike, we are inevitably more compelled by the flawed and conflicted of our kind – whether in lurid warts-and-all celebrity biographies or more subtly probing character studies. In […]
Filed in: Page to Screen
Freeman tapped Eastwood to direct ‘Invictus’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 1:02 pm · June 5th, 2009
Toward the top of this John Powers profile of Morgan Freeman (published in part online and appearing in full in the June issue of Vogue), the actor drops an interesting bit of information I wasn’t aware of until now. Most people were (as always) quick to call Clint Eastwood an Oscar hound for his choice […]
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EXCLUSIVE: Eastwood’s Mandela film titled ‘Invictus’
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 7:50 pm · June 2nd, 2009
It’s interesting how news bites trickle down. A passing comment from our own Chad Hartigan over at Twitter stirred the stagnant buzz nest of Clint Eastwood’s still-filming Nelson Mandela project for me, so I did a little digging. Anyone who follows the film awards season is well aware of the project, which will star Morgan […]
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SANTA BARBARA: Clint Eastwood hailed as a Modern Master
Posted by Kristopher Tapley · 12:44 am · January 30th, 2009
So Clint Eastwood arrived in town tonight without all the pizazz you might have expected, as I reported from this evening’s Arlington Theatre event. But inside the place was bananas. Every single seat in the theater was filled, many of the locals vocalizing their shock on the way down the aisles. “I’ve never seen it […]
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