Go Fly One: Ziman’s Anime Adaptation a Denuded, Unnecessary Endeavor
Those familiar with Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 fifty minute anime of the same name will be sorely disappointed in Ralph Ziman’s modernized update of the controversial Kite. But a faithful, live action rendition would have crossed the boundaries and limits of what defines exploitation cinema since we’re talking about an orphaned school girl sex slave assassin. A more fitting nod came from Quentin Tarantino, who culled the origin tangent of O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill from Umetsu, in an anime sequence deemed too violent for live action. While a faithful adaptation would have seemed gratuitous, this end product is unable to elicit any kind of response at all, feeling utterly uninspired in look, tone, or content.
In a ravaged world facing the after effects of a global financial collapse, a young girl in Johannesburg named Sawa (India...
Those familiar with Yasuomi Umetsu’s 1998 fifty minute anime of the same name will be sorely disappointed in Ralph Ziman’s modernized update of the controversial Kite. But a faithful, live action rendition would have crossed the boundaries and limits of what defines exploitation cinema since we’re talking about an orphaned school girl sex slave assassin. A more fitting nod came from Quentin Tarantino, who culled the origin tangent of O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill from Umetsu, in an anime sequence deemed too violent for live action. While a faithful adaptation would have seemed gratuitous, this end product is unable to elicit any kind of response at all, feeling utterly uninspired in look, tone, or content.
In a ravaged world facing the after effects of a global financial collapse, a young girl in Johannesburg named Sawa (India...
- 10/8/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Main Street Films has committed to release Aussie writer-director Murali Thalluri.s post-Apocalyptic action adventure One on at least 600 screens in the Us.
That.s a remarkably wide Us release for the Adelaide-based filmmaker who has just one film to his credit, 2:37, a drama which chronicles a day in the lives of six high-school kids culminating in one.s suicide, which screened in Cannes. Un Certain Regard in 2006.
Main Street Films is co-producing and co-financing the film which will star Blood Diamond.s Djimon Hounsou and Pitch Perfect.s Alexis Knapp.
.We have a guaranteed release of a minimum of 600 screens in the Us, and have presold multiple key territories already, and we haven.t even shot the film yet. I.m pumped," Murali tells If.
Pre-production is due to start in Johannesburg and Cape Town in September, the first film shot under the Australian-South African co-production treaty signed...
That.s a remarkably wide Us release for the Adelaide-based filmmaker who has just one film to his credit, 2:37, a drama which chronicles a day in the lives of six high-school kids culminating in one.s suicide, which screened in Cannes. Un Certain Regard in 2006.
Main Street Films is co-producing and co-financing the film which will star Blood Diamond.s Djimon Hounsou and Pitch Perfect.s Alexis Knapp.
.We have a guaranteed release of a minimum of 600 screens in the Us, and have presold multiple key territories already, and we haven.t even shot the film yet. I.m pumped," Murali tells If.
Pre-production is due to start in Johannesburg and Cape Town in September, the first film shot under the Australian-South African co-production treaty signed...
- 5/18/2014
- by Don Groves
- IF.com.au
Blecher Rides Waves, Inelegantly
Cutting her teeth with the surfing 2010 short doc Surfing Soweto, director Sara Blecher has forged ahead, tackling similar territory with her fictional wave bound feature debut, Otelo Burning. Often feeling a bit puerile, films that fixate on surfing tend to use the sport as an over arching symbol of freedom and escape, and Blecher’s film is no different. A quartet of friends face a myriad of adolescent problems, only to find that surfing could be their ticket away from their issues to fame and fortune atop a gloriously blue break. It does however successfully employ the played out athletics to explore racial tensions and political unrest that plagued South Africa before the end of apartheid during the 90s with surprisingly grim inflection of tonal balance.
Blecher sets the familiar pieces in play with our dark skinned leading teens, Otelo (Jafta Mamabolo) and his little brother...
Cutting her teeth with the surfing 2010 short doc Surfing Soweto, director Sara Blecher has forged ahead, tackling similar territory with her fictional wave bound feature debut, Otelo Burning. Often feeling a bit puerile, films that fixate on surfing tend to use the sport as an over arching symbol of freedom and escape, and Blecher’s film is no different. A quartet of friends face a myriad of adolescent problems, only to find that surfing could be their ticket away from their issues to fame and fortune atop a gloriously blue break. It does however successfully employ the played out athletics to explore racial tensions and political unrest that plagued South Africa before the end of apartheid during the 90s with surprisingly grim inflection of tonal balance.
Blecher sets the familiar pieces in play with our dark skinned leading teens, Otelo (Jafta Mamabolo) and his little brother...
- 11/22/2012
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
LONDON -- "Tsotsi" means "thug" in the patois of South Africa's townships, and it also is the name of the title character in writer-director Gavin Hood's tough-minded film about a young man fighting against his own history of violence.
Brutal but believable, the film in some ways harks back to early Hollywood, when Jimmy Cagney or Richard Widmark played callow villains out of their depth in everyday life. With its highly original setting, "Tsotsi" will appeal to fans of thoughtful crime pictures beyond the festival and art house circuits.
The movie screened in London and was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It also will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Seldom has the desperate poverty of the shantytowns that sprawl beside cities such as Johannesburg been shown so vividly as in Hood's fast-moving story about a fearsome gang leader (Presley Chweneyagae) who unexpectedly discovers a kind of life different from one of violent crime.
Tsotsi leads a gang of vicious petty thieves but is frustrated by their pointless existence, and one day his anger explodes; he turns on one of them and beats him to a pulp. Horrified by his own behavior, Tsotsi flees until he finds himself in a wealthy part of the city.
In pouring rain, he spots a woman pulling up to her garage door. Almost without thinking, he does what comes naturally and steals the car at gunpoint, wounding the woman in the process. Racing away, Tsotsi hears a baby crying in the back seat and totals the car.
The young criminal's reaction when he finds himself taking care of the infant after the crash and the impact it has on his violent life makes for a winning tale. When he encounters a young mother (Terry Pheto) in the ghetto and she responds to his plight, the story becomes both darker and more absorbing.
Hood's filmmaking is accomplished, Lance Gewer's cinematography exceptional and there are fine performances throughout, especially by Chweneyagae as the memorably tortured young Tsotsi.
Brutal but believable, the film in some ways harks back to early Hollywood, when Jimmy Cagney or Richard Widmark played callow villains out of their depth in everyday life. With its highly original setting, "Tsotsi" will appeal to fans of thoughtful crime pictures beyond the festival and art house circuits.
The movie screened in London and was shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It also will screen at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Seldom has the desperate poverty of the shantytowns that sprawl beside cities such as Johannesburg been shown so vividly as in Hood's fast-moving story about a fearsome gang leader (Presley Chweneyagae) who unexpectedly discovers a kind of life different from one of violent crime.
Tsotsi leads a gang of vicious petty thieves but is frustrated by their pointless existence, and one day his anger explodes; he turns on one of them and beats him to a pulp. Horrified by his own behavior, Tsotsi flees until he finds himself in a wealthy part of the city.
In pouring rain, he spots a woman pulling up to her garage door. Almost without thinking, he does what comes naturally and steals the car at gunpoint, wounding the woman in the process. Racing away, Tsotsi hears a baby crying in the back seat and totals the car.
The young criminal's reaction when he finds himself taking care of the infant after the crash and the impact it has on his violent life makes for a winning tale. When he encounters a young mother (Terry Pheto) in the ghetto and she responds to his plight, the story becomes both darker and more absorbing.
Hood's filmmaking is accomplished, Lance Gewer's cinematography exceptional and there are fine performances throughout, especially by Chweneyagae as the memorably tortured young Tsotsi.
- 8/30/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 11/12/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
IMDb.com, Inc. takes no responsibility for the content or accuracy of the above news articles, Tweets, or blog posts. This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The news articles, Tweets, and blog posts do not represent IMDb's opinions nor can we guarantee that the reporting therein is completely factual. Please visit the source responsible for the item in question to report any concerns you may have regarding content or accuracy.