Father Geek Here, I'm running behind on posting my normal columns because of this weekend's Butt-Numb-A-Thon, Not only did the event have me locked in a theater for the better part of 2 days, but Harry and I were confined to the AICN screening room most of the rest of the time Thursday, Friday, and Monday hosting many of the out of state guests/attendees that flew in beginning Wednesday. For example, today at one point we had 10 geeks from the Minn./St.Paul area over for about 5 hours starting at 11am. No sooner had they left when The owner of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Tim, showed up and we started planning next years BNAT. Then an hour later attendees from Canada and California dropped in and the 8 of us talked and watched film until about 2am this morning(Tuesday). Anyway thats the way its been here at Geek Headquarters for the last 5 days. I'll make a point of catching up by this time tomorrow. Sorry!Now here's a bit that came directly to my PC...

Don't know if you're interested but last night I went to the BAFTA screening of BLACKHAWK DOWN at the Empire in Leicester Sq, London. Let me just say this...Interesting. (I will try and keep this as spoiler free as possible.) This is a difficult review to write, as I am in two minds. First off, there are some standout performances. Eric Bana is simply brilliant as the grizzled, 'been there, done that' Delta Force veteran. He is totally convincing, and almost unrecognisable from the last film I saw him in, the excellent 'Chopper'. Look forward to Hulk. Josh Hartnett is good, but somehow I find it hard to suspend my disbelief that much. Does anybody buy that this kid is a Marine (or a WWII fighter pilot for that matter)? His performance was competent enough however. Tom Sizemore does what he does best, shouting hoarsely. But we have seen it all before in 'Ryan'. A parallel theme which runs throughout the film. At least Scott avoids the jerky camera-shake to some degree! Empire magazine billed this as 'The first twenty minutes of 'Ryan' sustained for two and a half hours'. And to some extent I can see why that made the project viable. But in truth it is all a little too much. After the first hour and a half of machine guns and dead bodies, you become numb to it. It almost becomes banal and boring, and unsure of how to end itself. How do you top a two hour hour bloodbath. Blood being the operative word here. Some of the violence is extremely gory (Think Starship Troopers), and other bits are sort of in-between too much and too little, but still not quite right. The film credits the Somalis with having little or no brains (The brave Americans know how to duck and cover, but the bad guys just keep charging into bullets regardless of the fact that ten men dropped dead at their feet just in front of them)

Scott's direction is as you would expect it to be. It is very competent, very fast and very loud. But I am confused as to why he picked this material. Maybe he thought another violent epic would erode away the stink that was Hannibal, 'a glorious powerhouse return to form' sort of thing. Sadly though, I don't think this is it. Not to say that this a bad film, because it isn't. I just could have done with a bit less gunplay, and more character analysis. And a bit less of the 'don't worry about it, you'll be back in no time' dialogue. And 'Tell my mom I fought hard'-'You can tell her yourself!, just hang in there!' is a little corny.

The film has become very topical because of Sept 11th. In the closing captions, it states that after Somalia, the US gov changed its policy on deploying ground troops in international civil unrest, and it remained so until the attacks on Sept 11. Now the troops are in Afghanistan. etc etc..

Our dear old Ridley was there to answer questions afterwards, as well as Jerry Bruckheimer, Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett and Jason Issacs. On being asked 'was this an easy film to make', Ewan replied, 'Acting wise this was very easy. Because when an RPG is supposed to be flying towards me, an actual RPG is flying towards me! So there was not much stretching of the imagination on this film. None of it was blue-screen'. You can sense his frustration working on those little Lucas films.

Overall a strange choice of film to make, strangely lacking in a point. But not bad. Just not excellent.

Yours EL GUAPO.

Then there was this from Ryan...

Artive I read online today about Lex, Kelly, and Clarence getting ill while in Africa. Click here to read it...

Survivor 4 Possible Spoiler below Just go here to find it...

Now here's SOTHA, Rigobert, and Nurse Hollis...

DR.SOTHA back for another edition of Africa-AICN.

Thanks to my Armadillo catharsis a week ago, I was able to muster up the courage to head back to my labs. Thankfully, for the moment, those Plant cop rats weren’t sniffing around like a bunch of muppets. Poor Nurse Hollis seemed in a terrible state. She hadn’t seen me in near a month, and someone from Homicide kept paying her regular visits about my whereabouts. Nurse Hollis did the only thing she knew how – she seduced him and threatened to send the pictures to his wife. God bless her. So, things are back to normal here at the wards, and the column can now run smoothly again.

Send me your best infidelity snaps to africaaicn@hotmail.com

Hollis, you just earned yourself a Christmas bonus…

SOUTH AFRICA

* Harry Potter has met his match in South Africa. A local film has achieved the seemingly impossible feat of displacing Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone from its pole position immediately upon release - as well as outperforming Potter's opening gross of one week earlier. Mr Bones, produced by Videovision Entertainment and distributed by UIP, achieved the all-time biggest opening for a South African title in the territory with $289,106 (R2,964,781) from 87 prints after opening on Nov 30. The film removed Harry Potter, which debuted on Nov 23 with $288,236 (R2,955,864), from the top spot. The comedy is the third largest opening of all-time in South Africa, behind Mission: Impossible 2 ($327,920) and The World Is Not Enough. The film stars South Africa’s biggest box office star Leon Schuster as a white witch doctor who is sent looking for the son of his tribal king but brings back an American golfer. Schuster has appeared in a host of popular South African hits including Panic Mechanic, which is the second highest grossing film ever in the territory after Titanic

* Independent South African producers Jeremy Nathan of Avatar Digital, Joel Phiri of ICE Media and Kobus Botha of Ballistic Pictures have formed an alliance to make up to eight feature films to be produced on digital over the next two years. The alliance, called D-V-8 Films, announced last week that 14 projects have been selected for extensive script development - titles include The Block by Jason Xenopolous, Virgin Margaritas by Licinio Azevedo, and Forgiveness by Greg Latter. Adhering to a Dogme style, 'without the dogma' according to Nathan, the project has the full support of The Hubert Bals Fund and the Rotterdam Film Festival. The trio has set a budget limit on the projects at $200,00! 0 (R2,000,000). Any genre can be produced but period films must be produced within the budget parameters - cast, crew and locations must be kept to a minimum and the emphasis should be on putting the script on the screen and on characters, dialogue and locations. "Far too often Southern African scripts deal with issues rather than stories. African audiences, and world audiences, want to be entertained, not lectured. We want to focus on commercial, challenging stories that are cinematically told," says Botha. The projects went through an extensive script development process. The first workshop was held last week outside Cape Town and was facilitated by Claire Downs of the NFTS in Beaconsfield. Production will begin around May/June. "DV8 hopes to facilitate the creation of a sustainable flow of films, not one-off events that become landmarks just for being made, but rather a steady stream of films revealing our many cultures. Feature film production in Southern Africa remains ! sporadic at best, and non-existent at worst, and we're going to address that," says Nathan. ICE Media and the Film Resource Unit have been appointed as the distributor of the films for Africa, excluding South Africa and it is envisaged that FRU/ICE will commit a minimum of $7,700 (R80,000) per film as a minimum guarantee against African rights. DV8 itself shall handle any pre-sales or commissions from South African broadcasters and exhibitors. Distribution and Marketing costs shall be capped at $19,200 (R200,000) per film.

* A South African television documentary that revealed the secret hideout of a clergyman accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has won the 2001 ICIJ Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. Jacques Pauw, an investigative reporter for the SABC, won with his TV documentary, The Bishop of Shyogwe. This is the story of an Anglican bishop accused of conspiring with the Rwandan government to kill Tutsis who sought sanctuary in his parish compound. The ICIJ award judges chose Pauw as the winner of the $20,000 first-place prize, saying that without his efforts the bishop, who was wanted on genocide charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, might never have been brought to justice.

* New projects by art-house favourites Peter Greenaway, Catherine Breillat, Ulrich Seidl, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Alexandr Sokurov head a strong line-up at the forthcoming Cinemart co-production market in Rotterdam (Jan 27-31, 2002). Also in the mix are three South African features, Norman Maake’s Soldiers Of The Rock, Jean & Zinaid Meeran’s P-I-G, and Ice Media’s Lumumba. Underlining Cinemart’s ability to put together financing for the top art-house pictures of the year, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Jan 23-Feb 3, 2002) will showcase recent Cinemart beneficiaries which have marked the festival circuit in 2001. They include Fruit Chan’s Hollywood Hong Kong, Andres Wood’s Loco! Fever, Zhang Yang’s Quitting, Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s Hush, Merzak Allouache’s The Other World and Luis Fernando Carvalho’s To The Left Of The Father. Earlier this week it was announced that the Russian government would invest $1m in Greenaway’s $11m trilogy, The Tulse Luper Suitcase, marking a novel piece in the director’s usual financing jigsaw. The cash will be channelled through the Studio 12-A production outfit. In addition to special sidebars - "The Desert Of The Real" and "Looking Glass" - the topic will be examined through screening of pictures by David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Alexandr Sokurov and Mike Figgis. The festival, which has yet to announce its main competition line-up, unveiled special tributes "Filmma! kers In Focus" to US experimentalist Stan Brakhage, Zacharias Kunuk, director of Atanarjuat The Fast Runner, and the social critic Goran Markovic.

* The non-governmental distribution agency, The Film Resource Unit (FRU) in association with North-West Cultural Calabash, will be showcasing the best of South African and African film productions at this year's edition of the Calabash festival in Mafikeng. The Calabash African Film Festival runs from 14 to 17 December. It will be launched on Wednesday 12 December 2001 with the short film, The Little Girl Who Sold The Sun, produced by the late Senegalese filmmaker, Djibril Diop Mambety. The Festival will feature a total number of eight productions. For more info contact Thabo Seadira at seadira@hotmail.com

NORTH AFRICA

* Rigobert Song:

Hello Readers. I bet most of you don’t know that there is a flourishing movie-making industry in Nigeria, and its all produced on video. Despite the country facing an economic depression, they continue to make videos and sell masses of them to the locals. Thunderbolt is one of its shining successes. Remember to email me at rigobertsong@hotmail.com with your African film musings.

Thunderbolt

Directed by Tunde Kelani – Nigeria -- 110 minutes -- In English

Thunderbolt will come as a bolt out of the blue to most Americans, even aficionados of African cinema. It is one of the best examples of the little-known but burgeoning video industry of Nigeria. Produced with European government grants and television subsidies, they function as an "art house" cinema independent of any marketplace. Nigerian video, in contrast, is wholly intended for and financed by a mass market. It is estimated that last year alone over 600 feature length videos were produced in Nigeria; one distributor reports selling over 500,000 tapes a year. The new Nigerian video industry is without doubt one of the most vibrant new developments in the world cinema t! oday.

Videos are cheap to produce; with budgets as small as $4,000, shooting rarely lasts more than ten days or two weeks. The break-even point is 10,000 units sold and a successful title can sell over 100,000 copies. Videos sell for between 300 and 400 Naira (US$2.25 - US$3.00). There are over 30 stalls in the Lagos central market devoted to video. The majority of cassettes reportedly are bought by "housewives" affluent enough to afford a VCR. The poorer majority of Nigerians sees these productions in video theatres, originally little more than a spare room in someone's house but with the advent of video projection, discrete facilities.

Given the conditions of their production, it is hardly surprising that what results is hastily produced, inexpensive popular entertainment rather than art films. Most titles are heavily influenced by soap opera and focus on the Lagos elite, simultaneously ogling their material success while deploring their corruption. Infidelity and magic figure prominently often together. Thunderbolt rises above these by attempting to treat a political theme - national unity -important unfinished business for Nigeria in the aftermath of the brutal Civil War of the 1960s.

The first half of the film is in a sense a retelling of the Othello story - except the protagonists are not Abyssinian and Venetian but Yoruba and Ibo. Yinka and Ngozi met in the National Youth Service Corps; Ngozi is finishing her stint as a teacher in a village while Yinka already works as a construction engineer in a nearby city. The seeds of jealousy are planted when a friend of Yinka, like Iago in the Shakespeare play, suggests that Ngozi is having a secret affair because "Ibo are untrustworthy." Adding to Yinka's suspicions, Ngozi has recently inherited some money and so is a financially independent woman. In this half, as in the Shakespeare play or any standard Western melodrama, the action is propelled entirely by psychological motivations.

In the second half of the film a distinctly West African emphasis on the supernatural comes to the fore; curses and ritual cleansing take the place of psychological explanations. An old man (possibly the spirit of her grandmother) warns Ngozi that her death is imminent and will strike her like a thunderbolt. We later learn that Yinka has placed the curse of magun upon her, a curse reserved for those suspected of infidelity. Magun is described as "African AIDS"; any man who has sex with a woman infected with it will die - but not before crowing like a rooster, doing somersaults or vomiting blood. On the other hand if the woman does not have sex within nine weeks she will die. It is interesting how some knowledge of AIDS transmission seems to have been appropriated into popular folk beliefs.

Despite her skepticism Ngozi undergoes a long and painful treatment by a herbalist. This introduces a subsidiary theme in the film - the value of traditional African medicine. A scene is interposed where a doctor scandalizes his colleagues by suggesting that the West has been arrogant in rejecting the wisdom of traditional healers. As the time for Ngozi's death approaches, neither her husband nor an old lover can be induced to have sex with her. She finally convinces Dimeji, a doctor who had previously offended her with his advances. He is immediately stricken and only saved by the herbalist. Ngozi and Dimeji are reconciled and will apparently become a couple and live happily ever after - despite her former antipathy and marriage. Ironically the curse has forced Ngozi to become what she was falsely accused of being - an adulteress - yet th! is is certainly poetic justice for the perfidious Yinka. Dimeji says he hopes Ngozi will not think all Yoruba men are cads; she replies with the moral of the story: "there are only two tribes, good and bad people."

The emergence of a vital and prolific popular cinema in Nigeria could be regarded as an important African response to the encroachment of Western pop culture in this age of global information flows. On the other hand Nigerian video films, perhaps inevitably, reflect some of the less attractive features of post-colonial society. There is a fetishism of material prosperity often in imitation of Europe and America; Westernization seen through African eyes. And one can't help wondering what the public health impact of validating traditional over Western medicine might be in a continent fighting the AIDS epidemic. An indigenous popular cinema will inevitably transmit and reinforce the priorities and beliefs of the society that finances it. An art cinema based in essentially non-profit filmmaking, on the other hand, can risk interrogating that s! ociety's values and suggesting alternatives. Nigerian cinema may soon face the same problem confronted by the U.S.: how to nurture and finance a non-commercial cinema, which can act as a critique and complement to its commercial counterpart.

* Actress Calista Flockhart still has nightmares about her genital mutilation fact-finding visit to Kenya a year ago. The Ally McBeal star took off to Kenya with human rights activists to get a taste of what young girls have to endure in certain areas of Africa in the name of tribal practice. Flockhart says, "I've always been very passionate about women's rights and the reason why I went is I had only a vague understanding of FGM [female genital mutilation] so I went to learn more about it. I felt deeply disturbed by it and I felt panicked and helpless and I can't get the sound of one little girl's cries out of my head. I think about it all the time. It's one of those things that you see and you never ever forget it. Hearing a little girl scream and nobody is paying any attention to her and just mutilating her. That just doesn't happen." The actress admits meeting campaigners fighting to stamp out the dangerous tribal practice, which varies from cuts aro! und the clitoris to the entire removal of the clitoris and labia minora - often using equipment like razor blades and broken glass, made her realise how trifling her own problems were. She adds, "I learned how small the world is. I always thought of Africa as being so far away and so remote and so different from the world that I live in and it is but fundamentally I learned that we really are the same. I met this young girl called Beatrice who I just adored. I called her my little revolutionary. She stood up and said, `No, I will not be cut, ' and I was struck by her courage. She inspired me to stand up for myself and be strong and stand up for what I believe in my daily small, tiny little battles."

AFRICAN AMERICAN

* Alfre Woodard has joined the cast of Jon Amiel's sci-fi drama "The Core" for Paramount Pictures. Shooting starts this month. Woodard will star alongside Oscar winner Hilary Swank, Bruce Greenwood, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Aaron Eckhart, DJ Qualls and Tcheky Karyo in the story of a group of space shuttle astronauts who discover that the Earth has stopped rotating because of a change in the planet's core temperature. To restore the normal temperature, they must travel to the center and detonate a nuclear bomb. Woodard will play a NASA control chief. (So basically Armageddon with a different cast – DR.SOTHA)

* Christian Slater, Gerry Butler and Patricia Velazquez are in negotiations to join LL Cool J and Val Kilmer in Intermedia Films' action-thriller "Mindhunters" for director Renny Harlin. Production is slated to begin next month in the Netherlands for Intermedia-based Outlaw Prods. and Avenue Pictures. The five actors will play members of the FBI's psychological profiling division, referred to as mindhunters, who are training seven new recruits on a remote island to track serial killers. The trainees must put theory into practice when it emerges that a killer is among them.

* Halle Berry who reportedly received a $500,000 bonus to bare her breasts for a sun-bathing scene in Swordfish has said that she has taken steps to insure that she won't be called upon to go topless if she gets the role as the next "Bond girl." In an interview with the online site Cinema Confidential, Berry said she has been asked to play Bond's "nemesis" in the next feature. "I will not be topless," she interjected when asked about the film. "I actually have a clause that says, 'I will not be topless in this movie.'" Asked about a remark by actor Samuel L. Jackson who has appeared with Berry in three films (Jungle Fever, Losing Isaiah, and Strictly Business) that her breasts represented "probably an extra $20 million on the Swordfish box office," Berry shot back, "So when is he going to bare his stuff to make 20 more million dollars ..! . if that's what he thinks that does!" (These are important social issues that need to be resolved – DR.SOTHA)

* Renée Graham, the black writer of the "Life in the Pop Lane" column for the Boston Globe, has urged a boycott of the Black Entertainment Television (BET) channel for failing, after 20 years, "to become the major creative outlet many African-Americans once envisioned," and becoming instead a channel "laden with lousy rump-shaker rap videos and an endless parade of infomercials." In a column appearing on the front page of the Globe's "Living" section, Graham rebukes black leaders for not going beyond their occasional swipes at the channel. "They will not," she writes, "call for a boycott. Why not? [BET chairman Robert] Johnson has tuned out the complaints for years, and with little resistance, he and his BET cronies have sold out the very community they claim to serve by offering the most narrow! , unchallenging programming imaginable."

* Florida police, DEA and FBI agents searched O.J. Simpson’s home as part of an investigation into an international Ecstasy smuggling ring Tuesday. The former football player, who was acquitted of murder in 1995, has not been arrested, indicted or named as a suspect in the case. "He has never been and never will be involved in any kind of drug use, dealing or sale," said Simpson's lawyer, Yale Galanter, who believes the search was prompted by a brief mention of Simpson by one of the suspects in a secretly recorded conversation during the two-year investigation. According to reports, Simpson's home was just one of nine locations being searched as investigators sought further evidence in the case that recently resulted in ten arrests and two warrants for suspects still at large.

DR.SOTHA REVO & OUT