Tsotsi
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Movie Reviews of Tsotsi
Movie Review: Tsotsi - This movie will become a classic
Summary: 5 Stars
A beautiful movie. I enjoyed every scene of this movie. Will view it again and again. I will recommend this movie to all my friends.
Movie Review: intense, but a reality checker, this is what many live
Summary: 5 Stars
a good study of personality shaping and someone wanting to be different but dont know how to start - at least he tries.Movie Review: Great !!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I really enjoyed this movie. It was quite intense and full of action. I plan to make it one of my annual reviews!!Movie Review: Don't Look Back - Review by a South African
Summary: 4 Stars
"Tsotsi" is a powerful, Oscar-winning foreign-language movie from South Africa that could make expat South Africans feel good for all the wrong reasons. Based on the 1960 Athol Fugard novel, it is a tough, unflinching story Directed by Gavin Hood that speaks with the authentic voice of the township, beautifully shot and directed while showcasing a stunning performance by Presley Chweneyagae..
This movie is easily comparable to the Brazilian favela gang movie, City of God but is a much more personal story that turns on an eerily sensitive portrayal by Presley. Everyone speaks in tsoti-taal, so be prepared to read subtitles and catch a few words in English and Afrikaans which sounds like guttural English and a melange of tribal languages. The music track will also bring you up to date with the new rap music of South Africa, kwaito which you might find a little more interesting than the us gangsta variety.
"Tsotsi" won't sell too many tourist seats on South African Airways and it will be perversely appreciated by expats for reminding them how safe and sound they feel in America. Likewise, their friends and relatives back home will come away advised to find better remotes, quicker-acting electronic gates and motion detectors. For the most part, if it makes South Africa seem attractive, it will be for those who enjoy the thrill of peering into a Darwinian World from the safety of a tourist bus....or a movie theater.
Nevertheless, it is a world class movie that will get 2 thumbs up from Ebert and Roper and have a respectable run in art houses, probably winding up on HBO. It won't attract the same crowd that watches Boyz in the Hood or other gangsta flicks because it is too introspective and turns on the kidnapping of a baby without hope of ransom, something 30 year old males will have a hard time making sense of. But it is still gripping in a way that gets at the heart of South Africa's children of the street, their free-floating threat and their ultimate cost to society.
The most compelling thing for ex-pats, and for that matter, the kind of refined audience that will actually go to this movie is both the viciousness and vulnerability of the lead tsotsi. It is truly frightening because you feel you can reach out to him but at the same time it could also cost you a bullet or thin knife to the heart. No wonder a green card feels so good........!
Yet the movie stands as a kind of cleverly crafted wake up call to help because the lost people seem capable of a rude redemption: the tsotsi saves a life....but only by taking another. Or that he does a good deed but only after crippling an innocent person.
Interestingly, according to the star, Presley, this movie played to sold out crowds in the townships, where kids often remarked "hey, that's like me." You'd kind of wish they didn't feel that way which begs the exit question, what can we do about these abandoned kids will come back to plague us.......?
It is interesting how this 1960 period story was updated to the new reality. AIDS awareness signs are everywhere and instead of it being about black-on-black township crime, the black victims are well-to-do suburbanites in a security obsessed upscale neighborhood, driving BMW's & Mercedes. The only white performer is a hardened detective who speaks perfect tsotsi-taal and blends seamlessly with new black majority South Africa. He is there to remind you that it is not just "their problem."
The acting is so good all around that if you just see it for its technical achievement you'll go away proud. If you see it for its overall story, you might think twice about taking the family back but at least you'll get a bracing update on what South Africa is, and feel proud that no one splattered it with whitewash.
Movie Review: Baby let's play house...
Summary: 4 Stars
Following on the ragged coat tails of previous award stormer's such as La Haine and City of God, Tsotsi also deals with marginalised youth gangs fighting for survival, respect and... decency. A tale of redemption amid the hopeless poverty of a Soweto township the film, based on Athol Fugard's novel, tells the story of a teenager who has consigned his past and future to the dumpster and is known only as Tsosti which, roughly translated, means hoodlum or thug.
In the aftermath of a robbery Tsotsi finds he has inadvertently stolen a baby. He takes it back to his shack where his inept attempts to look after the child force him to seek out a local girl who has recently given birth. This girl, also a victim of local lawlessness, (her husband having recently been murdered) is forced by Tsotsi to feed the child. This Madonna-esque epiphany in the midst of this urban hell hole triggers Tsotsi's journey back from the brink of damnation to retrieve his lost identity and to risk all by returning the child to its family.
Presley Chweneyagae's (try saying that after a stiff Pimms) portrayal of the young gangster is at once brilliant and alarming with a permafrost glare that often suggests an unsettling femininity. The subsequent replacing of his black leather jacket for a crisp white shirt as he begins his path to redemption is somewhat trite though, but when he takes the child to the top of a hill overlooking the distant city with a gospel choir singing under a nearby tree gives us one of the films most powerful moments - for the first time we see the possibility of beauty in a landscape that has hitherto been impossibly hideous.
Just as powerful is the film's soundtrack. In the early 80's there was much talk of `world music' and how African music in particular was about to be the next big thing. I suppose my own prejudices led me to expect an unholy marriage of Adam and the Ants and the Tarzan theme tune, when, in fact, it all sounded a bit saccharine-loaded and unexpectedly twee, and the `next big thing' became little more than the soundtrack of countless Yuppie dinner parties. Twenty years later African music may be about to gain a real foothold on the world stage due to Tsotsi's extensive use of Kwaito - a pan afro/house hybrid that merges Western electronica with the idiosyncratic grooves of post-apartheid South African Ghettos. Language barriers notwithstanding, Kwaito has the kind of attitude and swagger that really could connect with foreign audiences - and lets not forget - it was the film Blackboard Jungle which heralded in the Rock and Roll era of the 1950's and changed the world.
Adrian Stranik