IN MY COUNTRY A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2005 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
Filled with gut-wrenching stories told to South Africa's apartheid amnesty commission, IN MY COUNTRY, nevertheless, lets no cliché go unspoken in one of the worst scripts of the year. And the acting by the fine and usually reliable actors, Samuel L. Jackson, Juliette Binoche and Brendan Gleeson, is just as clichéd and unconvincing. This is a sanctimonious movie that will drive most viewers crazy with its dialog.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Langston Whitfield, an American newspaper reporter, and Juliette Binoche plays Anna Malan, a South African reporter from a proud Afrikaner family. Her family says things like, "It's open season on whites now," and "It's not our country anymore." Langston and Anna meet at a press conference in which white reporters ask questions such as, "Do black people have a special capacity for forgiveness?" of the all-black commission, which has been formed after the end of apartheid to decide which whites deserve amnesty.
Anna, who bonds best with black South Africans, begins to have an affair with Langston, although they are both married and have kids. He asks her such sole searching questions as, "Where was God when you needed him?" To which she replies, "He was on our side."
More like a grade school poem of cheap platitudes than a movie, it reaches its lowest point in a bar, where the reporters like to hang out, get drunk, sing and dance. Langston explains life in America to these South Africans, saying "If you're black in America, every day of your life you're made to feel like you don't belong." I nearly gagged. I immediately got an image of a prosperous American Jew in 1945 complaining to concentration camp survivors in Germany about his daily problems with anti-Semitism in America.
IN MY COUNTRY runs a long 1:44. It is rated R for "language, including descriptions of atrocities, and for a scene of violence" and would be acceptable for teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, March 18, 2005. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
Web: http://www.InternetReviews.com
Email: Steve.Rhodes@InternetReviews.com
Want free reviews and weekly movie and video recommendations via Email?
Just send me a letter with the word "subscribe" in the subject line.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39533 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1368469 X-RT-TitleID: 10003882 X-RT-SourceID: 703 X-RT-AuthorID: 1271 X-RT-RatingText: 1.5/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews