Petty Resentment Theatre - Liveblogging 'Invictus'

A film-buff friend of mine encouraged me to watch the new Clint Eastwood movie Invictus, largely to see my reaction to it. Well, here it is. I made a log of the various states of outrage I reached as I watched the movie, which I now post here .

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Dear god, this is hammy.

For heaven's sake, they take almost ten minutes in the first scene where the black and white bodyguards rub each other up the wrong way.

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Now they're talking about changing the sport emblem, and Madiba's refusal to do so, the way other movies talk about launching the h-bomb. For fuck's sakes.

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Wait, and now Mandela is supposed to be wearing a South African flag pin? Dear god in heaven, why? I can understand Morgan Freeman not getting the accent right (and he doesn't -- it's quite distracting) but there's no fucking reason to give Nelson fucking Mandela ostentatious symbols of dedication to his nation. Anyway, they're really anachronistic, and have never been common in South Africa. I've certainly never seen Mandela wear one. It's a really asinine little zit on this hairy asscrack of a movie.

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 The Mandela character talking about Afrikaners: "They treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away from them, we will lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be."

Actually, Afrikaners (and the white English -- anybody remember the English? Put in place racial segregation, disenfranchised and dispossessed blacks, still to this day own most of the economic capital in SA's vital industries?) feared that the blacks would rise up and kill the whites in their beds, but never mind that. I'm sure a game of football is constitutive of a healthy nation, and this movie as stirring a portrayal of nation-building, as you make it out to be.

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Chester... Chester... Chester... yet throughout all the many (many, many) references to the Sprinboks' one player of colour, nobody dignifies Chester Williams enough to mention his surname.

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"It means 'God Bless Africa', which you got to admit, we can use."

And with that touching evocation of pure truth, Francois Pienaar calls knowing glances to the eyes of the racists who, just five second earlier, were throwing away the song sheet to the national anthem. (It had been the anthem for over a year by then, so it would've been hard to find anybody in South Africa who didn't know what 'Nkosi Sikilel' iAfrika' meant).

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"Are those the judicial appointments for the Free States?"

Free State. State, not States. I know you come from the Unified States of America, Clint Eastwool, but realise that these things really stand out to anybody who knows anything about the thing you're making a movie about.

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Also, Jonah Lomu the New Zealander gets named more and gets more screen time than any Springbok other than Francois Pienaar and Chester Token.

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Another strange thing the movie does: it has given more mention to the NZ team's pre-game traditions than it has on the South African coach, Kitch Christie, who took over a team in shambles and transformed them into a world champion team. He had an unbeaten record in his tenure, starting in 1994, through the World Cup and for some time later, until cancer forced his retirement and killed him. I'd have thought that was worth him at least getting named.

Another strange fact: Mandela's PA in the movie is black, whereas in real life it was a white woman. I wonder why they changed that, given that this train stops at every other Transformation Station on the Track to Reconciliation.

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Oh Jesus, this is just stupid. In the build-up to the World Cup Final, a 747 did a flyby of the stadium. Everybody knew about it, it was scheduled, part of the airline's intensive PR campaign tied to the tournament, etc, etc. But the movie makes it out to be some maverick pilot who decided to buzz the game on his own prerogative, shocking everybody and putting security into a panic. (What would he be doing in the air in a 747? Is he making a pass over the stadium with a fully loaded commercial liner? Whereupon he personally prepared a supportive message on the undercarriage?). It's another example with Hollywood's abusive relationship to real-life stories: it wants to tap into the drama of actual events, but it never resists the temptation to embellish reality in the most pointlessly showy, grandstanding ways.