Tsotsi

With a friend, I ventured to see Tsotsi, not quite knowing what to expect. The movie, based on a novel by Athol Fugard, won an Oscar, and I had heard good things about Fugard from my friend, who had recently seen a play of his.
What I saw was a textured film about a young man finding humanity within himself and within others.
Tsotsi means thug, and in the film, the name is tied to a young man growing up in South Africa.
He roams the streets with a group of young men. Their existence is bleak and their moral code is corrupt. Their mode of survival is from taking, often brutally, from others.
That fact is established quickly in the first few minutes of the movie as we witness a simple mugging turn violent and bloody.
Then in a later scene, we see Tsotsi shoot a woman and steal her car. At that point, I wasn't sure whether I would ever sympathize with Tsotsi. I feared him to be a monster.
But behind even monsters is a human being, and slowly, Tsotsi's past of abandonment becomes clear. No one truly cared about him so he learned not to care about anyone else.
His world is changed, however, when he discovers that the backseat of the car he stole is not empty. It contains an infant. He ends up taking the infant home, struggling to figure out how to take care of someone so small.
His burgeoning relationship with the child transforms him. He begins to care. He begins to see another way.
And before you know it, you become invested in Tsotsi. You start to root for him to do the right thing, to be the man he was never taught to be.
The ending is a mixture of hope and bleakness, as is the rest of the movie. You don't quite know what might happen to Tsotsi after this experience. All you know is that he is not the same person you met at the beginning, and maybe there's hope in that.

Tom Cruise: Mission Impossible Action Star

Tom Cruise isn't getting much love lately. He deserves it. From public spats with Matt Lauer and Brooke Shields to his overexposed love affair with Katie Holmes, Cruise has had a rocky ride with his fans the past year.
And the opening box-office take for Mission Impossible III doesn't bode well for his future movie star career.
So when I saw the movie recently, I had low expectations for how good the movie is. How pleased I was to find that during the course of the two-hour plus movie, I forgot about TomKat.
That is not necessarily due to Cruise. J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias and Lost, layers the non-stop action with some emotion. This movie felt more visceral and personal than the previous incarnations of Mission Impossible.
Granted, the story is a little cliched. Good guy's woman is in peril.
But, here's the thing. The set-up works.
With so many frenetic action sequences intermingled with lovey-dovey kiss-kiss scenes between Ethan Hunt and his beautiful girlfriend, you don't have much time to think about Tom Cruise and his troubled year.
Even more wonderful is the presence of Laurence Fishburne as the head guy. He's smart, menacing, the kind of guy you don't want to mess with. The dialogue is sharp and witty, and the pacing now slacks.
So, in a sense, the real mission impossible, forgetting Tom Cruise, ends up being accomplished in a very winning way.

United 93

9/11 was barely five years ago, but here we have United 93.
I haven't seen it. There are movies where you have to be in the right mood to see it.
Or maybe that's an excuse not to go through the emotions that will likely come from watching it.
United 93 is not going to be one of those romantic comedies where the two love birds kiss at the end.
In this movie, the heroes and the villains die at the end because that's what happened in real life when flight United 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
I wonder how long you wait until you dramatize a tragic event such as 9/11 on the big screen. Is this too soon, or is it just the right time, if you approach everything with a seriousness and respect.
I feel I have to see this movie. I just wonder if I will get anything beyond the sadness organically comes from seeing the worst day in our country's history on the movie screen.