Standard disclaimer! I am incapable of doing this type of thing without some use of spoilers. You have been warned.
The Pan African Film Festival website can be found here. It is not dial-up friendly, and there's nothing you can do to stop that irritating song from launching every single time you click a page. Make your peace with that before you clicky.
The definition of terms can be found here.
Film A Goat's Tail
Director Julius Amedume
Writer Same
Stars Godfred Nortey, Simon James Morgan, Lesley Cook, Kwabena Paul Akorfaala
Awards None that I could find
Genre: Hybrid of crime/coming to America/but what I really want to be is Bergman
Country Ghana & UK (Take another look at that movie poster. That's all I'm gonna say. What's clever about it didn't click until the third or fourth time I looked at the lobby card.)
It was particularly satisfying to be woken up by the garbage trucks this morning.
I skipped the two early movies to make sure I'd be on the ball to make this one. The trailer I saw, combined with a week of watching this young man work the crowds, made it a must.
The first thing to say is there's nothing wrong with this movie that cannot be fixed by ruthless editing. You carve 1/2 hour to 45 minutes out of this thing? You've got a tight, intelligent crime/drama/doomed romance filled with hotties, violence and poetry. No need to reshoot anything, just rearrange what's already there. Culled, this thing could turn into something with a smooth plot that could make money. Probably not a lot, but some. I only mention that because I understand that's what the people who make the decisions in Film Land ultimately care about. If there is an Adopt A Filmmaker program out there in studio land, adopt this kid. Go to his personal website, make the call to get copies of the other stuff he's done, evaluate it. This kid has all sorts of talent. Get him now, he'll make you money later. Perhaps all you'll have to do is cut him loose every once in a while to make an art flick. Based on A Goat's Tail, part of him kinda sorta wants to do art flicks.
Amadume said it took him three years to make AGT, which means he started when he was 26.
This bit was funny enough to mention. When he got up to introduce the film, and for the q/a afterwards, he encountered the Call And Response vibe that is one of the delights of Magic's theater. It's always amusing to watch an outsider encounter that:
Us: Speak up! We can't hear you!
Him: "I'm soft spoken."
Us: So? You have a microphone!
Him: "I'm Ghanian. We're a laid-back people."
Us: We're black Americans. We're NOT!
He said this has not yet been screened in Ghana. I would LOVE to be a fly on the wall of the focus group the day it is. Based on feeling and listening to some of the immigrants talking in the hallway after the screening, I bet the reaction of his intended audience will differ from this one. (Way too many people at the screening I attended questioned him about the lack of an overt happy ending. Happily, they were semi-hooted down with catcalls. Many of the questions came from the reality that a standard AA audience is not used to encountering something with so many art film elements. A lot of the stuff he was asked at Magic's would never have been asked at the Arclight. It was interesting.)
His q/a was so good that Michael The Right Hand of God of PAFF had to walk down the aisle, stand next to him and tell all of us to get out.
The good stuff! All three of the main actors in this are great, as is much of the supporting cast. Nortey has a heart-breaking vibe of soulful innocence and hope. He was also a hottie. Apparently this was his first acting job. Morgan was wonderful in his portrayal of an attractive bad boy type manipulating and juggling his way through life. There's a sequence toward the end when he's high on coke that made everybody fall out. Cook's portrayal of a woman trapped by no prospects and a drug habit was affecting without being Pretty.
I LOVED the portrayal of multi-cultural London. Also, this was another film that let me know that the living spaces for a certain class of people in London does not match up with the Masterpiece Theater version. They live in horrible, tiny apartments of white walls, blanket-draped furniture, and tacky. They don't even make enough to go to Ikea, the go-to outlet for those of limited funds and no trust in their own taste. (A couple of Ikea pieces helps one not feel as if they're living in a cell block.)
I liked the grandmother in Africa, though I wouldn't be surprised if others didn't. I liked most of the flashback childhood sequences, even though maybe 2/3rds of them should be culled.
There's a lot of Big Picture Political Landscape stuff done in this movie I felt was handled with deft mastery. Also, though maybe there were a few too many montages, each one was damned near perfect.
If the theater's tech were not screwed up I bet this movie looked good, despite the Big Face Closeups.
Around here, we give credit for the ambition of this story, particularly in light of it being a first feature film attempt.
The plot! While visiting Ghana, a white woman from England has a one night stand with her taxi driver. Since he has longed to emmigrate, that's enough for him to show up on her doorstep a little while later. He has dreams of Greener Grass, expecting to make money and hoping to find a market for his poetry. When reality brings down that pipe dream, he finds himself part of a lucrative drug enterprise and over his head. By the time he realizes he was rich in Ghana, just not rich in money, it's too late.
Did he die in the end, or did he make a deal and become part of the problem? That's left for you to decide. You will have fun discussing this ending with others! For the record, I'm fine with the open ending. Then again, I don't think it's as open as others thought. Perhaps that's a sign of a good piece of fiction..
The plot holes! Most of the glitches in this are rooted in the film wanting to be a whole bunch of things at once. The pacing is completely off. Part of that is due to the Art Film sequences that go on and on, and the redundant conveying of information we picked up on an hour earlier. In some ways, this movie indicates that it doesn't trust the audience to be able to keep up.
The low-grade Sin City segment that appears as if visiting from another movie and doesn't go away in a timely fashion? Visually, that was cool. Structurally, that belonged in another movie. It doesn't matter if that sequence was inspired by true-life stories: it came way late in the film, it brought the story to a dead stop for what felt like 20 minutes, and it didn't add much to the narrative. The (multiple) torture bits in Resivoir Dogs were vicious, but they never stopped the movie. The torture scene in this movie stops it. It needs to be cut down.
Why Kojo does all of these things for this woman never made a lot of sense. He took on work that cleared her from her drug debts. He works like a dog in jobs legit and criminal while she sits in the house on the dole. He stays with her even after her discovers her huge drug habit. She can't cook. Even now I don't understand why he didn't just walk. He's undocumented, it's a big city, easy for him to vanish and chase his dreams without the stone she was around his neck.
Why Jimmy had Kojo hide the big stash in the house of a woman who is a known drug user made no sense. In real life smart and successful drug dealers - which Jimmy obviously is - do not make such pedestrian mistakes. I could see him using her as a mule. It made no sense that he would use her as a safe house for his product.
It was a cheat to have us watch the fallout from the rival dealer's victory by sitting in the car with one of Jimmy's henchmen and the hussies from the club. Instead of seeing what happened when the rival dealer & his hulking goon showed up at Cynthia's flat, we get a guy and two girls in a car, and Cynthia crying in a bathtub. WTF?
You can be out of the country and still return a fucking phone call within a reasonable window. There is email, for example. Text messaging. If you got the message, you can return the message. She got the messages. Having her sit on them as long as she did? No. And if she's an A&R rep? DOUBLE No.
There were a lot of unneeded 'floater' subplots. The politician, the police survelliance, the potential pregnancy. None of them play out. None of them are needed.
Music! If you just listen to the soundtrack on its own, it's fine. Some techno, some reggae, some dancehall, some violin crap. But the soundrack and score as incorporated into the film was a misfire. Too often you couldn't hear the dialog because of the music. That *may* have been due to the technical problems of the theater - this screening had the worst tech meltdown of all of the films I saw ... it was so bad some people made phone calls while waiting for them to fix it - but I'm not sure tech was at primary fault.
Application of the first rule: Medium to high, even in its current state of Bloat. Cut it, and you've got a high.
Application of the Sledgehammer Rule: When Thor killed Black Goliath? It was like that. For two hours and fifteen minutes. Right in the middle of your forehead. Editing would fix that.
Reaction of 13-year-old boy who is my inner essence: About 1/3 of it he was completely into. The rest, it depended. I think he felt cheated that there was not more overt sex. He was also fine with the Sin City sequence.
Application of Julia Phillips rule: To be honest, it's hard to say. I think within this movie is a movie that must be seen on the big screen.
Die Whitey index: Despite the messaging Amadume said he had in mind, medium low. However, on a racial male/female relations level it's high, best described by a comment overheard: "Damn! The things they do for white women." Still had me in stitches when heading home. In my audience, Cook's character was percieved as a villian. I think that's in part because she did a damned good job with that character.
Hotness index Medium to high. For me, carried by Nortey and Morgan. I could have done with an extended scene with Nortey in the bathtub, filmed in arty slow motion! I look forward to the day he's in a movie shirtless, oiled up and running around with a gun. I'd like very much to see Morgan in something else as well, though he can keep his shirt on. His charisma in this role was powerful. He was a very good Suit Bad Guy.
Was Quentin there? Nope.
Random tidbit! And this ends our Pan African Film Festival coverage for 2007, except for the bit about the tech problems, which requires more people being talked to before it can be completed. Wanted to hit 13 films, only managed to do nine. Even though what I put up here was filtered through my interests, I hope you got a sense of the variety offered at this event. PAFF has been going on for 15 years and we are lucky to have it.
Most of the movie websites do not cover this festival. They're all over Sundance, AFI, the various Hong Kong Action fests, even though the attendance at AFI and the action fests are a fraction of PAFF. Most of the films screened at PAFF will not get theatrical releases, not even the art house circuit. When you go into a dvd rental place, including the specialty ones which we have in abundance around here, good luck getting more than a blank stare when trying to get hold of something out of Africa or something diaspora-related that is not backed by the BBC. These places can get you practically every verision of any obscure HKA or Bollywood or Euro art house flick on the planet, but ask for a movie out of Senegal or Haiti or the Congo and they have no idea what you're talking about. Over the years I have had more than one clerk at a very High Hipster Profile dvd outlet say "they don't make movies in Nigeria" to my face with absolute sincerity. It is weird that my best local source for these films is now Amoeba Music down in Sunset, where Hollywood People dump their screeners into the resale bins. Amoeba has a miniscule diaspora section but what they do have is leagues beyond what anyone else has.
Something is better than nothing. How pathetic is it that this is my standard when hunting for movies by/about black people not crippled by Hollywood Myopia? Nearly as frustrating as sifting through reams of coverage of other festivals at the big movie news outlets hoping for a crumb. (That said, the recent fall of the firewall at Variety should make it easier to find basic info about this type of film. If you don't know what's out there, you don't know what to keep an eye out for.)
So we work it how we always have, find another way and tell each other. Your tastes might not mesh with mine. That's fine! Go to the PAFF website, read up on the movies offered, look around and see if you can snag one from overseas. The downside is for most of them you will need a region-free player. But that's a small price to pay for an unfiltered look at ourselves, for lack of a better term.
PAFF is a treasure. I have learned so much about creators I didn't know existed by going to this event. PAFF has significantly expanded my view of the world. The movies and documentaries are often hardcore independent, they are often as good or better than the work generated by the Hollywood Machine (though the ones that suck suck just as hard..believe me), they offer a different view of the world. The only reason I was able to call Tsosi as a win last year was because it screened at PAFF one or two years before. (I'm tired..At the moment I forget which year that first screened.)
I decided to move my PAFF coverage from the inbox to this space because it's the only way I could think of to spread the word about these movies, even if it's just in a small way. Telling you about these films might get you to keep an eye out for them at your local art house outlets, or arm you with details to take to a dvd rental place. I feel badly that I could not get to everything I wanted to. If I do this type of write-up again, maybe I'll take a day or two of vacation time so I can camp in the theater and then go over to the mall and roll out reports. I didn't know they had free wireless at the mall because I'm not the type to walk around with a laptop.
Aside! My Brother opens March 16 at select theaters nationwide. More on this later, and I realize it's weird to segue to a Hollywood film. For now let me just say that this is a far more worthwhile movie to go see than Norbit. We bitch about being tired of the coon shows belched from Hollywood, yet opening weekend box office shows that we help open those movies at #1 over and again. You'll never be able to stop those types of movies from being produced. But what you can do is show your desire for ... um ... less coon-y? ... content when it's produced by going out to see that type of movie when it opens. Here's the spoiler-filled version of what I thought about My Brother. If it sounds like your kind of film, go see it.
Based on notes briefly scanned in the inbox, some of them from Irritated People, I understand that my method of describing a movie is overly long and uncommon. I regret that, when it comes to PAFF, this approach has been misconstrued by some as 'attacking' these films. It's not. When I bring up plot holes/negatives, it's because I saw plot holes/negatives. Negatives can exist even if the overall work is solid and/or entertaining. Understand that I'm approaching PAFF films in the same way I approach any other movie or creative work. I rarely do absolute Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down with anything, so I see no reason to do so with PAFF.
I'm also fully aware that my postings here at BGF Central here are often in sentence fragments, in shorthand, filled with typos. I'm okay with that. I'd rather share top-of-head thoughts now while the show is running - however ragged, even if I look like an illiterate - than fail to tell you something about these films because I need the words to be Formal And Pretty. If I delayed for rewrites I'd never get around to it.
This is my home port. I will run it how I choose.
What I've put here is a scaled down version of the reports I send to certain friends. The supplemental report I sent to those people about some PAFF films are *even longer* than the piece I put up about Stardust not too long ago, or the ramble I did about World War Z. Between now and next PAFF perhaps I will try to come up with a more user-friendly approach. But if I don't get around to it, prepare for a repeat of this.
Okay! Now that the festival is over Moi and the 13-year-old boy that is my inner essence can finally go se Ghost Rider! Woo!
Site's gonna go dark for a few days. Recovery period. Attempting to do 10-days of coverage took more than I thought it would.
