Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 4 February

The Last King of Scotland (Macdonald, 2006)

Correction: Yesterday – prob­ably not for the first time – I put my Scorsese Fan Club mem­ber­ship at risk by con­fus­ing the titles of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ. The error is regretted.

Back to busi­ness and, for some reas­on, my thoughts recently have been on dic­tat­ors and dictatorships.

From February 2007, here’s my very brief review of The Last King of Scotland from the Capital Times:

The Last King of Scotland is a fic­tion­al­ised por­trait of Idi Amin, dic­tat­or of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and self-appointed “Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”. To fully appre­ci­ate Forest Whitaker’s superb per­form­ance check out the real Idi’s eyes in the archive foot­age at the end of the film and you can see the genu­ine bat-shit insane para­noia of the man.

Whitaker went on to win the Oscar for best act­or that year

Also in that Capital Times column: Rocky Balboa (which I naively thought was going to be the last time we saw that char­ac­ter); Robert Altman’s final film, A Prairie Home Companion, which I really liked but the cre­at­or of the radio show that inspired it, Garrison Keiller, has been can­celled now; Adrien Brody invest­ig­ates the murder of TV’s first Superman, George Reeves (Ben Affleck) in Hollywoodland; Will Ferrell play­ing in a lower key than usu­al in Stranger Than Fiction; and kiwi doc­u­ment­ary Squeegee Bandit.

Eighteen years on, it’s inter­est­ing that Brody and Ferrell were still show­ing up in this news­let­ter yes­ter­day.

Where to watch The Last King of Scotland

Aotearoa, Australia & Canada: Streaming on Disney+

India: Streaming on Hotstar

Ireland, USA & UK: Digital rental

Further listening

While last week was the final week for At the Summer Movies, it was the first week back for my reg­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights. We talked about Maria, The Haka Party Incident, The Franchise, Shrinking and the return of the Wellington Film Society.