Something to watch tonight: Catch a Fire

Subscriber BF of Twizel wrote in to thank me for the Young Pope / New Pope recom­mend­a­tion last week but poin­ted out that on New Zealand’s Neon stream­er, the show has no sub­titles for the Italian lan­guage con­tent. What with the prob­lems that people have been hav­ing with the new TVNZ+ app, it’s obvi­ous that loc­al stream­ing tech­no­logy is strug­gling to keep up with the glob­al offerings.

Neon is about to lose all of its HBO and HBO Max con­tent to the Aotearoa ver­sion of that behemoth so the sil­ver lin­ing there might be that present­a­tion will meet some basic stand­ards of accessibility.

I was check­ing earli­er Diane Keaton men­tions last week for that Young Pope recom­mend­a­tion, I stumbled across this rave for a film that is eas­ily (and in my case actu­ally) for­got­ten.

Australian Phillip Noyce¹ did an excel­lent job of dir­ect­ing this Apartheid-era story and the review reminds me that I had high hopes for Derek Luke² back in the day:

Returning from the World Cinema Showcase earli­er this year is the splen­did Apartheid-era polit­ic­al thrill­er Catch a Fire star­ring Tim Robbins and (one of my favour­ite act­ors) Derek Luke from Antwone Fisher. The film is set in the North Eastern Coal Fields of South Africa in 1980 where all com­munit­ies live in the shad­ow of the huge Secunda Oil Refinery. Luke plays apolit­ic­al refinery work­er Patrick Chamusso who becomes politi­cised after being accused and tor­tured over a ter­ror­ist attack at the refinery.

He travels to Mozambique to join the ANC and plot the destruc­tion of the refinery, and the over­throw of the hated apartheid sys­tem. What he doesn’t real­ise is that the mor­al cor­rup­tion of apartheid reflects itself in real world cor­rup­tion every­where and that his move­ments have been watched by police­man Nic Vos (Robbins).

Catch a Fire is a test­a­ment to the many sac­ri­fices of those years dis­guised as a fast-moving thrill­er and it works on both levels. Written by Shawn Slovo, her­self the daugh­ter of white ANC free­dom fight­ers, the film also takes a sens­it­ive approach (in the spir­it of Truth and Reconciliation) to the white side of the story, show­ing the spir­itu­al dam­age done to them by apartheid. You won’t find many more sat­is­fy­ing (or more beau­ti­fully pho­to­graphed) films this year.

Also in that August 2007 Capital Times review: Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore in the rom­com Because I Said So and John Krasinski and Mandy Moore – again- in the rom­com License to Wed (“There are two kinds of Robin Williams film nowadays: the ser­i­ous kind and the crap kind and this is the lat­ter. Krasinsky³ is quite watch­able though and I sus­pect we’ll be see­ing a lot more of him over the next wee while – he’s like a young Tom Hanks with a pair of com­edy ears on.”)

Where to watch Catch a Fire

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, India, USA, Ireland & UK: Digital rental

1. Noyce’s Graham Greene adapt­a­tion, The Quiet American, has just been re-released by Imprint on Blu-ray. I used to own it on DVD and am look­ing for­ward to giv­ing it anoth­er go soon. ↩︎
2. Luke may not have reached the giddy heights but IMDb tells me that he is still work­ing pretty con­sist­ently. ↩︎
3. Krasinski’s action hero career con­tin­ues with a new Prime Video fea­ture drop­ping tomor­row: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. ↩︎