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
- 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. ↩︎
- Luke may not have reached the giddy heights but IMDb tells me that he is still working pretty consistently. ↩︎
- Krasinski’s action hero career continues with a new Prime Video feature dropping tomorrow: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. ↩︎
