24th Jan 07 - The Last King of Scotland

I’ve learnt things from this week’s film:

Learnt thing number one: Idi Amin was a wacky man.

Learnt thing number two: calling Idi Amin a ‘wacky man’ does not really justify how horrendous his actions were.

Learnt thing number three: English people are ugly, sandal wearing weasels who spoilt everything.

Learnt thing number four: Scottish people are acceptable to Hollywood.

Learnt thing number five: Forest Whitaker can really act and this performance is justifiably Oscar nominated.

Learnt thing number six: What James McAvoy’s pee pee looks like.

Learnt thing number seven: I’m probably too old to be calling it a ‘pee pee’.

Learnt thing number eight: It’s clever to use a young jolly Scottish (not miserable English) doctor as the window to this fundamental part of Ugandan history.

Learnt thing number nine: Starting a film with an orange happy glow makes the grisly finale interestingly disjointed and therefore gives it more impact.

Learnt thing number ten: Good films can be spoilt a little by only briefly touching on interesting father/son relationships and wedging in parts of Amin’s background in weird, stilted bits of dialogue (“I’m going to tell you about how I grew up… um, there. Told you. Now you can go.”)

Learnt thing number eleven: Having a broken cinema seat makes a two hour film drag. Or getting a bit slow in the middle makes a two hour film drag.

Learnt thing number twelve: If you expect a film to be a powerful, gut-busting piece of cinema and it turns out to be solid but not overwhelming, you are more disappointed than usual.

Learnt thing number thirteen: If you take into consideration learnt thing number twelve, then this film can only make CF0, mainly because of the lack of expected ‘oomph’.

Learnt thing number fourteen: Writing reviews in this fashion is quite easy, and reduces the need to make full sentences.

Learnt thing number fifteen: Taking learnt thing number fourteen into consideration, I could easily write for a tabloid.