Word: attenborough
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...ambitious new films, both telling tales of the end of empire, are as different as their titles: Cry Freedom and Sammy & Rosie Get Laid. The first is Director Richard Attenborough's stately, schizophrenic epic of South Africa a decade ago as blacks groped toward liberation. Sammy & Rosie is Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi's double vision of London as the hip place to be and the last place on postimperial earth. For 2 hr. 35 min., Cry Freedom meanders through a meadow of noble sentiments, finding its only drama in the education of a white liberal South African and his escape from...
...story. The man was as close to being an authentic martyr as any revolution can claim: charismatic preacher of nonviolent resistance, champion of racial equality, steely victim of state sadism. He died in the arms of his torturers ten years ago. There is surely a film here, but Attenborough and Screenwriter John Briley can't find it. The men who made Gandhi turn their Steve Biko (Denzel Washington, from TV's St. Elsewhere) into a saintly apparition; he is first seen swathed in blinding sunlight and last seen shimmering in the memory of his friend Donald Woods (Kevin Kline...
...errant gunfire and toxic T shirts, and the viewer is meant to recoil from these domestic atrocities. Of course they are horrid, yet their intended impact reinforces, in dramatic terms, the Afrikaners' credo: white lives mean more. Piling on bogus suspense devices as Woods snakes his way toward freedom, Attenborough lets the venality of South African imperialism degenerate into a staid chase film: The Brady Bunch Flees Apartheid. Once again Attenborough has proved that the road to dull is paved with good intentions...
...historical mini-series, still in the works, which has excited the interest of Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Jane Fonda. Three theatrical movies probing racial conflict in South Africa are on the way. The first and most prestigious of the three is Cry Freedom, directed by Sir Richard Attenborough (Gandhi). Due in early November, it explores the friendship between Stephen Biko (Denzel Washington), the black leader who died in prison after police interrogation, and Donald Woods, a white anti-apartheid newspaper editor (Kevin Kline). Coming next spring is Atlantic's A World Apart, about a family caught in the racial...
...transgression: its failure to nominate Hollywood wunderkind Steven Speilberg for his directorial effort in The Color Purple. The Academy gave itself away as a bunch of jealous, unappreciative snobs when it failed to commend Speilberg for E.T, choosing to give the Best Director award of 1982 to Sir Richard Attenborough for his crowd control talents in Gandhi...