Word: thrillers
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...attorney representing a black South African political activist seeking amnesty in Red Dust. Then came Catch a Fire (terrorism during apartheid) with Tim Robbins in 2006 and Goodbye Bafana (the friendship between Mandela and his white prison guard) with Joseph Fiennes in 2007. This year brings Endgame, a thriller about the secret talks to end apartheid starring William Hurt and Jonny Lee Miller. In February, as Ving Rhames was wrapping Master Harold . . .and the Boys - a film about the relationship between a white boy and his black servant - Damon and Freeman arrived for their rugby turn. (See pictures...
...Yesterday, the story of an HIV-infected mother bringing up her daughter in dirt-poor KwaZulu Natal. In 2007 came Bunny Chow, a hip black-and-white comedy about three comedians traveling to a festival that recalled early Spike Lee. Last year featured Jerusalema, a sophisticated thriller about the rise and fall of a Johannesburg slumlord - a kind of South African American Gangster - which made its star, Rapulana Seiphemo, the new face of South African cinema. Later this year Seiphemo teams up with Tsotsi's Nkosi in White Wedding, a road movie that, with impressive maturity, plays apartheid's legacy...
...Battling Mickey's kids and the monsters was Russell Crowe, whose sex-politics-and-espionage thriller State of Play, based on the compulsively-watchable BBC series, took in $14.1 million in its opening weekend. The other new wide release, which will end up sixth overall, was Crank: High Voltage, with B-movie Brit Brillo pad Jason Statham reprising his role from the 2006 Crank as a hit man who'll die if he slows down. Sort of like Speed, only instead of a grimy bus, it's a Limey cuss. Crank 2's haul was a demure $6.5 million...
...mixed results as a box-office lure. American Gangster, where he was second-billed to Denzel Washington, was a hit; Body of Lies, with Crowe supporting Leonardo Di Caprio, was a flop. State of Play (a flat, unenticing title for what means to be a smart, pounding thriller) may have one of those twisty plots that mass audiences think will make their heads hurt; they'll watch it in a few months at home...
...settled in for a screening of the year's first big prestige picture: State of Play, a political thriller starring Oscar laureate Russell Crowe as a crusading newsman and Ben Affleck as a prominent Congressman whose career is threatened by a sex-and-murder scandal. This is my kind of cinema sirloin, organic and artfully prepared. Yet something in me anticipated leftovers. The film is a distillation of a 2003 BBC miniseries, also called State of Play; and I'd recently seen and revered that show. Not that the American movie couldn't have improved on the British series...