Word: toits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...reason for the picture's impact is its straight-ahead melodramatic structure. At its simplest level the movie functions as a well-constructed mystery story. A black man, a gardener named Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona), comes to his employer, Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), asking him to help find his son. The boy was taken into police custody during the Soweto protests of 1976 and has disappeared. Du Toit, a calm and rational man, believes this is surely just a bureaucratic muddle that can be easily ameliorated by a solid citizen's firm but polite intervention...
...talking bureaucracy here. We are talking about a strangely imperturbable menace. Searching for his son, Ngubene is also arrested; father and boy are tortured and then murdered in prison. And because Du Toit continues to seek justice on their behalf, he is himself victimized by state terror that is the more frightening because of the bland face with which it covers its institutionalized psychopathy. Du Toit is subjected to steadily escalating harassment. Eventually he loses his job and his wife (Janet Suzman in a good, dour performance), and he must deal with the fact that his daughter is willing...
...that the best thing about A Dry White Season is that it does not practice unconscious apartheid. Our attention may be focused on the political education of Ben du Toit, but the Ngubene family is well particularized and their torments set forth unblinkingly, not to say horrifically. And Ben is provided with a guide to the realities of life on the other side of the color line: the tough, suspicious, ultimately compassionate taxi driver named Stanley (Zakes Mokae). He is a man who turns up in surprising places in unpredictable moods. He provides the bestartlements that shake Du Toit...
...ambitions for his French seem greaterthan his classmates', they are not sensitive toit. He appears to be acheiving his goal of being"like any other student...
...other new fellows are Judith Andre of Old Dominion University's Philosophy Department; J. Gregory Dees of the Yale School of Management; Lachlan Forrow, a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School; Henry S. Richardson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown University, and South African dissident Andries B. du Toit, a Political Studies professor at Cape Town University...