SWEET AND SOUR RHINO DOUBLE FEATURE
From comedy to documentary, local telly provides an interesting juxtaposition of edutainment, writes Matthew Vice
Oh dear, I guess I’m a Hollywood sheep because I caught myself on more than one occasion referring to movies made outside of the US as “foreign films” — and I don’t even live in the US! Honestly, it was just easy jargon to reach for, but M-Net recently supplied me with a better term in their September press release: “world cinema”. Perhaps you’ve noticed, but after the weekly Sunday night feature, M-Net (channel 101) usually shows a forei ... oops, sorry, world cinema film of some kind. French, German, Israeli, Chinese, films from these countries and more have appeared, but on Sunday September 22 at 9.40pm it’s our turn with the locally made documentary Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War. It’s a simultaneously worrying, depressing and inspiring investigation of rhino poaching and horn trafficking that takes us from the local wildlife reserves where brave soldiers fight against criminal poaching groups, all the way to Asia where the main market for illegal horns is believed to be. It’s a pretty big deal and won a whole mess of awards, so although you have to work on Monday it might be worth staying up to catch this one. It’s hosted by Bonne de Bod.
Oooookay. You’ll have to believe me when I say that I found out about this movie only after I wrote the above passage about Stroop: Journey into the Rhino Horn War — but on the same day, on the same channel, at 8.05pm, you can catch the Leon Schuster comedy Frank and Fearless, which deals with the same subject matter. Schuster plays a ranger who, after finding a beloved rhino dead, gathers his posse and heads out on a mission to kidnap a Southeast-Asian ambassador to use as a bargaining chip to force an end to rhino poaching. So
immediately after this comedy you can watch the serious documentary and have yourself a sweet and sour rhino double feature.
Those were the two main standouts this month, and there’s not much else to recommend, so I’ll add this one in for any animation fans. This coming Friday on e.tv at 2.30pm is the animated feature Titan A.E. from animator and director Don Bluth, best known for the classic The Secret of NIMH and a slew of other more divisive animated features such as All Dogs Go to Heaven and An American Tail. The guy has serious talent and as someone who has dabbled in amateur animation in the past, I have mad respect for the guy. Titan A.E. was a box-office flop, unfortunately, and largely ignored by the mainstream — and I’m not about to play contrarian and say it was a misunderstood classic, but it’s certainly a good sci-fi adventure yarn with gorgeous visuals and imaginative concepts that deserved to perform better than it did. In a distant future, Earth has been destroyed by alien invaders and the remnants of humanity drift about the galaxy as nomads, but a young man named Cale is in possession of a map that could lead to a device capable of creating a new planet for humans to call home.
And from a movie that I feel deserved a better box-office run, we move onto one I feel deserved a worse one, Pan — a movie I saw when I went to Montecasino to wait out loadshedding once. As I plan what I want to write about this film, I can’t help but feel I’ve bitched about it before ... Anyway, if I have, forgive me, but it’s a prequel to the Peter Pan story, showing how Peter (Levi Miller) found his way to Neverland and became the boy who never ages and also features a fictional version of the nefarious pirate Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman).
Sounds like an idea that could work, especially with the big-budget treatment, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t. It tries really hard, but ultimately becomes an almost point for point rip-off of Star Wars — the original good ones, I mean — with Peter as a pixie version of Luke Skywalker and Captain Hook (Garrett Hedlund) as Han Solo. Oh yeah, Captain Hook is a yank in this version, which is just sacrilege. It’s still worth a look, because you can see a sort of diamond in the rough.