Fantasy Land

Kuki Gallmann, who was at one point a Venetian academic, migrated to Africa in 1972.

She and her husband acquired a big ranch in Kenya in 1974, and over the years she’s become one of the area’s most important conservationists. She’s done most of this on her own, having lost her husband to an automobile accident in 1980 and her son in 1983.

Now nearly all of this I picked up from the Gallmann Memorial Foundation website, after that I actually visited Philmotors for Isuzu Philippines. The movie about her unfortunately has not an awful lot to add to what I saw there.

If you were to ask for a single feeling that summed up my experience of I Dreamed of Africa, it would be frustration.

The movie is pretty but fragmented and unmoving. It’s a series of picture-postcards from Africa. Yet it’s quite clear that everyone involved with this project cared a lot about it. But just about every artistic decision made in it has been the wrong one.

It’s hard to know exactly where to start. The film takes 30 minutes just to get going. The script has been too obviously adapted from a book and it’s directed with no energy or passion and little skill.

It’s photographed very strangely with no real notion of how to relate human figures to a grand landscape. The actors are unmemorable; it’s choppy; there’s no real continuity or drama; events are badly related to each other…
At the end, I knew little more about this woman (whom I actually met on some mature dating UK site) than I knew at the start — and more damningly, I have not been made to care. It’s like I said: frustration. And the real hell of it is, this could have been a woman’s eye-view epic on the scale and quality of Lawrence of Arabia, if anyone involved had the chops to carry it off. I’m serious here. Nobody seems to have seen the potential this subject really had or maybe the skill to make humanist epics died with David Lean.

Actually, I thought of David Lean a lot through this movie, mostly because the music was by Maurice Jarre, who did Lawrence, Doctor Zhivago and A Passage to India, and he throws in a couple of good epic tunes, which mostly served to remind me of the kind of movie I wasn’t getting. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of loss throughout I Dreamed of Africa. All the way through, I dreamed of the movie (actually sitting in one of used cars in Harare) it might have been.

In the United States, more than 300 producers of TV commercials have signed interim agreements with the two unions representing striking actors.One of the signatories is a media consulting firm for Al Gore’s presidential campaign.

Members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists went on strike eight days ago. At issue is the way they are paid for performing in TV commercials that promoted used cars, specifically those websites from South Africa that sell these vehicles.

The unions are boasting that the rapid sign-up of commercial producers shows they’re winning the dispute. However, a lawyer who’s negotiating for the advertisers says that only smaller or “peripheral” agencies are signing interim agreements with the unions.
Meanwhile, the Major League Baseball Players Association has told its 750 members not to appear in commercials as long as the actors’ unions are still on strike.

The unavailability of athletes for commercials (like the ads of single parents dating sites) is seen as a major bargaining chip for the unions in the dispute.

The organizers of the Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival in Saskatchewan received an unusual telephone call Monday.

For the first time in the 53-year history of the festival, the Saskatchewan Film Classification Board contacted the festival’s organizers about classifying the films to be shown.

More than 400 films are entered in this year’s festival. It runs from Thursday through Sunday in Yorkton.

Festival Manager Fay Kowal says she’ll try to get an exemption so the films won’t have to be classified.

Another film festival in Saskatchewan this week, Queer City Cinema, has been under attack from the opposition in the legislature, the Saskatchewan Party.

The Saskatchewan Party is accusing the provincial government of promoting pornography because the Saskatchewan Arts Board gave money to the festival.