"Welcome to the new South Africa" says the trailer. Yeah, I guess we're in Africa today.
Anti-violence from A Single Word. But now an exploitation flick? Joe Bob Briggs would have loved this movie. Does anybody remember Joe Bob Briggs any more? More than Rogert Ebert, I would list Joe Bob as one of my formative movie critics.
Anyway, Impunity has a healthy breast count, more buckets of blood than I could carry home from Safeway without a car, and honorable mention for a dog eating gunshot-spattered brains off the floor. What's not to like? Plus high-quality production values.
And what really makes it come together as a sex-violence-action flick is that it succeeds in making you root for the characters, and care about the outcome, unlike that stupid violence movie with Woody Harrelson, or Reservoir Dogs, it's thrilling when it brings you along for the ride. You need to be able to root for the main character, you have to give a shit, you have to care if they get away, or get caught, or get to do more violence, or whatever, but if you're just watching images on the screen it's not nearly as much fun as if you really fell like you're there and you have a dog in the race. Impunity really succeeded in that, I really enjoyed being along for the ride. I can't wait for the day when I can see this movie again.
Best line, spoken by the cop of the girl half of the killer couple: "She's cognitively flexible and emotionally intelligent." Second best line, spoken by the boy half to the other cop: "I'm not going to confess to a murder I didn't commit!" (when the audience knows he could very well confess to half a dozen murders he *did* commit!)
But it's more than just an action/violence/sex joyride. I should have seen this coming. The first hint that I was going to have to actually think about this movie is all the closed-circuit TV footage of contemporary violence, crime, and disaster in modern South Africa, sharing a common thread with yesterday's movie about the Green Revolution in Iran, The Red Rose, which heavily quoted found cellphone video.
But then the filmmaker comes out at the end and actually explicates the movie as an invitation to the audience to have a conversation with the filmmaker about the Cloud, TV and surveillance, where everything we do is being documented, about how the Web is becoming the internal rhetoric of our culture, "by trying to ensure that we're accountable to each other, the less we seem to actually be accountable to each other." So it was created as more than just a splatter flick. There's actually room for intellectual engagement here.
The screenplay is by Jyoti Mistry (a woman), the story by Trish Malone (also a woman). What does that say about it being just an exploitation flick? Where is The Gaze being directed? Not just at the beautiful and often naked Alex McGregor (playing the girl Echo), but also at the real-world equivalent to the simulacrum that Echo lives in.
Current events link: of course the Oscar Pistorius and Riva Steenkamp shooting (the director, un-ironically: "I'm not sure if anybody outside of South Africa has heard of the Oscar and Reeva trial..." followed by uproarious laughter from audience.), but also something I hadn't heard of, the Marikana shooting, "the single most lethal use of force by South African security forces against civilians since 1960" according to Wikipedia, which also quotes Benjamin Fogel
"Perhaps the most important lesson of Marikana is that the state can gun down dozens of black workers with little or no backlash from 'civil society', the judicial system or from within the institutions that supposedly form the bedrock of democracy. What we have instead is the farcical Farlam commission, an obvious attempt to clear the state's role in the massacre and prevent any sort of real investigation into the actions of the police on that day. In other words, the state can get away with mass murder, with apparent impunity in terms of institutional conceptions of justice and political accountability."
Tell me that doesn't link back to Iran's failed Green Revolution in The Red Rose again.
Lastly, oh hell, a week later I don't remember what I was going to write next to "lastly". Just watch the trailer:
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