Movies good and bad

Both boys alone this weekend, as Best Beloved was away. Not the first time we've been apart since we got married, but the first time I've been the one who has stayed behind. Interesting experience. Almost but not quite exactly unlike being a bachelor again. The whole flat is different and there's this teenager hanging around like he knows me.

So those of us who stayed behind decided that on Friday and Saturday we would watch movies, one each of our choosing. For Friday he chose ... oh dear, oh dear, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

Wow. I honestly cannot remember the last time I watched a film with such a total absence of comprehension. Or, as it went on, interest. Maybe it would have helped if I had played the game it's based on, so could recognise when characters from it start gratutiously popping up. Or maybe if I had watched Final Fantasies I through VI. In fact, I think I did see one of them. V: The Spirits Within, which I'm told was rubbish. Well, maybe, but I do recall quite liking it and it had esoteric concepts like character and dialogue and humour and ... what's that word ... ah yes, PLOT.

It's not the first time I've watched a movie and not understood it. Let's see. 2001. Blade Runner. North by North West. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. But for each of those, I was either too young or there were layers to peel back; either way, each one has grown and grown and grown with repeated viewing.

I don't claim the gift of prophecy, at least not much, but I will prophesie that Final Fantasy VII will very rarely be mentioned in the same breath as 2001, now or ever. Unless the breath is to utter a sentence like "Final Fantasy VII is less good than 2001."

So what was my movie, I hear you cry? The Last King of Scotland, a fictionalised look at the reign of Idi Amin through the eyes of the young doctor whom he makes his personal physician. Doctor made up, dictator decidedly real.

There's nothing that gives me the willies more than African soldiers with guns. It's very unfair because there are African countries where there's nothing to be scared of at all about a soldier with a gun. There are also far too many where fear is a very wise emotion, and Amin was a big contributor to this. It's fair to say we Europeans well and truly screwed the African continent over in several different ways, but the worst crime of all that we committed was to impose European-type power structures that enable people like Amin (or Mugabe or Bokassa or ...) to seize power and hold it, rather than just be overthrown and quietly bumped off as would have happened in the normal scheme of things.

Anyway, the movie. Immediately written off by the Boy as boring, of course, but it grew on him - not just because of the sex and violence (which might have helped) but it really was fascinatingly disturbing to watch Amin grow more and more bonkers. Or rather, to watch his pre-existing bonkersness become more and more apparent. The young doctor is sucked into Amin's world because he's bored of the mundane life treating diseased children at a mission. He's flattered by the attention, he enjoys the prestige. He is not a likeable character at any stage of the movie but as his mistakes pile up, culminating in one ghastly blunder, he gets a kind of redemption. And the whole movie is a fascinating look at the subject of power - uses, abuses and temptations of.

Anyway, Best Beloved returns this afternoon and normal service will resume. The West Wing and Rome ... quality stuff!