The tireless Clint Eastwood returns in December with “Invictus,” which chronicles the five years from Nelson Mandela’s release from prison to his prominent role as President of South Africa to unify South Africa through the hosting of the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Morgan Freeman portrays Mandela and Matt Damon plays Francois Piennar, the victorious South African team captain.
Mark Macaskill of The Times discovers that “Robert Carlyle fans can buy a role in his new film.”
Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Kodi Smit-McPhee appear in November in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” directed by John Hillcoat, who helmed 2005’s vastly impressive “The Proposition.”
“Antichrist” star Charlotte Gainsbourg reveals to Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle that “on the balance, all the naked things and the sex scenes were nothing compared to the grieving scenes.”
One Film Wonder: In 1980, South African director Jamie Uys made “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” which centered on Xi, a Saho bushman in the Kalahari Desert, who discovers a soft drink bottle and embarks on a journey to discard it. As “The Gods Must Be Crazy” was financed with South African government funds at a time of an international embargo, the film was marketed as a Botswanan film. Describing the work as a “highly popular and distorted film,” Canadian anthropologist Richard Lee noted in his book “The Dobe, Ju/hoansi” that “The Gods Must Be Crazy” inaccurately “tried to portray the Ju/’hoansi as pristine hunter-gatherers ‘untouched’ by civilization.” The film became a world-wide sensation. In North America, interest began in midnight movie houses, with the movie earning expanding distribution in 1984 and grossing more than $30 million.
Xi was portrayed by N!xau, a San, one of the indigenous peoples living in the region classified presently as South Africa and Namibia. Born circa 1944, he was paid a reported few hundred dollars for his performance in the film. For the 1989 sequel, “The Gods Must Be Crazy II,” he negotiated a purported salary in the hundreds of thousands. N!xau appeared in only 4 other films, each one of them a sequel in the “The Gods Must Be Crazy” franchise; the last three, which were not directed by Uys, were set in Hong Kong and filmed in Cantonese. A herdsman, he returned to Tsumkwe in the Otjozondjua region of Namibia to live on his farm with his family. N!xau died in 2003.
