Tag: South Africa

“Trompoppie” – TV Series Review

A scene from the South African TV crime comedy series “Trompoppie.” Courtesy of MHz Choice

The title of the darkly comic murder-fest “Trompoppie” is Afrikaans for drum majorette. We first meet aspiring South African gymnast Luna (Melissa Myburgh), whose mom died leaving her with a drunk, depressed and broke dad. Poppa wants the best for her – a top-notch gym academy in Russia – but they can’t even cover their daily overhead. During a workout, she’s seen by a wealthy local celeb, Jill (Marion Holm), who decides to pay for Luna to attend the city’s posh high school and live with her family, in exchange for adapting her skills for the majorette squad her daughter Zanne (Celeste Loots) is due to captain. There’s a big competition that means the world to Jill and the school, and Luna seems to offer the pizzazz element needed to boost them from also-rans to champs. That contest seems far more important to them than it should.

The privileged jock milieu isn’t what Luna aspires to, but she agrees because it’s the only known path to her own goal. Luna is warmly embraced by Zanne, but immediately and callously spurned by the rest of the squad – especially Mindy ((Elzet Nel) – the current captain and leader of the pack. Mindy is straight out of a MEAN GIRLS clone, complete with intimidated minions in the roost she rules, and contempt for the new girl from the poor side of town. Luna perseveres, with Jill’s staunch backing. She’s a strident Karen among Tiger Moms, and throws her weight around liberally and loudly. She also looks uncomfortably like Eddie Izzard in his drag mode. As a veteran soap opera star, Jill can impose her will more forcefully than most, and without reservation or remorse.

For ten 50-minute episodes, we follow a tragic accident, a desperate cover-up and a string of consequential murders, with suspense about who is doing the rest of the killing. Suspects ebb and flow among members of the squad, their handsome coach (Armand Aucamp), Jill’s surly other adopted daughter, Elke (Luca Human), Zanne’s short-fused beau Tomas (Cantona James), and others. We root for Luna because she’s as pleasantly earnest and sympathetic as Lindsay Lohan’s character from MEAN GIRLS. She’d advocated for doing the right thing after the initial incident, but was outvoted and out-muscled by Mindy and the rest of the squad, ala HEATHERS.

Etienne Fourie apparently wrote and directed the entire miniseries. His effort contains considerable merit, including some effective misdirects and twists.  The script’s wry, morbid humor blends nicely with the suspense. The media frenzy and fickle reactions of the public add a fine social satire element. Jill’s high profile and central involvement make the ongoing situation a big attention-grabber, as we see from inter-cut scenes of random folks’ responses to the swinging pendulum of the unfolding story. Performances are fine across the board from a large cast of featured players. On the downside, this would have been much better if compressed to seven or eight episodes. A lot of fat could have been excised without losing any of the meat. The acts of violence and their results occur mostly off-camera. For those expecting a bunch of titillating scenes of young lasses in skimpy outfits, locker rooms and shower scenes, cool your libidos. There ain’t many such cheap thrills to be found.

There’s a lot to like, including some laugh-out-loud moments and a satisfying ending. Perhaps others will have more patience than I for the length of the winding path to reach it.

“Trompoppie,” mostly in Afrikaans with English subtitles, starts streaming on MHz Choice on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025.

RATING: 2.5 out of 4 stars

BEAST (2022) – Review

Hard to believe but Summer will soon be a distant memory, so if you can’t get outta’ town before packing the kids off to school, there’s still time for a virtual “vacay” at the ole’ multiplex. Oops, maybe the tots should skip this excursion. So, is this flick set in romantic Paris, or perhaps on an exotic island? This tale has no ocean or beach, though it has a lot in common with a couple of movie islands (namely Amity and Skull). Still, there are lots of vast open areas to explore and observe the local wildlife (er…see the aforementioned isles). Yes, the wildlife couldn’t be much wilder when a getaway turns deadly when a dad out of his element must protect his daughters from a truly savage ferocious BEAST.

The film’s opening scene sets the tone and premise. An ambush of a lion pride by a group of heavily-armed poachers doesn’t turn out as they hoped when the only surviving cat turns the tables on them. Cut to the next day as a small plane touches down on a dusty South African airstrip. On board is New York doctor Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) who has brought his teenage daughters Norah (Leah Jeffries) and Meredith (Iyana Halley) on vacation to the birthplace of their late mother. The two young women are bickering almost immediately (the heat and no wifi) until the group is met by Nate’s old pal, game preserve manager Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley). The two go way back (Martin introduced Nate to his late wife), so he opens his home to the trio. That evening’s dinner is rough as the girls (especially ‘Mer”) voice their resentment over Nate’s absence during Mom’s illness, as the two had separated earlier. Over late night drinks, Nate tells Martin of his guilt and his hope that the family can bond over the trip. But tomorrow’s a fresh start as Martin loads them up in his jeep for a tour of the sprawling preserve, After a fairly close visit with a friendly pride of lions, the quartet travels to a quaint little village. But instead of friendly faces, they discover eviscerated corpses. And Martin knows the attack is recent (campfires still smoldering), so he hustles his friends back into the jeep just as the killer lion charges them. Naturally, the spot is so remote that they can’t get a signal on their cellphones, walky-talkies, and CB radio. When the jeep fails, can these four possibly survive the jaws and killer claws of this man-killing predator?

Though he’s adept at playing the confident action hero, Elba is able to step into an entirely different heroic role, a man who knows he’s in over his head but somehow pushes himself into protector mode (papa bear, perhaps). As we first meet him, Nate is almost walking on emotional eggshells, trying to say and do the right things to connect with his kin. A few drinks reveal his tremendous remorse over failing to hold the family together. Elba later shows us, through his terrified eyes, that Nate will give his all this time in order to triumph. It helps that he’s got great chemistry with the always engaging Copley whose Martin loves being the “Dutch uncle” while still telling Nate what he needs to hear, the lovely and the ugly. He fawns over the daughters, but his quiet masks a dark secret that will make an impact during the “siege”. Halley as ‘Mer’ mixes the usual teenage rebellion with seething anger towards her dad, thwarting his every effort at re-connecting. The younger Norah played by Jefferies wants to break free of the “baby” role while still craving parental security.

Essential in the “animal attack” genre flick is the impact of the “villain from nature” , so from that aspect the movie works due to the expert CGI rendering and the motion-capture work (I’m sure there will be on the set photos of actors with those padded scuba suits with ping-pong balls and maybe a stuffed lion-head cap). The lion is quite scary and director Baltasar Kormakur knows his thriller history well enough to be frugal with the attacks in the first act. He’s also adept at putting us right “in the action” with his camera swirling about the “prey” as they try to get a ‘lock’ on the attacker’s proximity (the most effect is Nate trying to get out of a maze made of brittle brush and sticks). Ultimately the uneven script gets in his way as the daughters make far too many bad decisions and turn into screeching “bait”. There is a nice sense of panic mixed with claustrophobia in the disabled jeep, though CUJO probably did it better decades ago. And speaking of classic terror creatures, the single-mindedness of the predatory certainly owes much to the JAWS variants as each one seemed to care more about exacting revenge than “chowing down”. And like those “finned fiends”, the unstoppable lion appears to be a very distant relative of Wile E. Coyote (or the more apropos Sylvester the Cat) in that he quickly shakes off any calamity that would disable most animals, and is back in the next sequence with barely a blemish or limp. Plus there are countless “call-backs” as different wildlife trivia and cultural bits are presented early in order to connect with later scenes and the somewhat ludicrous “final showdown”. Elba and Copley do make a terrific team, so let’s hope for another pairing, one more inspired than this fairly “toothless” BEAST.

1.5 Out of 4

BEAST is now playing in theatres everywhere

SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN – The Review

Want to experience a documentary that will truly lift your spirits? Seems that real crime and corruption dominate most of the theatrical doc landscape these days. That’s not to say that they aren’t enlightening and to a degree entertaining ( like THE IMPOSTER and THE QUEEN OF VERSAILLES ), but this flick could really compete for that tired tagline, ” The feel good film of the year”. SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN is about following your dreams and not giving in when doors are slammed in your face. And it’s a glorious saga that explores how life can deliver one heckuva’ second act, cause’ it ain’t over til the husky lady sings…or the long-haired fella’ wearing the dark shades strums an encore.

This is the story of early 1970’s recording artist Rodriguez. Sixto Rodriguez to be exact. Consider yourself a music buff, but the name doesn’t ring a bell? You are most certainly not alone.. Sixto was a fixture of the Detroit music scene in the late sixties. Two music producers talk about seeing him perform at a club actually called ” The Sewer” with his back to the audience! Rodriguez was a guitar strumming storyteller similar to Bob Dylan who leaned more to rock and roll rather than folk. He was signed to a record label and put out a couple of albums that went absolutely nowhere, aside from the remainder bins and dusty used record shops. Rodriguez gave up on his performing career. To this day, his collaborators can’t believe he didn’t find an audience. Ah, but it turns out he had an audience he was unaware of…half way across the globe.

All the way over in South Africa Rodriguez was a superstar ( even bigger than Elvis ). In the mid-seventies the youth of that country were starting to rebel against the constraints of Apartheid rule. Pop culture from overseas was prohibited. Legend has it that a visiting student flew into Cape Town with a copy of Rodriguez’s first album tucked away in her luggage. The songs caused a sensation and soon bootleg recordings were being exchanged all over the country. Something about this troubadour spoke to them. His songs became their anthems of freedom. When his follow-ups were finally, legally issued, government censors literally vandalized the discs to prevent songs about drugs and sex from being heard. At the end of Apartheid singers and bands sprung up, heavily influenced by the mystery man. Rodriguez was such a mystery that outrageous urban legends about his spectacular demise were spread. But a couple of music fans were determined to learn the truth. Carefully researching the song lyrics and album liner notes the men scoured the globe. Thanks to the emerging world-wide web in the nineties, they finally found out the real story about their country’s music hero.

To say anymore would ruin the delightful surprises in Malik Bendjelloul’s compelling film ( he’s one of the music sleuths ). Malik employs newsreel footage, jittery home movies, and dream-like animation to set this doc apart from the old standard talking heads flick. Most revealing may be a talk with an ex-record label founder still frustrated with the, ahem, creative accounting practices of the music industry. My only complaints are the lack of professional quality performance footage of Sixto on stage. They do the best they can with the shaky homestyle equipment. And the man himself is still an enigma. But, as they say, he lets his music speak for him along with friends and family members. And when he’s playing Rodriguez truly comes alive. SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN ( one of the banned songs is ” Sugarman ” ) is a compelling musical mystery and a celebration of the bond between an artist and audience. And proof that sometimes you get another shot at your dreams.

4.5 Out of 5 Stars

SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN plays exclusively in St. Louis at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Cinemas

Silk Spectre edits Phillippe in ‘The Bang Bang Club’

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Malin Ackerman (‘Watchmen’) will play a photo editor in a new indie drama called ‘The Bang Bang Club’. The story is set in apartheid-era South Africa and is based on a memoir by Greg Marinovich.

The film is written by Steven Silver and will be directed by Joao Silva. Ryan Phillippe and Taylor Kitsch will play two of the four photographers who captured the violent end of white rule in South Africa. The film is scheduled to begin production in Johannesburg in April.

[source: Variety]