I spent an hour this afternoon fixing another bug in my blog that only occured under Internet Explorer (and that you probably didn’t notice anyway, but stuff like this drives me nuts). Believe you me, it is with great nerdy trembling that I received the news of Bill’s imminent release of Internet Explorer 7, which will either be a godsend of CSS compliance or yet another steaming curl of crap from a company that can issue whatever it pleases because it has a corner on the browser market.
Then Katie called and saved me from a frittered-away day by inviting me to the Angelika Film Center to see In My Country at 7:30. The movie deals with the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was assembled in the mid-1990s in post-Apartheid South Africa. Anybody who felt they had been a victim of violence could come forward to be heard and face the person who inflicted that violence, who in turn could be given amnesty if he apologized and was able to prove his actions had been ordered by a superior; in fact, it seemed as if a lot of oppressors were set free on the time-honored “just following orders” defense. I didn’t know much about these events and it was enlightening to see them reproduced in the film.
Samuel L. Jackson as a journalist for the Washington Post and Juliette Binoche as an Afrikaans covering the hearings for South African radio turn in some decent performances, but the movie is marred by pathetic editing. Many scenes ended abruptly and the scenes that followed either didn’t follow or were jarring. A long scene in which Jackson’s character interviews a sadistic South African police colonel is chopped up and confusingly interspersed throughout the latter half of the movie. As for the plot, the idea of showing a wave of Africans telling heartbreaking stories of relatives lost or murdered under Apartheid was numbing, but ultimately not as effective or memorable for the movie as a tight focus on one family or an individual person would have been.