Family First

Paul Eilers’ Verraaiers is a long film. At two hours, it feels like three. This Bosbok Ses production is overall a more merit worthy experience than Roepman, their previous film I liked but a film I found to be too whimsical and spiritually thin for its own good. Verraaiers is, for better and for worse, a more grounded experience, an exploration of loyalty and betrayal against the backdrop of the South African War (Anglo-Boer War).

At the centre of events is Jacobus van Aswegen (a strong Gys de Villiers), who with his sons – including Vilje Maritz – fight the British until he starts to question the wisdom of their involvement in the conflict. With the implementation of Kitchener’s scorched earth policy, whereby farms were burned down and women and children taken to concentration camps, Van Aswegen decides to rather stay at home with his wife (Rika Sennett) and daughters (including Roepman’s Beate Olwagen) so that he can be there to protect them if necessary. This decision is seen as betrayal by some of the Boer authorities and before long Jacobus and his kin (and some friends) are arrested and set to stand trial on charges of treason.

The first part of the film is the narrative and thematic set-up and provides a clear idea of why some Boers decided to personally withdraw from the war even if they supported the effort as a whole. The second part of the film concerns the trial, and is a complete slog to sit through. When the trial-part of the film begins, the film has nothing else to focus on, no B-storyline to alternate with the trial-storyline. So, for nearly an hour we see the men worry, talk to the Boer authorities, question themselves and so on. There are some cutaways to the women all alone at the homestead, but those quickly become pointless due to a specifically bizarre scene which suggests something completely unconvincing about the Boer women in question, particularly the mother.

Then we’re back with the men who sit and toil and wonder their way to an unsurprising ending. Half the film is thus claustrophobic and constraining without visual reference to whatever else is happening while the protagonists are imprisoned – why are we not shown the scorched earth policy in practice? – and the film grinds to a halt. In films such as Der Untergang (Downfall) such characteristics – claustrophobia; constraint; a focus on a specific small group of characters – were beneficial in sustaining suspense and a sense of foreboding, but in Verraaiers their sum total is tedium. There’s something in the combination of shot selection, editing and the screenplay that severely undermines the film, something I hope will become clearer to me in a second or third viewing (which I’m not looking forward to, given how leaden half of the film is). 

Johan Baird and Stian Bam are solid in important supporting roles, but there are odd character moments that don’t convince, such as an early scene with Carel Trichardt as a judge wondering aloud (as if on stage) about loyalty and betrayal, somewhat clumsily foregrounding the film’s themes. Yet it’s the pacing that remains the biggest problem. I’ve seen war films that go on for three hours; I’ve seen hour upon hour of Tarr and Tarkovsky and am all the better for it. Those films, regardless of their running time, have a poetry to their images that is undeniable, and often, to me personally, unshakeable. Maybe that’s why Verraaiers felt so long and seemed so lifeless as it continued: it is so sincere, so focused on representing history in a functional and visually instrumental manner, that, to its detriment, it fundamentally lacks a sense of imagistic poetry. 

There can be only one (let's hope)

 

Hoofmeisie, a new Afrikaans tween comedy by Morne du Toit and the team from the Film Factory (purveyors of Bakgat, Bakgat 2, Night Drive and Superhelde), got a rave review from one Afrikaans speaking critic and was lambasted by another critic in the Mail & Guardian who referred to the film as “impossible to watch”. Maybe what these critics and I should admit up front is that we’re not the target market for the film, having passed through primary school many, many years ago. This tale of a bunch of girls (and their mothers - where have all the fathers gone?) competing for the title of “hoofmeisie”, or head girl (the highest rung on the student representative council ladder), is clearly aimed at a very young audience indeed. However, old(er) as we may be, we do have something to say about the difference between good children’s entertainment and bad children’s entertainment. The best children’s entertainment works on most levels for most audiences as there’s something to appreciate for just about everyone. Surely no-one but the very, very young appreciates a mother squeezing out her daughter’s zit only to have its yellow content splash her soccer-mom face? 

Many American tween comedies are also mediocre, but it’s so much more unfortunate that Du Toit and his team chose to borrow from and imitate the worst that the tween comedy genre has to offer: badly written young romance, one-dimensional characters, psycho mothers. It ends up being very predictable, even for a film of its type.

Nadia (Misha’el de Beer) is a sweet natured, intelligent learner at Stumbo Pops Primary. Her BFF is the equally sweet Melissa (Annemicke Kotze) and her secret crush is Rikus (Ruan Wessels), who plays rugby. Thankfully the movie spares us a scene set at a primary school level rugby match, though it gives us instead a netball scene where the players and parents get so worked up that the coach turns a fire extinguisher on them. There are two main antagonists on the netball court and in the rest of the film: Susan (Melissa Massyn), who is sometimes referred to as Su-Satan, and Hetwieg (Jamie Lawrence). These are the girls who the movie shows as in being in contention the head girl title.

The good news, for what it’s worth, is that there are no fart jokes. There are one or two blink-and-you-miss-it attempts at satire. And the young actors are for most part amusing and entertaining, especially Melissa Massyn who on occasion displays a greater sense of comic timing than any adult actor in the film. Poor Hannes Muller. Poor Lida Botha, who seems to play the hyper caricatured version of the grandmother in Roepman. Poor Johan van der Merwe, who plays the stuttering Stumbo Pops principal, Mr Gouws, and ends up with cake on his face. This is a bad film with usually good actors.

How can I say whether a tween audience will think of the film as bad? I cannot, but I did watch the film with an audience consisting of parents and their children, and while there were a few chuckles here and there, there was absolutely no sustained laughter. There are a few jokes aimed at older viewers, but these fall flat; weren’t Malema jokes old a year ago?

There’s a moral to the story that parents will appreciate, I suppose; be true to yourself, be nice to your friends, don’t be nasty to your enemies, and so forth. But in between all of this, there’s a bizarre scene between Mr Gouws and a cleaner (from what I can tell), a young black woman who replaces a photo of Gouws with a framed photograph of Nelson Mandela. This apparently teaches him about merit and doing what’s right. There’s nothing wrong with the sentiment, but the film handles it in such an amateurish fashion it’s cringe worthy – consider how we are supposed to believe that a previously “invisible” black character suddenly initiates change in a middle aged white man’s life. I guess I should mention that the most openly violent and destructive character in the film is Hetwieg, who is non-white; of the four main young females, she also has the least dialogue.

Equally embarrassing is the film’s attempts at safe religiosity. When the film opens, we learn that Nadia is an orphan who resides with her grandmother (Marie Pentz). When Nadia tells her that her parents are looking down at them from heaven, Grandma confesses that she doesn’t believe in “the Bethlehem star” anymore. Surely it is not a spoiler when I say that the film provides an opportunity for Grandma to reconsider this position. Why on earth bring in this theme if you only spend two sentences on it? And such badly written sentences at that? Indeed, the film spends more time on Isak Davel in a red speedo.

Hoofmeisie is a threadbare story that has more product placements than a Bond movie; indeed, there is a scene set during the school’s Entrepreneurial Day that seems to be in the film only to throw together a few brands (and, lest I forget, to get Isak Davel in a speedo). Talking about odd creative decisions: the film tells the majority of its story in flashback, taking its cue from, can you believe it, The Usual Suspects. Where it served a purpose in the latter crime classic, there is no reason why Hoofmeisie should be told like this. The kid behind me told his father that he “didn’t know what is going on”.

I wish I could tell you good things about Hoofmeisie, but I cannot. It’s not enough to have a comedy in Afrikaans; it has to be a funny comedy in Afrikaans. It seems as if too many Afrikaans speaking people are willing to spend money and time on Afrikaans products simply because it’s in Afrikaans and not necessarily because it’s a good film. I’m sure that many people have enjoyed and will enjoy Hoofmeisie with their families in the name of good, clean family viewing, but to those people I want to say: have you seen Whale Rider, The Sandlot, Millions, The Princess Bride? I’ll concede that these movies are not in Afrikaans but they’re much, much better than Hoofmeisie if family viewing is what you’re looking for.

Getting the shot

Here’s a story worth telling told in an uninspired, shallow way. The Bang Bang Club was a group of photographers active in South Africa when the country was on the apparent verge of civil war as it neared its first democratic elections in 1994. The film establishes the major political opponents as supporters of the African National Congress (ANC, currently the dominant political power in South Africa) or the Inkhata Freedom Party (IFP, a mere shadow of its former self), which had some dealings with the then dominant white minority government.

The photographers are there to capture the action, by which I mean murders and slayings. They are Greg Marinovich (Ryan Phillipe), who is established early on as the film’s main protagonist; Ken Oosterbroek (Frank Rautenbach); Joao Silva (Neels van Jaarsveld); and Kevin Carter (Taylor Kitsch), who is high on drugs nearly all the time. An unofficial member is Robin Comley (Malin Ackermann), who does the layout for “The Star” newspaper where the Club members mostly publish their pictures – unless it’s too graphic, in which case they’re sent to AP or Reuters.

Between the incessant “howzits!” and forced exclamations of “bru!”, The Bang Bang Club fails to characterise its characters. They have names and identifiable traits – Carter is the junkie, Silva the one with the accent, etc – but never register as characters. Poor Ackermann gets the worst deal: Comley is so underwritten that the character’s only function in the film is engage in a flimsy romance with Marinovich. Whether this happened in actuality or not is irrelevant; a film must succeed in making its events convincing, and this one fails in many respects. In the end, Comley is simply the Woman.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often trite. After everything he’s seen – the film has many images of violence, mayhem and brutality – Marinovich is reduced to saying “I hate them fucking all!” The film often reduces potentially powerful moments to inane exclamations. Emotionally, the film falls flat, even in its most challenging scenes, such as Carter getting the infamous shot of the dying Sudanese girl, a vulture just a few feet away. If we had any sort of connection with Carter, the eventual fallout of the picture would matter but Kitsch’s performance is so one-note any impact gets lost.

Director Steven Silver and his team deserve praise for reconstructing the period convincingly, and making the scenes of political confrontation quite kinetic. The film exhibits a high level of technical proficiency. But the film follows a tiring pattern: shooting township violence, then celebrations in a club/pub/bar, then some insufficient soul searching; repeat. Overall, in terms of characterisation, plotting and writing, The Bang Bang Club is a shamefully superficial film, and a wasted opportunity indeed.

Sucked Dry

Less ideologically offensive than “Night Drive” but easily more vacuous and boring, director Christopher-Lee dos Santos’s “Eternity” is a vampire romance so tedious that you begin wishing for the fast paced antics of “The White Ribbon”. I am grateful for “Skoonheid” and “Roepman” and embarrassed for this film. In “Eternity, Andre Frauenstein stars as Billy (the name is a set-up for a terrible joke late in the film; it’s as forced as the character’s hair, which makes him look like a forlorn Goku in search of an Egoli Dragonball), a vampire who spends his evenings parkouring around Johannesburg with his buddies. After one night on the town (its rooftops, staircases etc), it is one of his friends who channels the great philosophers to make the seismic observation: “It is almost daybreak”. I think the rising sun gave him a clue, as it would Billy, but Billy stands there nodding solemnly.

Allow me to pause for a moment. Here are creatures that have obtained immortality and spend their time practising parkour. Something tells me they’re not doing it simply because they’ve already worked their way through the Western literary canon.

Life as a vampire seems uncomplicated enough, until a scientist (poor Ian Roberts, in another of his appearances as Ian Roberts-as-Character X) discovers a formula that could give vampires the ability to walk in direct sunlight without turning to ash. An emergency Vampire Board Meeting is called, where evil Borlak (David James) turns the tables on the more moderate current leader (Gys de Villiers) to become the alpha vamp. This scene exists only so that the film can claim to have a Vampire Board Meeting scene, which most contemporary vampire movies have. With the exception of the Big Bad Borlak, none of the other characters really make a functional appearance ever again. The dialogue throughout the film is ridiculously leaden and generic, but this scene is a particularly effective indicator of what’s to come.

One night, Billy meets Jenny (Rikki Brest) in a night club. May I venture that Brest (now now) was cast for her body, and not her acting abilities or strong verbal presence. If there’s not blood or parkour on the screen, there’s cleavage, and the camera spends minutes on Brest’s body in an early scene where she’s trying on different outfits for her night out. It’s so gratuitous it should be hilarious, but it’s more boring than anything else.

It is Jenny’s birthday, but her mother (Brumilda van Rensburg) does not seem to know about it. So Jesse and Billy celebrate by drinking and dancing. Another pause: Billy drinks blood. When asked what’s in his flask, he says something to the effect of “It’s some kind of Bloody Mary” and then follows up with a Stephanie Meyer-sized clunker: “It’s an acquired taste”. Anyhoo, so the Big Bad Borlak kidnaps Jenny to get his hands in the formula since Ian Roberts-as-Character X is her dad. (By this point - and I may be wrong because at some stage my mind wandered and I started thinking about Del Toro and Hogan’s “The Strain” and Cronin’s superior “The Passage”, which is a sweeping epic featuring vampires – the film reached the halfway mark, and nothing had really happened yet.) Billy and company set off to rescue Jenny and save… Save what? There’s no integration between the worlds of the vampires and the citizens of Johannesburg, so it’s cinematically unclear what precisely is at stake except for some individual fates.

I should mention that Hlomla Dandala co-stars as a policeman, Joe Kau. Dandala is better than this material, and all he does is say his lines, point his gun a lot of times, and appear on the scene when necessary. Model turned actress Christina Storm appears as Billy’s former lover, Lisa, who may be a bit jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s newly acquired mortal girlfriend. Storm, who also recently appeared in a horror of a different nature in “Ek Lief Jou”, is a dreadful actress, plain and simple. She brings only her body to a role that at least demands convincing grunting and groaning. Oh, the noises. These are some of the noisiest vampires I have ever encountered. They hiss and snarl and hiss and snarl and hiss and there I was again, thinking of “The Passage”. It really becomes comical. The blonde female vampire who lugs Jenny around is a particularly inspired hisser.

After the film reveals a big twist - a development even Oedipus would see coming, eyes or no eyes – the film predictably climaxes with a battle, followed by an ending so abrupt and impotent you cannot help but laugh again. “Eternity” is a bloody mess, and proves once more that a bad screenplay results in a bad movie, regardless of how many gunfights or parkour scenes or shots of heaving bosoms you put in.

On beauty

 

Francois (Deon Lotz) is a middle aged Afrikaner trapped in middle class domesticity. He runs a timber mill in Bloemfontein and shares a house with his wife and daughter, Anika. His relationships with both women are strained; he sees his daughter as disobedient and rebellious, while his wife is little more than an occasional sparring partner. Her occasional meanderings into throwaway political quips are few and depthless. It could be that Francois’s relationship with the missus is troubled by the possibility of her having an affair, and that he’s not getting along with Anika because she pursues her passions, which is in strong contrast to her father’s forceful stoicism. In this light, it seems as if Francois is the only one who does not get what he wants, and what he wants, is twenty-something Christian (Charlie Keegan).

“Skoonheid” is about the obsessive pursuit of desire as an older man lusts after a younger one. Put differently, “Skoonheid” is about a crisis of desire, of a man so used to the mundane that the younger man’s youthful freedom is so consuming to Francois that it threatens to completely derail him. “Skoonheid” is about looking and waiting; the film’s impressive opening shot in fact establishes the film as Francois’s story because we see what he sees, and sometimes how he sees it as well. The camera pans slowly from right to left and comes to rest on a newly wedded couple receiving words of congratulation from a line of friends and family. Past the happy wedding guests in the background we meet Christian as the camera slowly, patiently zooms in on his face. He is visibly comfortable in his skin and in the situation, where he makes obligatory small talk. His being is far removed from Francois’s, to whom the film cuts once Christian has been established, and it is clear that Francois sees something he desperately wants and cannot have.

Writer-director Oliver Hermanus (“Shirley Adams”) approaches the material with solemnity, knowing that the story should not be rushed, that he is dealing with characters and not plot mechanisms. Often the film is distant and detached, and are we allowed to not only see Christian as Francois sees him, but to also watch Francois watching Christian. In this way, and not through overly manipulative music or dramatic dialogue, are we gradually pulled into the story.

“Skoonheid” is frank about sexuality, and there’s a particularly explicit, brutal scene late in the film. But “Skoonheid” is never indulgent or gratuitous; Hermanus is too sensitive and too intelligent for that. Francois never sees himself as gay; he simply wants to have sex with a man. Because Hermanus knows that style complements character, the sex is not eroticised, but is portrayed simply as fact, as something that must happen.

As a lingering character drama brave enough to tackle notions of repression in a traditional Afrikaner milieu in graphic detail, “Skoonheid” emerges as a mature, challenging drama. For most of its running time, I could see exactly why the film has been surrounded by so much positive buzz since its much publicised premiere at Cannes earlier this year. But then it ends, and it is here that the film lets the viewer down. Throughout, the film relies on a variety of ambiguities – of character, of situation – to add nuance to the story. The film doesn’t pander to its audience.

I understand the purpose and function of ambiguity, and I’m all for open-ended narratives. But after what “Skoonheid” shows us, I couldn’t help but feel that we – and Francois, and Christian – deserve more than what Hermanus leaves us with. I’m not asking for anything sensational or even concrete, just an ending that is as visually and thematically powerful as its opening scene. I was reminded of the ending to “Y Tu Mama Tambien”, where a brief café encounter set the characters straight without over explaining anything. And for all its flaws, “Brokeback Mountain” had an unforgettable final shot that quietly emphasised the tragedy of the story. “Skoonheid” lacks a similar final visual or thematic punch.

This should not deter one from seeing the film. Though it won’t have the box-office take of a “Liefling” or “Jakhalsdans”, it is “Skoonheid” that will remain far longer in the mind.

South African horror has blood, no brains

Justin Head’s South African horror “Night Drive” is a pathetic feature film, a gory and insulting attempt at tension and suspense where capable actors do their best to take the screenplay seriously. In this, they are more successful than we are. Christopher Beasley, Corine du Toit, Greg Melvill-Smith and Brandon Auret star, and while we pretend not to notice that half the South African soapie circuit is in the film (hey, it’s Robert Whitehead!), we cannot miss, or forgive, the ineptitude of the writing. The awfulness of the screenplay is “Night Drive’s” downfall, since the film is technically quite polished even if the camera is sometimes too self-consciously jerky. 

In “Night Drive”, a handful of tourists – the elderly British couple; the yuppie Black couple; the struggling mismatched couple – are taken on a night drive in a South African game reserve. Some poachers have been using the reserve as a hunting ground over the past weeks, and not just because they hunt animals… they hunt humans too, to use their organs in muti (black magic). And muti is stronger when the organs are taken from the victim while he or she is still alive. Muti is a shocking reality in some of the northern provinces of South Africa especially, but the film simply uses it to form part of its genre exercise. The key figure behind these poachers-hunters is the mystical Hyena Man, who feeds human remains to his hyena kin at the start of the film. (Later, the Hyena Man will hear the hyenas calling in the wild, and refer to them as his children – have the filmmakers really not seen at least one version of “Dracula”? If they have, and this is a reference to Stoker’s creation, it is one of the film’s worst moments.)

I am going to discuss the film in more detail now. If you plan on seeing “Night Drive”, stop reading now and ask yourself if you really have the time and will to subject yourself to it. It really is a terrible film.

Spoilers follow.

Cliched and devoid of solid characters, “Night Drive” invites the viewer to take out a horror genre checklist to see how many un-surprising twists the film gives you (not many, and the major revelation is not much of a revelation at all) and also to play the “who dies next?” game. After decades of horror, who would’ve thought that in a South African horror film, the black person still dies first? In fact, it is firstly the black female who has her breast and arm cut off; secondly, seconds later, her black boyfriend has his genitals removed. And what about the elderly couple – do they make it? No. They are built into the story only for some demographic purpose, I guess, before being dispatched of without ceremony. What about handsome and tortured hero Sean (Beasley) and the equally tortured Karen (Du Toit) – do they make it? And is there a bit of a spark between them?

Tortured Sean’s trauma originates from an earlier incident where, in pursuit of a criminal, he shot and killed not only said thug but also a female civilian. The movie revisits this moment a few times. The film is lame enough to, predictably, recreate this moment at the end, when the Hyena Man grabs Karen and threatens to cut her throat, telling Sean to put the gun down. You don’t need me to tell you that Sean does not put the gun down and manages to save Karen. Please note that before Sean comes face to face with the Hyena Man in this final confrontation, he finds his father’s (Greg Melvill-Smith) corpse. He puts his gun down and instead picks up a panga with which to face the poachers who are armed to the teeth with knives, pangas and automatic weapons. Clearly this does not make sense, and to add insult to injury, Sean’s surname… is Darwin.

The film’s other great problem is an ideological one: it detests its female characters, killing almost every single one of them with the exception of Karen, who has apparently survived a previous rape prior to the film’s events only to endure further extreme victimisation and, possibly, a future with an equally psychologically scarred Sean.

Such are the problems that plague the film, including some horrible dialogue:
Karen: “Fuck you!”
Potential poacher and rapist: “Fuck me? No, fuck you!”

There’s even a retread of the classic “there are things worse than death” line, and – oh, come on, they make it too easy.

Woerwoer

Paul Eilers’ “Roepman”, an Afrikaans drama adapted from the book by Jan van Tonder, is as polished and well crafted a South African film as one is likely to see. The camerawork is outstanding, the editing fluid. “Roepman” has been called the best Afrikaans film yet; we’re talking about over a century’s worth of movie output, so it’s quite a claim. It’s certainly one of the best Afrikaans movies ever released, and it’s certainly better than “Paljas”. Scratch that; despite its flaws, which I’ll get to, “Roepman” is one of the best South African films yet, and stands shoulder to shoulder with the Oscar-winning “Tsotsi”. Eilers’ film comfortably shifts from the sentimental and the humourous to the political and the downright shocking. 

“Roepman” recreates a key period from South African history, and places its characters against a backdrop of political conservatism and preservation. “Roepman” excels at evoking time and place. It is 1966. Timus (Paul Loots) is the youngest child of a large Durban-based Afrikaans family, which includes two sisters and an older brother. Like many white Afrikaans men of the time, his father works in the rail industry, and his mother stays home. There is a black woman who helps to keep the house neat and clean. Timus is somewhat fascinated by Joon (John-Henry Opperman), the titular character, who is a “call man” employed to make sure that rail workers wake up in time to get to work on time. 

To Timus, Joon is a great young man who has saved Timus’ life on occasion. Timus is growing up – there’s some foregrounding about the loss of innocence – and his siblings have their own stories: brother Braam (Eddie de Jager) may or may not be in love with the girl next door, while his sisters (Beate Olwagen and Desire Gardner) have boyfriend and independence issues. Father (Deon Lotz) keeps a firm hand on the family, with mother (Rike Sennett) as mediator between the patriarch and his children. Lida Botha co-stars in the archetypal wise old woman role as the grandmother. 

The film opens with Timus running through the train yard in tears, and the film builds up to that moment for most of its running time. One senses the coming of something ominous early on, and I’m not just talking about the black-and-white photograph of Verwoerd keeping a watchful eye on whatever happens in the living room. There are dodgy characters, such as the grease ball boyfriend (Altus Theart) of Braam’s potential love interest and the gang of young men who spend their time walking around town, reading Playboy and being assholes. It is their leader, Hein (Andrew Thompson), who tells Timus that he’ll be a man only when he “pisses foam”.

As a family drama, “Roepman” is stellar. The story is gripping and, as I said earlier, the film is very well made. It is aware of the politics of the time, and effectively uses it to outline key events in the characters’ lives. When it ends, the film refuses easy answers in favour of emphasising the loss of innocence once more.

If so much of “Roepman” works, what holds it back from greatness? I’ll do my best to steer clear from spoilers.

(1) It is clear that Hein is going to be some sort of villain in the movie. This is an important character filled with insecurity and with a certain pathological element, but the character is totally flat. There’s nothing to Hein, and it doesn’t help that he wears black - if memory serves – in every single scene he appears in. I would also suggest that the role was miscast, but let’s leave it at that.

(2) Despite solid acting from Lotz, the conservative Afrikaner father leans towards caricature. Here “Paljas” actually has the edge; Marius Weyers’s Afrikaner father had a little dimension.

(3) The film is good at developing a sense of dread, and it handles the eventual payoff with great success. However, these darkly dramatic scenes are contrasted with scenes so whimsical that it requires considerable suspension of disbelief.

(4) The film oversells Joon as messianic figure, especially in a shot of a statue of Christ on the cross that has particular significance for the film’s later developments. Like the black-clad Hein, this too seems spelled out.

(5) The “all you need to do is believe” mantra is thin. While certain characters can get away with it when it is appropriate to the plot and emotional payoff, I’m not so sure you could, for example, tell the family’s live-in maid to “just believe and it will happen” with Verwoerd frowning at you. And considering what happens to a major character just before this message is overtly promoted for the last time, it rings rather hollow.

A final word. Director Eilers has a small appearance as the local minister, and in two minutes shows why he’s considered to be such an incredible actor.