 | I relinquish myself to every adolescent/boyhood urge: the original title of Almodóvar’s new film is La Piel Que Habito. That knowledge would function ordinarily as mere trivia for the pretentious cinema-goer; the type who “keeps it regal” and likes to pronounce all the foreign film titles in their native languages. Inevitably they end up sounding like a caricature of a Mexican. But I can’t halt there because that phallic syllable is gaping out at me. The “piel” I live in. ...read more |
The Skin I Live In
Thursday, January 19th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
31 Million Reasons
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | I don’t know precisely where the artistic impulse for endless local crime fiction emerged. It’s much easier to see its dark inspiration in the seething, throbbing streets of South Africa. This place is ostensibly, in the phrase of Mike Nicol, “killer country”. Full of chaos and questless violence, it’s the kind of place where a character of his can cough out (quilled in archetypal genre language: nasty, brutish, short) “You want to kill anybody, you take them to South Africa. ...read more |
Best Of 2011 | Skoonheid
Thursday, January 5th, 2012 by Kavish Chetty
 | How many more mid-life crises must we be lurched through in pursuit of art? This is a graceless and irreverent start to what I think – genuinely – is an understated work of some intrigue, but the charge endures. Sure, middle-age is uniquely positioned for trauma: there is the recharged vigour of youth by which new projects are taken up; but they’re now poisoned with the cloying desperation which comes with the acknowledgement of life’s finitude. Still, it is a ...read more |
Best Of 2011 | Viva Riva!
Friday, December 30th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | I have developed a taste for flesh and so here I cannibalise our young to make my point. In Mahala’s previous coverage of Viva Riva, Colin Macrae speaks of director Djo Tunda Wa Munga as “an African Tarantino“. Interestingly, not the African Tarantino, but an African Tarantino – marking him indefinitely as one amongst many potential Africans who might have that lusted-after medal pinned to their lapels (“good job, old chap”). I can hear the distant echoes of ...read more |
Drive
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | Drive opens up on the dark, neon-lit arteries of downtown Los Angeles. There’s an immediate parallel here – you feel it in the loneliness, the slumberous anguish – to Taxi Driver. You’ll acclimate to the lead character slowly (he’s a nameless dude credited as “the Driver”), but there’s a seismic moment when it all lurches in his favour; a kind of regicidal scene in which I found myself saying “This guy is cooler than Travis Bickle.” ...read more |
Hel Op Die Platteland
Thursday, November 24th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | It’s difficult to resist the histrionic urging of a film like this. It dangles its seductive lameness before you. It architects the mise-en-scène for a thorough critical savaging, which spares no expletive or low-slung metaphor in its bitchy pursuits. The exercise of this savaging is a non-catharsis. I tried. What I’m left idly puzzling over in the aftermath of that aggression is this: are the directors and producers of this film – and all films like it – aware of ...read more |
One on One | Tsotsi at Park Station
Friday, November 18th, 2011 by Briain Lethlabane
 | The movie about my life would open with this scene. This still shot, in fact. In a voiceover, I’d talk about how tense I was shooting it and how badly I wanted my mother to see me up there on the silver screen. I’d mention how cold it was that night and how worried I was, like any actor, about getting my next job. I’d talk about how this was my second major motion picture yet I still didn’t have ...read more |
One on One | King of Comedy
Friday, October 28th, 2011 by Roger Young
 | Before you had Zack Galifianakis, Ricky Gervais, before Tim and Eric, before Tom Green, there was one guy who did uncomfortable comedy better than all of them, Robert De Niro. He only did it once, though, in 1983’s little seen De Niro vanity project, The King Of Comedy. Directed by Scorcese and mostly framed in long shots because he was recovering from the seventies and was too weak to really get involved. ...read more |
State Of Violence
Thursday, October 27th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | There is, in our film and literature – and I’m sure you’ve felt it too – an obsession with the past; this sense that the “present” we have is dragged deep into the murk of something which came before it. The bolder works threaten to tear open our hastily-sewn sutures and show how the past is always here: the spectres of apartheid, the phantasms of some history. ...read more |
Howl
Monday, October 24th, 2011 by Kavish Chetty
 | Cinema has the magnificent discontinuity that our own lives are lacking. We have to breathe through all the stasis and slumber, the lulls and breaks in rhythm, the slow marches. The characters of cinema are always already compacted into symbolic completeness, a desirable wholeness. They’re just there in 90-minutes of volatile, beautiful perfection. It makes their lives something to drool over. ...read more |
