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<cxr26@psu.edu> "The Last King of Scotland" is a very dangerous mix of fictionalized fiction and an attempt to be historically authentic (to the extent of recreating down to the last detail scenes from Barbet Schroeder's 1974 documentary, "Genderal Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait"). My sense was that viewers who were not already familiar with Uganda's history and Amin in particular left theatres feeling that they had seen a "true story." Amongst the many things that disturbed me about the film, I'll just mention two. First (as someone on the list has already mentioned) African women are portrayed as fully sexually available: within the first 5 minutes of the film the young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, has managed to have sex with the first Ugandan woman he meets. Later Garrigan goes on to have an affair with one of Amin's wife. Numerous other scenes depict African women as hypersexualized. This stands in stark contrast to how the one white woman in the film is portrayed: sexually restrained and moral, as she resists her attraction to Garrigan and remains faithful to her do-good husband. Second, the film not only too easily glosses over the question of Britain's role in Amin's rise to power and his ability to stay in power for so long, it gives NO credit whatsoever to Julius Nyerere and Tanzanian forces (who were assisted by Ugandan exiles), for bringing Amin's dictatorship to an end. A final point: People seem to be mesmerized by Forest Whitaker's performance, but as far as I'm concerned all of the accolades he's received have less to do with his performance and more to do with what kinds of roles Hollywood is willing to reward Black actors for playing...think of Halle Berry's oscar for "Monster's Ball" and Denzel Washington's for "Training Day." Carina Ray <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Carina Ray Department of History and Program in Religious Studies 108 Weaver Building Penn State University State College, PA 16802 (814) 863-7455 "Every time we step outside the stereotypes that have been so cunningly fashioned to patrol our imaginations and dull our intellectual energies - a strategy that is central to domination and control - we engage in a politics of the mind, in intellectual resistance, and we change ourselves in qualitatively new and revolutionary ways." Patricia McFadden <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
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