South Africans in New York

SA News for SAPeople

“Chronicle,” a Movie Shot Where?

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Is this Cape Town?

I don’t know about you, but if a movie is shot in South Africa I can tell. Within five seconds of a Volvo ad screening on TV, I can detect Chapman’s Peak or the Karoo or a shot in Cape Town central – no matter how hard they try to disguise it. So blow me down (and away) if one of 2011’s blockbusters (and one of my favorite movies), Chronicle, wasn’t shot in South Africa and I didn’t even smell a rat or fynbos or the salty spray of the Atlantic at Clifton for one milisecond. Even if you check out the photo to the left, try and see Cape Town in there somewhere. As one American critic noted, director Josh Trank did an amazing job with the movie, not least of all in transforming South Africa into Seattle.

The story in Chronicle is a simple one. Three high-school kids discover a hole in the ground that seems to have been made by a meteorite, go into the hole, and then, zap!, something happens to them. They all inexplicably develop telekinetic powers – they can do fun things like move cars by pointing their fingers and they can fly – and plenty other things an 18-year-old could have fun (and get into trouble) with. But all of a sudden, of course, things start to go wrong in a bad way. It’s a very smart movie, written by Max Landis (whose father, John, made movies like American Werewolf in London) that has you guessing all the time. And I don’t mean just the location.

Safe House

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We all know that Cape Town is being used a lot for movie shoots and ad shoots, often doubling for a city in America or elsewhere. This week sees the launch of Safe House, an action blockbuster that is set smack in the middle of the Mother City and which is getting great word of mouth already.

It stars Denzel Washington as a rogue CIA agent who, after evading capture for a decade, is sent to a safe house in Cape Town, where he is guarded by Ryan Reynolds.

Of course everything goes wrong, and from the very start of the movie it’s chases and shootouts. And, of course, lots of great Cape Town scenery.

The movie is already being compared to the Bourne series because it’s not only as fast as a whip, but it’s smart too, with the actors also including Vera Farmiga and Brendon Gleeson.

The young Swedish director, Daniel Espinosa, spent much of his time growing up in Africa, in Mozambique especially, and he knows South Africa well. “For me,” he said in an interview, “it was like coming home.”

Watch the trailer:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IfQY4fNcnw

Causing an Uproar

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The subject of Dereck and Beverly Joubert’s full-length documentary, The Last Lions, is simply – and sadly – just that. It’s about the last lions of Africa. Which is exactly what they will be unless people take action. Fifty years ago there were 450,000 lions; now there are an estimated 20,000 left. All that in a mere half century. This has been caused by the encroachment of civilization, poaching, and sport hunting.

Watch the Trailer and $10 Goes to Save Lions

It’s a fact learned by few people who go on safari. They don’t realize that the animals they are watching, enjoying, enthralled by, might not be there for their own children to one day see. And that’s what the Jouberts, who have been filming predators in southern Africa for twenty years, mostly for National Geographic, are trying to do with The Last Lions. They want to make people aware of the beauty and irreplaceable richness that will die when the predator cats do.

The Jouberts follow one lioness, who, with her three cubs, flees a pride of females and settles on Duba island in Botswana. The rest of the movie is about her battle to keep her family alive, to feed them, and to fend off attacks by other cats and a massive herd of buffalo. It’s a story of Africa’s wildlife, heartbreaking at times, but it reminds you what’s at stake. Lions in all their glory.

Financed by National Geographic, which has launched Cause an Uproar in order to spread information about the plight of lions.  Also, The Big Cat Initiative, which was started by the Jouberts and National Geographic, is working in Botswana, Cameroon, Kenya, and other countries, to try and halt the decrease in the number of cats. As Dereck Joubert says, “We are fighting for one cat at a time.”

But the Jouberts also do their own share.

As stakeholders in the Great Plains Conservation, which owns properties in Botswana, Tanzania, and Kenya – such as Duba Plains, where the movie was filmed, and Ol Donyo Lodge – the company puts money back into conservation and cat programs and anti-poaching. To support their company and its properties is to support wildlife.

Streets Paved in Gold

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Ever since I moved to New York fourteen years ago, I’ve collected things off the street. This is the city of plenty – plenty to throw away. You can find furniture, paintings, lamps, computers, printers, strollers, food, you name it. So impressed was I by the largesse/wastage that I wrote a book, Mongo, Adventures in Trash, about it. (Mongo is New York slang for anything someone has thrown away that you find some use for.)

I’ve since stopped collecting bigger items. I go for the occasional painting that takes my fancy or a lamp. If it’s something I’m looking for – though it’s rare you actually find something you’re looking for when you’re looking for it – then I take it. One thing I have always collected and continue to look for is money. New York is a city paved not so much in gold but brass and nickel. Mostly I find pennies. Pennies are plentiful and most people don’t seem to have the energy to pick them up once they’ve fallen. Pennies are the insignificant coin. So much so that many shops don’t even bother to give you your change of one or two cents. They regard it as so small as to be meaningless. How far away, you might ask then, is five cents and a dime?

But those pennies add up. I’ve collected more than $400 off the streets since I bent to pick up my first coin. Of course that’s not all made up of pennies – there was one very welcome $50 bill drifting around a gas station on York Avenue and 58th Street – but most of it was. I have always put the coins I collect to one side, just to figure out how much I’ve made, how much falls out of people’s pockets, how much people overlook what is right at their feet.

Whenever I see someone who picks up a coin, I make sure to say something, like, “You a collector?” They are always happy to meet a fellow collector/picker/gatherer (that is, unless the collector happens to be a psychotic schizophrenic, many of whom rummage through the city’s trash too). In all my years in New York, though, I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen picking up coins. Sometimes it is the kind of person you’d expect (an old lady who, wearing a torn dress and with a Medusa hairstyle, looks like a trash picker) and sometimes it isn’t (a twentysomething on his cell phone). I still feel embarrassed every time I stop the sidewalk traffic to pick up a coin – yes, even $400 later! – but that doesn’t stop me from doing it.

Coins won’t feature in the documentary about mongo that Italian/Australian filmmaker Marco Mona and I are making at the moment, but plenty of other amazing throwaways in New York will. For a taste of what the movie will look like, check out Mongo, Trash Treasure Hunters – and stay tuned for more!

Lights, Camera, Apartheid, Blockbuster!

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Who ever thought they’d see the words ‘apartheid,’ ‘sci-fi,’ and ‘blockbuster’ in the same planetary orbit, let alone the same sentence? Well, along comes ‘District 9’ – you already see the allegory, right? – a HUGE movie opening this weekend in America that was shot in South Africa, directed by an expat (Neill Blomkamp, aged 27, who lives in New Zealand), stars an unknown South African (Sharlto Copley), was produced by ‘Lord of the Rings’ Peter Jackson and is about a group of extraterrestrials that look like giant insects whose spaceship gets stranded above Joburg in the ’80s. They are put into a kind of township for the next 20 years, kept apart from the rest of the population, and everyone despises them. Then, of course, something goes wrong, and our hero discovers a nasty experiment that’s being carried out on the ETs. The YouTube video has already been watched by half a million, and the reviews have been incendiary. Move over, Gavin Hood, there’s a new kid on the block!

Documentary as Thriller?

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Yes, sounds odd, doesn’t it. Well, that’s how they are promoting ‘The Cove.’ And that’s what the rave reviews are calling it. It’s kind of a doccie mixed with ‘The Bourne Identity.’ It’s brilliant, has you at the edge of your seat the whole 90 minutes, and you just have to check out the trailer at The Cove to see what I’m talking about. For the faint of heart (or those of you who love animals), beware — this is about how one town in Japan, Taiji, treats dolphins. After herding them into the aforementioned cove in the most chilling, horrifying manner, those that they don’t sell off to aquariums around the world (and to swim-with-dolphin programs — yes, this is how they trap those seemingly happy dolphins you might have swum with!), they slaughter. One heroic man tries to save them. It’s a movie that you should see, although most people will head to ‘Transformers 2’ instead. But if I’ve made one of you go check it out, I’ve done something. Save the Dolphins.