I saw a preview of this with Shani Thursday night. I'm a big Emma Thompson fan, Will Farrell movies are a guilty pleasure, Dustin Hoffman mails in an enjoyable reprise of his "Huckabees" performance, the plot (of a real-life person who's hearing his life narrated by a novelist) is promising given my taste for that sort of Charlie-Kaufmanesque plot, and the trailer is great. Yet I was vaguely dissatisfied. The trailer is too good: if you've seen the 2:36 trailer, you've seen 80-90% of the good moments of the movie (depriving you of any enjoyable surprises), and the rest is so much filler, including an unconvincing love story, and a sentimental cop-out of an ending that smacks of focus group interference. It would have been much better as a ten-minute sketch.

Bob Astles, who apparently is the basis for the fictionalized "The Last King of Scotland."

It's been getting good reviews, but Slim and I didn't like it so much. OK, Forest Whitaker's performance is very good.

But the story: again, it's the "Forrest Gump" approach to history, where a fictional character finds himself swept up in and influencing events. This becomes somewhat offensive when it's a white protagonist in Africa; the movie assumes that we cannot possibly identify with African victims; while there is a harrowing torture scene, we never see an African being tortured.

Scottish Dr. Garrigan is a political naif who is swept up in the excitement of the coup, charmed by Amin into joining his inner circle. To make this palatable, historical events are swept into an arc, and Garraghan escapes when he is improbably tortured and left alone in the midst of the 1976 Entebbe hostage situation. The movie implies that Garrigan tells the world of the true nature of Amin and that this redeems him for the three or so deaths he's directly or indirectly responsible for, a total that includes Amin's wife, Kay. Of course, the illiterate Amin took power in 1971, expelled the Asians in 1972 because of a "dream," had executed thousands in his first year of power, and never had the world's imprimatur; in 1975, he sentenced the British university lecturer Denis Hills to death for comments in a book critical of him. "State terrorism was evidenced in a series of spectacular incidents; for example, High Court Judge Benedicto Kiwanuka, former head of government and leader of the banned DP, was seized directly from his courtroom. Like many other victims, he was forced to remove his shoes and then bundled into the trunk of a car, never to be seen alive again. Whether calculated or not, the symbolism of a pair of shoes by the roadside to mark the passing of a human life was a bizarre yet piercing form of state terrorism." While Amin was a showman, a real Garrigan never could have been so naive as to not realize he was abetting a cruel tyrant.

Garrigan is acted upon more than acting; he never learns Amin's cruelty, only has it described to him by a British spy. Again, this is a tale that would've been more interesting if it had been historically accurate; it did whet my appetite to see the 1974 French documentary.

Separately: The movie has Amin releasing all "non-Zionist" hostages. Let the record reflect that non-Israeli Jews were not released at Entebbe, and had to be rescued by the Israeli military; an elderly British Jewish woman left behind was murdered.

Separately: Amin claimed to have fathered 32 children. Whatever happened to them?

* Idi Amin obituary [The Guardian]
* Idi Amin profile [moreoreless.com]
* Entebbe raid [Palestinefacts.org]
* Uganda [Library of Congress]