by Chris Marshall:
It’s taken me a long, long time (like, three days!) to
finish Out of Africa. This shouldn’t
necessarily be seen as an indictment of its quality, but I did fall asleep four
separate times while watching it. Rest assured, I went back and made sure I
watched every moment of it, even if it did take several attempts.
At its most basic level, it’s not a terrible film by any
stretch of the imagination. It’s a perfectly acceptable piece of cinema, and it’s
obviously the type of thing that the Academy loves. But it is so far outside of
my interests that it became difficult to focus on it for too long. It didn’t
help matters that I tended to try to watch it late at night.
The film is based on the novel by Isak Dinesen[1],
whose real name is Karen Blixen, and recounts the events of her life in Kenya,
which was at the time a British colony. Blixen is Danish, and at the beginning
of the film she marries Bror, which is a silly name. They aren’t particularly
in love with each other, but trifling things like that didn’t matter so much
back then. They were good friends and liked each other well enough, so why not?
