Tsotsi, Kevin and Dave:

Please do yourself a favor and see Tsotsi, playing at a movie theater near you. I’m recommending it highly even through praising a Best Foreign Film Oscar winner from South Africa featuring poor black teenagers seems like peddling liberal guilt. I even saw it in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco where the only person of color was a starling alit on a telephone pole across the street. For shame!

Dave had recommended I check it out after sending me a few kwaito (a Johannesberg-hybrid of house music and hip-hop. It kicks ass) tracks from the soundtrack. Dave is black which is less rationalization than turnabout. I’ve made him see more than a few holocaust movies in the 12 years of our friendship Besides his people are from Ethopia not South Africa. Mine had all emmigrated to America before the holocaust. Kindly forget the preceeding two paragraphs.

Tsotsi’s a movie about a violent young man who in the midst of a crime, discovers he’s unwittingly kidnapped a baby. His heart doesnt’ turn to mush. He doesn’t even become a nice guy. Like The Accidental Tourist (which takes place in Baltimore, where Dave and I met), the film spends its entire running time leading up to a simple gesture. It’s only after we get there that we realize how profound that gesture is.

Tsotsi doesn’t milk poverty for cheap sentiment the way I thought City of God (Dave loved it. Kevin hated it). It exists fully inside the slums and upper middle class suburbs of post-Apartheid Johannesberg. They the whole world not a microcosm of a lesson for us all.

Here’s the deal. See this movie. It’s 90 minutes, breathtaking, intense, powerful. If this isn’t why you go to the movies, get over it and thank me later. Or thank Dave who got us here in the first place.

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