THE LYNX EFFECT

Slim pickings at the pictures or what? So off I went to see The Last King of Scotland, or rather, Forest Whittaker’s awards-minded Idi Amin and just as well. Without him there wouldn’t be much of a movie because his co-star, James McAvoy’s weirdly effeminate mug alone (see above) couldn’t entertain me for twenty minutes, let alone the whole two hours.

While critics rave about Forest's portrayal of Idi Amin as a party animal turned sadistic cannibal – no doubt jumping on his line about ‘no human flesh on the menu’ – what nobody else is talking about is the limp-dicked sexist colonialism that sabotages the film. It’s the same guff that still turns up in BBC dramas – an English public school boy fantasy where black women’s knickers fall off at the first sight of whitey.

McAvoy, who looks like he’s got about three inches to his name, gets his end away first with a cheery native girl on a bus. After a ten second chat, we catch them at it – and surprise, surprise, the gal’s on top, while McAvoy goes along with it, smirking like the guy out of the Lynx advert. You just want to smack him and we're only ten minutes in.

Next up, we see Gillian Anderson in a non-part as a bored doctor’s wife, gagging to get her end away with the only other white guy in town - odd when there’s plenty of well-hung black guys under her snooty nose. We can tell this by the way she gives McAvoy those longing looks. But being a white woman of virtue and conscience – ‘my husband’s a good man, but dull’ – she doesn’t give it away, not even as much as wee blowie round the back of a mud hut. Doesn’t take a genius to work out the moral meta-narrative there.

Then we have Kay, Amin’s third wife. From the minute they’re introduced, we know that Kay fancies McAvoy by the way she gives him the come on. How irresistible can this wee guy get? Never mind the fact that her husband’s a psychopathic murder-happy dictator. After a few scenes where Doctor McAvoy tends to her epileptic son, she throws herself at him and obviously, as a black woman, gets up the stick as soon as she parts her legs. I don’t want to be a spoiler but I think you can guess the outcome.

Who knows, maybe the producers assumed the audience would be too busy being overawed by Whittaker’s methody Amin to notice this double dose of racism/sexism. The audience I sat with laughed loudest at the deep fried monkey line – a cheap racist gag in itself, if you think about it. and not exactly accurate either when nobody commented on deep-fried anything in the 70s. But Peter Morgan’s script bypassed a lot of things – such as why did the British put Amin in power? And why did the filmmakers skip the 300,000 murdered civilians? I guess on a measly $6 million budget genocide was beyond their reach and the director's ability, being so fond of the close-up.

Not that they’re advertising the fact, but rumour has it that Scottish Screen pumped £500,000 into The LKOS, presumably minus the fee for the uncredited ‘producer’ based here who filled in the forms. The question is, what value for money did SS get for the three badly shot, badly lit and badly acted scenes that open the film? Somehow I doubt any profits will work their way back to West George Street. Still, it looks good on the website, if not the books, to claim it as their own. Solidarity with Uganda, I say, and good luck to the filmmakers for choosing to spend the budget there. After all, when it comes to filmmaking, we’re a third-world nation too.