Caboose

I was in Abuja at the weekend and had to stay for a meeting on Monday. As it turned out Monday was a public holiday (announced on Friday), so the meeting was moved to Tuesday. A whole day to hang around in Abuja, marvellous!

Karen and I occupied some time by going to the cinema, to see The Last King of Scotland. This was at Abuja’s (fairly) new cinema inside Ceddi Plaza, operated by a subsidiary of South African company Nu Metro. It’s just like a real cinema although we were reminded we were in Nigeria when the power went off twice and we had to wait for somebody to go and start the generator.

The film itself was very good. From a VSO perspective it’s interesting to see the changes in Nicholas Garrigan’s outlook, as shown through the use of colour and music in the film. He starts off thinking everything is lovely, colourful and full of life and has little tolerance of the more cynical outlook of Sarah Merrit.

Forest Whitaker as Amin is incredible, convincingly showing both the charm and menace of the man. Too many films turn those kind of characters into comic-book bad guys, without showing how it is that they manage to attract their followers.

(Stop here if you’ve not seen the film and don’t want to spoil the ending) (more…)