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Starring Kai Luke Brümmer, Dylan Stassen, Matthew Vey, Stefan Vermaak Published Jun 02, 2021 8 Born in South Africa under apartheid, director Oliver Hermanus never gave much thought to the hardships of white South Africans. In his mind, he says in the film s press notes, all white people in South Africa have had it easy. This is true but imagine being a gay teenage boy in South Africa in the 1980s. They, too, saw prejudice as they lived a life of illegality. The film s title, Moffie, is a derogatory and oppressive Afrikaans term for gay. Many lives were ruined and changed due to apartheid and this included every white boy over the age of 16, who became the property of the state and was forced to complete two years of compulsory military service to defend a white supremacist regime against communism in bordering Angola. This, Hermanus says, forcibly imprinted upon nearly one million white boys a diseased ideology of white supremacy, racial intolerance ....
Ever since The Invisible Man, the upper-class wife whose luxury real estate becomes an overbearing metaphor for her isolating marriage seems to have become a go-to set-up for indie filmmakers. Last year we had Swallow and The Nest, and this year that plot gets a straight-up genre treatment in Held. The perennially pained-looking Emma (Jill Awbrey, who also wrote the script) is clearly over her square-jawed husband Henry (Bart Johnson), but they’re giving it one more try by escaping to a secluded, automated smart house vacation rental. Naturally, the property’s version of Alexa has other plans drugging them and forcing them into chivalrous machinations straight out of a 1950s marriage manual. Held doesn’t hold back, skimping on character development, rushing into the concept and mainly using the first act to set things up to pay off later. Basic druggy montages, a visually uninteresting set and an even more uninspired baddie sap ....
Better Tagline: I am in a world of shit. Not So Brief Plot Synopsis: In the early 1980s, all South African males age 16-60 were conscripted into the South African Defence Force to defend their country s apartheid regime against Soviet-backed Angola. One new recruit, Nicholas van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer), has to contend not only with the brutal training, but hiding the fact he s gay (derogatorily referred to as a moffie in Afrikaans) from both military command and his brothers-in-arms. Critical Analysis: There s an adage that says the best time in history to live as a woman (or person of color, or LGBTQ) is right now. The next best time is tomorrow. Those fond of pining for the good old days tend not to fall into those categories, for reasons that should be obvious. ....