INVICTUS by clint eastwood starring morgan freeman matt damon and THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM

if this movie doesnt have a rad inspirational speech by damon in a south african accent i am going to demand my money back

must to avoid

thought this was called JUVENTUS

screenplay is by the guy who wrote the Downey-Ritchie Sherlock Holmes thing

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1031920/

Oh I can't wait. This sounds Oscar caliber.

http://agentsmith2.files.wordpress.com/2006/07/oscar50.jpg

i'm there if the SPIRIT OF FREEDOM plays mandela, morgan freeman plays de klerk, and matt damon plays winnie mandela.

casting morgan freeman as nelson mandela seems almost craven to me

otm!

Terrible.

it's actually my username

so deeply psyched for this you have no idea

just tell me eric--is there a locker-room inspirational speech?

is there a scene where winnie mandela "necklaces" someone?

Haha.

more like in-dicked-us

There is an inspirational locker-room beer toss.

how is damons south african accent

Mandela sons an Afrikaaner?

3.5 stars from Ebert

Ebert likes movies with black heroes/heroines.

also boobs

What hero? Nelson Mandela here comes off as a really high-profile rugby fan.

Damon's accent sounds ... committed, at any rate.

is that the first sentence of your review?

at least looks like most fuckable Damon physique of his career.

THERE'S a real first sentence.

xpost That's sorta true.

predictably dull but shockingly limp. Who knew a historical melodrama about South Africa could be so...colorless?

and here I thought the critics were revving up to love this. sad that, based on these one-liners from you lot, it is basically exactly the film I thought it would be.

watch as a white south african athlete teaches nelson mandela how to live...and love.

starring morgan freeman doing a half-assed accent

this movie looks horrible

watch as a white south african athlete teaches nelson mandela how to live...and love.

That's not even a good guess.

MF's Mandela seems closer to Sellers in Being There, or (the pre-vitriolic) Bill Cosby gone slightly senile. And when the ruggers go to Mandela's prison cell, a Shawshank Redemption flashback breaks out.

what a let down, not inspiring at all really

terrible soundtrack

needed more rugby and more inspirational moments

wonder what the cricket equivalent of this would be oh wait lagaan

haha, I thought of Lagaan even before I saw this as an impossible standard to reach! Mandatory max rental along with this 1942 vehicle for the poem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BghAjudd2m0

Seriously up there with The Happening for 2000s movies that are so bad its almost hallucinatory and you are amazed they were released into cinemas in this state.

So much retardedly on-the-nose dialogue, completely underwhelming pitch scenes, whole thing felt like a first draft. Amazingly unprofessional and incompetent. Just staggered by how amateurish it was, tbh.

Damon's accent is fine. Freeman's is extremely shaky. The script is uninteresting for either of their characters, so they don't have much to do, but Freeman screws up the one thing he needs to get right, i.e. impersonation.

Countless errors too. Will bring lols when this gets released in rugby-playing countries.

the whole theater burst out laughing when the song came on during the scene where morgan freeman lands in the helicopter

I'd like to hope the Academy members were in your screening, max. This seems fast tracked to get at least a few obligatory nods, but I seriously can't see why. This one is as lame as anything I've seen this year.

Freeman a distant third in celeb impression stakes to Christian McKay and Streep.

Will bring lols when this gets released in rugby-playing countries.

a friend of mine who saw this said it was obvious eastwood knew nothing about rugby and had no idea how to film the game. (my friend doesn't know rugby either btw; he was relying on the film to make clear what was going on, and said it completely failed.)

they give you one rule, which is the ball can't be passed forward.

i think, like soccer, it's a difficult game to film even for someone who knows the game. extremely free flowing and chaotic, and lots of action away from the ball. but it really, really was bad. it looked like the rugby scenes in that episodes of Friends. people visibly pulling out of tackles, etc. not exactly any given sunday.

and yeah, the exposition explaining the rules/tournament/politics of rugby felt like it had been assembled/edited in a rush, by a group of about six people, none of whom had ever met each other, discussed the film, or seen a game of rugby.

there was literally one single authentic line of dialog (something about "disrupting the first phase") which was then ruined by damon saying of lomu, "he's fricking killing us out there".

but i don't want to give the impression that my problems with the film were it's factual accuracy about rugby or english accents/syntax outside the U.S. they were more to do with the story and characters and direction.

apparently Clint flew into South Africa, for his first time ever, 3 days before filming.

and apparently read the script for the first time on the flight over.

and was told it was pronounced 'Mandela' and not 'Mandala' right before he met him.

for months he thought he was remaking Cry Freedom.

Then he switched gears and decided to redeploy The Power of One.