Memorable, crazy movie

A lot of fun.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Gee, an intelligent film about an interesting topic. I'd like a thousand more like this, please. It even treats the audience like we're intelligent, rather than pointing out the ramifications of each twist. And they managed to do that with the dramatized treatment of an actual matter. Just imagine what tremendously clever & entertaining totally fictional stories Hollywood COULD give us if we insisted upon it. Rise up and accept no less! -- Having read a selection of other postings, I will add that my comments refer to this as if it was a film, rather than the Al Quaida training manual others see it as. I'm sorry that, when I watch a film, I look to be entertained and have my horizons widened; I guess there is something deficient about me that I think for myself. Apparently I failed in watching this film by not developing any respect for communist tyranny or religious terrorism. I also once listened to an old recording of a Nazi band without starting to hate the Jews or wishing to invade my neighbors. I'm sorry. From the director's, "If we were going to defeat terrorism, the only way was to get an understanding of the terrorist mind," I guess he has the same belief about movies as me.

This film deals with an apolitical black man in apartheid South Africa, who is pulled into the fray against the gov't after he is falsely accuse of terrorism by the head of anti-terrorism in the South African govt. This film is beautiful. The cinematography is excellent, the relationship between Patrick and his family is shown well, and we are made to see that Patrick is a good guy, with a good job, who just wants to be a father and husband and nothing more.We also see Tim Robbins and his family and how he deals the omnipresent threat of violence from the people he is apart of oppressing. He is shown as a human character, he loves his wife and kids, he sings folk songs, and he runs a South African Guantanamo bay; hes a bad man.I cried at one point in the movie, and was interested throughout, the pacing was good. There just seemed to be something missing from it. I mean it was a pretty good movie, I just felt like there was another 20 minutes that belonged in the movie. I didn't quite feel like it was enough.Also the narration towards the end of the movie seemed a little stiff to me, as if Derek Luke wasn't comfortable reading it with an accent so he delivered it really choppy. Thats very minor.Having said all of that its definitely worth seeing. People will say its a movie about terrorism and I guess in one sense it is. But Americans have such a distorted view of terrorism. Its like if you are a group of people in a country fighting and you don't have an official army with tanks and planes you are a terrorist. But if you have a real army with tanks and planes you aren't a terrorist and if you blow things up its not terrorism. Terrorist/terrorism is a political word and this movie proves it.

Catch a Fire is overly formulaic and doesn't have anything new to say about the apartheid. But it does look good and it's well acted and slickly directed. The film shares many plot similarities to other Joseph Campbell influenced narratives like the Star Wars movies or Braveheart. The film is set in South Africa in 1980. The film's reluctant hero is Patrick Chamusso who works as a foreman at the Secunda oil refinery. Patrick has a good life: he owns a car, has a beautiful wife and in his spare time, he coaches a local boys soccer team.The freedom fighters / terrorists of the African National Congress (ANC) are fighting to overthrow South Africa's white-led government. As a black man Patrick suffers the occasional humiliation at the hands of the country's police but he doesn't complain or get involved in politics. The film doesn't dwell on the fact that Patrick is a refugee from the Mozambique civil war which ended in 1992, with over 900,000 dying from fighting and starvation.In many Hollywood films white South Africans are often portrayed as evil and sadistic. Tim Robbins plays Nic Vos / Darth Vader a colonel in the country's anti-terrorism police. Vos is shown as a devoted husband and father but his job is to capture terrorists. After the ANC plants a bomb at the refinery, Patrick comes under suspicion and is arrested. Patrick is a womanizer and his initial alibi is exposed as a lie. He is beaten-up but when his wife is tortured he becomes angry and seeks revenge. Although found to be innocent and released, Patrick travels to Mozambique and joins an ANC terrorism school. He returns to South Africa and blows up the refinery. Patrick plays an unenthusiastic warrior who helps overthrow an evil regime. He is arrested again, and spends over ten years at the Robben Island prison with Nelson Mandela. Most recent films about Africa paint it in a negative light. They show corrupt, genocidal hellholes, child soldiers, wide-scale barbarism, anarchy and starvation. What happened in South Africa now seems relatively low key by comparison. The film also fails to shock because TV shows like 24 seem to condone torture in terrorist interrogations. With the present day reality of prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo the actions of Vos and his men seem almost tame. Overall, it's a well-made movie.

I am not a historian and I know little about apartheid in South Africa. However in this movie we find that Patrick Chamusso is a real person and that most of the story in this movie really happened the way it is told. A good movie, with high production values.Tim Robbins is Colonel Nic Vos, and he sounds authentic with either an Irish or South African accent. He is a member of the ruling white government and always on the watch for revolutionists.American Derek Luke is believable as Patrick Chamusso, a humble refinery worker with a family and who is wrongly suspected of being a revolutionist. Torturing him for names, which he cannot give, they also end up mistreating his wife, Bonnie Mbuli as Precious Chamusso. This angers him, makes him fully realize the need to combat apartheid, and he leaves home to train with the revolutionists.The movie is often not fun to watch because of the themes depicted, but it has a favorable ending, and we see one of the freedom fighters who helped end apartheid in the early 1990s.