Overrated and overhyped

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The point here is that, in a clash of foreign colonial powers, the locals inevitably get the worst of it. This point is made early on and gets little further elaboration as the drama plays out. Giving the Oscar for best foreign film to a movie which was, let's be honest, a decent enough but obvious and not unusually clever satire on a serious topic (WWI), had to be some misguided exercise in political correctness before such nonsense had been given a name. Yes, it is fairly remarkable that a film with international appeal could be financed and shot in a place like the Ivory Coast. We get this. But an award for BEST foreign film, at a time when many national cinemas (Germany, France and Italy especially) were churning out a pretty impressive product, seems like tokenism. There. I said it. Go ahead and be offended.The film itself is watchable enough but ordinary. The pacing is slow, the characters are not particularly sharply drawn, and the plotting - mostly a series of military misadventures and misunderstandings - is nothing really clever. It works well enough, but had me neither slapping my knees in merriment, nor nodding in acknowledgement of its cinematic skill. If Hollywood had cranked out something along the same lines we would have expected a higher level of creativity. It has unexpected moments of simple entertainment thanks to some old-fashioned knockabout comedy, but even this is executed with no display of unusual skill on the part of the film's makers. Everything manages to hold together well enough and move the story along - the cinematography of the African locations looks good - but there is just nothing here that is special enough to elevate the project above the realm of the merely good and giving it such a prestigious award as if it does seems dishonest. Watch it, but don't let the Oscar voters snow you. It's an okay movie, and an honest attempt at creating international cinema in an unexpected place. It's just not THAT GREAT.

There are great movies about colonialism, like The Battle of Algiers or Lawrence of Arabia, which show the complicated relationships between settlers and natives and the natives' struggle for freedom. And then there are comedies like Black and White in Color which make you wonder how the settlers rose to power in the first place.This biting comedy is a scathing indictment of French colonialism in Africa and is deliberately uneven in its portrayal of the French as a bunch of morons, drunks, cowards and hypocrites, apparently unable to handle their own lives let alone an empire.The action begins in 1915. World War I started many months ago but news take a long time to get there, and the French go about their lives, oblivious, continuing their nice relations with their German neighbors just across the river. But when they receive newspapers with the war news, they decide it's time to declare war on their peaceful neighbors because France is wherever the French are settled.So they recruit natives and go to war with disastrous consequences. One of my favorite sequences is when all the French settlers go on a picnic to watch the natives charge against the German fort. The French sit around in the shade, drinking wine and eating and commenting on the battle as if talking about sports. Then they hear the sound of machine guns and they realize things aren't as easy as they expected.The Germans come across as better in this movie. That's evident from the beginning, when their flag is vibrantly waving in the wind, as opposed to the French one which stays still. The Germans are better equipped and trained, whereas the French go arrogantly into war without preparation. It's quite obvious who's the target of this movie.But in the end this is an indictment of any country that's ever had colonies in Africa, whether it be France, Spain or Portugal. It's all here: the spite for the natives' culture, the Christian proselytizing, the assumption of European superiority. But the settlers are so dumb you wonder how they could have conquered anything in the first place, and the answer is clear: it's got nothing to do with intelligence or racial superiority, just good old strength in numbers and weapons.Black and White in Color was made 33 years ago but it's still relevant today. Wherever nations continue to impose their will upon others through force, I don't doubt the same waste, abuses and incompetence depicted here will go on. For that reason, this movie is well worth watching.

In this biting satire on war, colonialism and racism, French troops in 1915 Gabon learn that their country has declared war on Germany. Knowing that there are German troops nearby, they decide to train the colonized Africans to fight. Only one person in the French contingent seems to have an iota of reason to his thinking.I think that "Noirs et blancs en couleur" (called "Black and White in Color" in English) shows imperialism in its most pathetic, depraved form. Not only do the colonizers want the colonized people to fight for the empire, but there's one scene that especially emphasizes this. When some rich people go out for a picnic, they watch the fighting as though it's a spectator sport; a form of entertainment, if you will. But they get mighty shocked when they see how violent it is. Apparently, these colonialists are so completely brainwashed by their own pro-war, nationalistic propaganda, that they fail to realize how ugly war actually is, and they're in for a rude awakening when they find the truth.Anyway, this is definitely a movie that I recommend. We could use some advice from it, what with the mess that we've made in Iraq. Certainly a good one for Jean-Jacques Annaud, and it definitely deserved Best Foreign Language Film.

While I would be the first to admit that this slight little film will probably not change your life, it is very clever and well worth watching. It is the story of an inept little French village in West Africa that discovers that World War I has been raging for 6 months. So, as patriotic Frenchmen, they decide to launch a completely inept invasion of a nearby German village--even though they had been on excellent terms for some time. The silly slogans and patriotism as well as the ensuing stupidity of their assault is a great mini-version of the real war back in Europe. The parallel is actually quite smart as is the acting and direction.A slight movie, yes, but it will give you a little chuckle and it's all harmless fun.