Reviews

O Heroi | The Hero

3.0 stars

By PETER KEOUGH | February 9, 2006

3.0 Stars

HOMERIC Vitório has it more difficult than most.

No veteran demobbed after wartime has it easy, but the case of is downright Homeric. Snatched up at age 15 to fight in the Angolan War of Independence, he serves for 20 years before losing a leg to a land mine. Back home he’s given a medal, a pair of crutches, and a home on the streets. A kindly doctor pulls strings for a prosthesis; a street punk steals it. Director Zézé Gamboa unloads this misery with a matter-of-factness and a lack of sentiment that intensify the authenticity and heartbreak. He interweaves Vitório’s plight with the lives of other Angolans: Manu, a troubled 12-year-old whose soldier father never came home; Joana, Manu’s teacher, an upper-class woman trying to make a difference; and Judite, a prostitute who befriends Vitório. Uniting them is the unlikely fetish of Vitório’s artificial leg, and the ensuing crossed destinies surpass the contrivances of Crash. (O herói is the opening-night film of this year’s African Film Festival.)

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Portland hopes to bridge cultural divides
This February marked the six-year anniversary of journalist Daniel Pearl’s horrifying death at the hands of Islamist extremists.
Round-trip Cruz
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The call of the future
As technology advances over the next two decades, cell phones will morph into new shapes and assume new features.
Last of the Tuba
In a 2006 performance in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy, MaryPat Warming wore a costume with a third prosthetic breast, stood with the Madonna’s poise at the edge of a wall with the vista of Florence unfolding behind her, and endeavored to consume the contents of several wine bottles full of whole unpasteurized milk.
Company man
In at least one of its toss-away scenes, Joshua Seftel’s War, Inc. rises to the level of brutal bad taste that distinguishes master satirists from Jonathan Swift to Stanley Kubrick.
Inside looking out
Visiting Elizabeth King's "The Sizes of Things In the Mind's Eye" at Brown University's Bell Gallery (64 College Street, Providence, through December 21) is a bit like visiting Dr. Frankenstein's lab — all glass eyes, artificial limbs, and automatons.
Culture war games
Karen Finley sat at the edge of the stage of Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre last week and spoke about a woman who got off on war.
Firewall
You could trace a history of American anxiety through the bad guys Harrison Ford has had to fight to protect his on-screen family: industrialization in The Mosquito Coast (1987), the IRA in Patriot Games (1992), Russian terrorists in Air Force One (1997), himself in What Lies Beneath (2000).
Who’s the real Dem?
Here in Massachusetts, Congressman Stephen Lynch has a primary challenge from a guy named Phil Dunkelbarger.
What's going on?
Five years into the Iraq War, we can catalogue a person’s every move with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
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[ 06/02 ] Always, Patsy Cline @ Ogunquit Playhouse

ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH

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Whatever your opinion of the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, you can't deny that his brother Yoni was a hero, a courageous man whose conflicts and triumphs mirror those of his homeland.

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