The River

Tuesday, March 30, 2004

The Passion of Alphonso

The new film from Mike Golby:

My director has just phoned from Angola. She tells me she’s finished shooting the final scenes of my forthcoming movie and we can go into editing next month. Our working title is The Passion of Alphonso. Alphonso is a wealthy Luandan playboy and arms dealer living off his father’s money (he was a flunkey for pre-independence Portuguese colonialists). He is Africa’s largest exporter of sex-slaves and importer of hard drugs. He financed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA for thirty years and oversaw (with the help of South African mercenaries who later fled to earn dollars in Iraq) the obliteration of Cuito, Huambo and several million Angolans. Responsible for withholding AIDS medicines from the poor to speed sales of Afghan heroin shipped by USAid, he has developed a conscience. Realising the magnitude of his crimes, he now sweats blood every night, uses industrial-strength coke to burn holes through his septum, and suffers from a terrible conscience.

Gunned down during a bar brawl with one of his capos at the movie's close (a bloody and explicit three-hour segment), he is a holy man indeed. I thought of blaming his death on the Portuguese, but the pre-publicity tells us the idea’s not taking off. Why? God knows. We therefore don’t expect the movie to make much money but, what the hell, we can always flog it to the Nigerians. They are good Christian folk. And Moslems too.

more (mostly a great essay on the movie Adaptation, it's a rich site)

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