Kathmandu:

It’s Oscar time. And in a little over 24 hours, we will know whether Forest Whitaker or Ryan Gosling walked away with the little golden man.

A controlled performance takes you all the way from A to Z while seeming one dimensional. This kind of acting is the most difficult.

As Idi Amin the ruthless, cruel, but charming ruler of Uganda, Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland comes across as an overwhelming powerhouse of a man possessed of great magnetism. He goes from appealing to cold without anyone seeing the destructive mad dementedness in him. You see it in the carnage that he wreaks and you are witness to horror.

Premiere super critic Glenn Kenny writes, “Whitaker has given a lot of extraordinary performances in his career, but none quite as high-voltage as his portrayal of the maniacal and, in his own mind at least, maniacally charming Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in this intense, sometimes hallucinatory, and often gruesome drama adapted from a novel by Giles Foden. The film’s title refers to the honour Amin once bestowed on himself, on account of his defiance of Britain; the movie’s other main character is a young Scottish doctor (James McAvoy, who also played that little faun feller in The Chronicles of Narnia), who, in a combination of dumb luck and catastrophically poor judgment, becomes Amin’s personal physician.

The physician, Nicholas Garrigan, is Foden’s fictional composite of several real-life figures in the real-world story of Amin’s atrocious regime. He is witness to all manner of blustering, feinting, paranoid, vengeful, and sadistic actions on Amin’s part. But Garrigan himself is so self-deluding, selfish, foolhardy (even going so far as to bed one of Amin’s wives), and downright stupid that he’s something of a turnoff. This is all to the point, of course, that the artistes are making apropos Western involvement in African affairs. When Whitaker is onscreen, he comes off as almost serene in his derangement.”

If you want character studies then watch Half Nelson, which examines two characters without much really happening. Ryan Gosling plays a drug addicted teacher with quiet brilliance and is matched by the wondrous Shareeka Epps who plays one of his students. Both of them drug involved.

Film writer Jae-Ha Kim is on record as saying, “There’s an attraction between a teacher and a young teenage child in the superb Half Nelson — the relationship has all the makings of confused disaster. Though there are a few uncomfortable moments when it’s not obvious whether Dan (Gosling) and Drey (Epps) might cross the line, the attraction is culled from desperation. Dan is an idealistic history teacher in an inner-city school. Drey is one of his brightest students. For both, drugs represent something that may help them escape their worlds. He takes drugs to dull his dissatisfaction with himself. She views drugs as a possible way to better her life. Half Nelson soars because of the immaculate acting by Gosling and Epps. With his impish smile, Gosling provides a character that is at once disarming, alluring, and pitiful. As the young girl who’s already seen too much hardship in her life, Epps plays her part with just the right amount of hardened raw emotion. While the ambiguous ending may not please fans weaned on happy Hollywood finales, it’s a fitting and believable close to a thought-provoking film.”