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Article: Amistad.
- Article from:
- The Nation
- Article date:
- January 5, 1998
- Author:
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Last night, as I sat dreamily browsing through the "Critique of the Gotha Program," I finally realized that my expectations for Amistad had been utopian. Face facts, I told myself. Name three other big-budget, Oscar-bait movies about an African revolt against slave traders. All right, name one. And now tell me, with a straight face, that it makes no difference to have such a thing, eighty-two years after The Birth of a Nation.
We're discussing a needed commodity. That said, we must pose the nonutopian question of its manufacture: If not Steven Spielberg, who? Otto Preminger's dead. Zhang Yimou is unavailable. Charles Burnett? An excellent suggestion; but on the ...